Life may as the saw says be full of surprises but some things happen exactly the way you imagine they will. Step on the upright tines of a rake and the long handle leaps to attention. Face forward, eyes down, and you'll take the hit on your head. A sharp crack, a red, swollen channel of welt and a headache if not a concussion. Look up and away instead, daydreaming while tending the yard, and you'll take the shot to your mouth or your nose, drawing blood, drawing teeth, drawing the potential for medical bills and a hospital visit. And if something pulls your attention to either side — a dog barking somewhere, because being cliché doesn't stop it from happening — then it might be your cheekbone that cracks or your ear that bleeds. All this can be yours if you step without watching. You, or in this case me, because I'm the one who took a rake to the face. In my own yard, behind my own house. My own rake. A multiparty betrayal.
It was a garden rake. It would have to be. The splayed, flexible tines of the leaf rake or lawn rake would never — they'd bend before launching attack. It wouldn't be the thatch rake with its sharp blades, too dangerous for clumsy homeowners like me and more likely to puncture both foot and ground than to launch. Nor the berry rake, in which I could trap a whole foot, turn an ankle, the works, without the tool rising. I never realized how many kinds of rakes co-exist until I was struck by the difference. There’s the stone rake, which I could actually use, considering the neglected state of my gravel driveway. Shrub rake, concrete rake, hedge rake, roof rake, lake rake… if I owned one of each I could be Tom the cat bouncing from implement to implement when he blunders into Jerry's trap in "Matinee Mouse": a rake to the face, a hoe handle to the back of the head, then a shovel blade right in the kisser.
That GIF of Tom is what parenting feels like, I told some friends on a morning I sent my daughter to school despite her insistence she didn't feel well, only for her to be returned by the nurse before the first class of the day had concluded. Her response was more like another cartoon in which Jerry stares daggers at Tom.
My childhood was rich with rakes whacking faces. Tom and Jerry. Benny Hill. And I can't confirm The Three Stooges did it but in my memory they do. Rakes lurked ubiquitous. Inevitable as quicksand yet never seen, and somehow with all the other violent stupidity we put our parents through, my brothers and I never thought to lay rakes for each other.
The banana peel was another hazard I expected on every sidewalk, a basic element of city life as lived on TV, in cartoons but also in real black and white. I never saw a discarded peel in the wild and when I laid one for myself in frustrated curiosity it hardly slipped underfoot. The rake, the banana peel, the bucket propped over the door — I'd seen them all so many times but they never arrived in my life. Clichés in the abstract, old tropes, but what novelties they would have been in the specific.
In 1927's The Battle of the Century, Laurel and Hardy escalate a tossed banana peel into an epic pie fight, something else I've spent my life waiting to see. Three thousand pies in that scene! Stan Laurel said throwing one pie on screen was a tired cliché so, "Let’s give them so many pies that there never will be room for any more pie pictures in the whole history of the movies." It's what Sideshow Bob did later for rakes but imagine all the lost teeth and concussions of his animated joke at the flesh and blood scale of Laurel and Hardy. Or of getting your kid through childhood.
When an actual rake hit my actual face it struck more forehead than mouth. A bit of eye too, just enough to turn black, and enough nose to be sore but not break. The pain like the impact came as a surprise but it also brought satisfaction, the relief of it finally happening. Of knowing it was possible for real to step on a rake and that my life waiting for it, expecting it, hadn't been wasted. I wanted to tell everyone because anyone who'd grown up in the world where I did would know what it meant. The pain — and there was a lot of it — was an affirmation, an initiation into a particular certainty. It's reassuring to wallow in suffering. To know at our lowest points that we cannot go any lower, or at least to convince ourselves of that in the moment because there is always lower to go like there are always more rakes and bigger blunders a parent can make. New reasons to lie awake. Pain so cartoonish brings its own negation: when you're bleeding and bruised you can't help but ask , "Was I really just hit in the face by a rake?" The suffering is a cliché. It is always already familiar or at least seems to be and that lets us know what it means without working to figure it out, and that lets us tell others, too. Telling someone you've been hit in the face by a rake doesn't require the same kind of explaining as your midlife crisis or your existential doubts about yourself as a father. It's a rake. In your face. We've all seen it happen even if we've never seen it.
