Daddy Issues

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When I was 10, I got really into karate. The year was 1984, and The Karate Kid had been released that June, so I was just part of the sudden national vogue for youth martial arts. But as I remember, it wasn’t the movie that got me excited—it was actually taking kempo karate classes at Amherst Regional Junior High, where a local instructor had set up shop evenings in the gym. Sensei’s name was Grand Master Mumeet Sharif.

One or two nights a week, I would put on my white gi and attend class, where Sensei, a burly Black man in his forties or fifties, would run us through drills. I remember holding a horse stance till my legs vibrated, kicking so high my knee met my forehead, and running barefoot through the autumn hills and woods outside the school. I was a little guy, shrimpy and flexible, so sparring didn’t appeal, but I loved the form and the discipline: I wanted to master the precise movements of the katas, each punch and block powerful but controlled.

And I loved being part of Sensei’s ad hoc dojo, where his black-belt sons and daughter were always there to aid our training. (His daughter, who was 13, was possibly my first crush—with her I would gladly spar!) And Sensei seemed like the ideal man to be running this family business: gruff, disciplined, kind. Among the group of kids who thought karate was just, like, neat, I took it more seriously than them, and Sensei recognized that. When it came time for my second-degree white belt test, Sensei allowed me to take it with the adult class. I had been taking his lessons for a few months at that point—this test came near the end of the second eight-week session—and I liked that the progress was gradual. This wasn’t one of those dojos where kids got green belts or orange belts three months in. Here you had to work. And I worked.

The end of the second session dovetailed with the end of the semester, so Sensei packed things up for the holidays, and spoke of setting up his own, permanent dojo come spring. I waited for an announcement, and waited, and waited. My family and I never heard anything from him again.

Two years passed, and I was getting antsy. I liked karate, wanted to keep going, was forgetting how to knot my belt. But all the other karate studios I visited felt commercial and casual—lazy Cobra Kai copies. Kids sparred, no one did katas. Finally, my mom and I talked to a manager of one of these studios and asked: Have you ever heard of Grand Master Mumeet Sharif? Where could we find him?

All the manager could tell us was this: Sensei had had some sort of breakdown and been committed to a mental hospital. That was the only thing he knew. Now, did we want to sign up for three months of karate classes?

As we walked out, I worried about Sensei’s family. Where were they now, and how were they getting along? What could have happened? How could this generous, welcoming man break? And why could 10-year-old me not have sensed something was wrong? I felt both that I had failed and that I had been failed. I never took karate again.

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Grand Master Mumeet Sharif was one of a handful of father figures I’ve had in my life. Another was David Sukal¹ , the kind teacher who first showed 9-year-old me how to program BASIC on an Apple II—and who turned out to be not only a drug dealer but an abusive