To tell another parent you sent your sick kid to school despite her protests and that she was sent home is the same. There's the incident itself, the event, which is simple and easily described. Then there's the baggage, the weight that dumb dad mistake drags behind it: the shame, the stupidity, the guilt, the regret. To say, "I sent my sick kid to school," is also to say this is hard, I fuck up all the time, I hope I haven't already ruined my child's life before it really gets going but I probably have because I'm the worst parent ever and some days I'm much worse than others, and for someone else to reply, "Oh yeah, been there," is for another parent to actually say, You don't have to tell me because wow, do I already know. You both speak the language and know the code. It's cliché to send your sick kid to school but cliché is cultural shorthand. It says we're in this together. A bargain store shelf full of signs that read, "Live Laugh Love," "Life's A Beach," and "It's Wine O'Clock," are trite but they're more.
The powers of a mantra, like an old joke, are simplicity and repetition. And communion. When you're too tired, too frayed, to lay out every exhausting thing that dragged down your day or your week, to outline all the indignities that tempt you toward defeat or destruction, the call and response of cliché makes a difference. "One day at a time," says a chatty stranger on the hot, crowded, broken down along the tracks again subway train home. "I hear that," says the stranger beside them because they do, they hear and are heard, and neither of those strangers needs to explain or expand. Neither needs to bare the particulars in that moment because it's enough to know someone else has had a day, too. Cliché is generous. At its best it's inclusive because my version of living, laughing, and loving may not be yours but what the sign really tells us is to find what is ours, our own version, and to get through one more day. One more week. One more parenting fuck up that is definitely going to keep us awake for the night while our sick child hopefully sleeps instead of getting sicker because we sent her to school.
Parenting is full of clichés. The misery of teething. The terrible twos. Teenagers (eye roll). The first day of school. There are differences, individual variations of experience and situation like the complications of one kid being Autistic while another goes to a school with a metal detector and a third knows the grief of losing a parent too young. But the shorthand is enough to commiserate and share understanding, to tell one another, "Whatever it is we're both in it." Like the first pie thrown into a face or the first foot to step on a rake, we can never trace back the first parent to fuck up in a particular way. The first to send their sick kid to school. It's embedded in the deep culture of fucking up. We might find the first pie or rake gag on film, maybe even on stage if a newspaper review wrote it down, but we'll never find it in life. The first rake handle to smack someone's face wasn't done as a joke. It may not have been witnessed and it wasn't filmed but it happened. And it happened often enough to be turned into a joke other people could laugh at. Recognize. Turn into a welcome cliché and a heritage into which we are received. When you make a mistake so terrible or strange no one else can relate, it's alienating and isolating. You've shown yourself beyond the pale of acceptable errors. A monster or freak who ends up in the news. Knowing other people — other parents — have failed as badly and as often and in the same ways, more or less, as yourself dulls the edges of those sleepless nights.
Buster Keaton as his half-built house collapses, an unglazed window in its falling facade lined up just right so that he isn't squashed. That's me as a father on my best days. My daughter's head isn't filled with all that old stuff. Buster Keaton. Bugs Bunny. The Three Stooges and Tom and Jerry. She's grown up on media made for her generation or a generation close to her instead of hand-me-down vaudeville gags in black and white films and old cartoons. I grew up laughing at the same jokes my father laughed at and my grandmother; that's what was on TV at the time so we had it in common, a shared language, a lore. My daughter has a palette of stories and characters who experience what she does more fully, how life feels, with complicated emotions and problems. Steven Universe and Adventure Time are more nuanced than rakes to the face. She doesn't speak the language of old cartoons and film shorts; she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. She doesn't walk around waiting for pies to be thrown and why should she? Why absorb old ways of being and seeing the world, old gags without question? If anything gives me hope for the future it's how vigorously younger people refuse to simply accept what their elders give them and the way things have always been done, but they also have bigger, worse things to worry about than I did at her age. Life has taught them to walk around waiting for more dangerous projectiles in the air. Things my childhood of cats chasing mice and sledgehammers harmlessly bouncing off skulls never prepared me for. It's one more division in a time of divisions.
When I think about vaudeville, when I imagine it inaccurately through gauzy remnants of secondhand memory and inherited tropes, it's people laughing and shouting and stewing together in hot, crowded venues at the same jokes people laughed at last night in another town down the road and will laugh at tomorrow in the next city. The same jokes people laughed at a year earlier when the troupe last came to town. "Whatever it is, we're all in it," I imagine to be the single, sustained joke of slapstick. The same joke that is no joke at all learned by generations of kids laughing at cats chasing mice and thousands of pies hitting thousands of faces. The same joke that isn't a joke to which the only possible punchline is live laugh love. The soothing touch of a hard wooden handle cracking your face and the warm trickle of blood followed by the throbbing bruise that says your heart is still beating despite stepping on a rake in the yard, despite getting it wrong as a parent again and again, despite being alive, despite reading the news on a day when you shouldn't, because whatever it is, we're all in it.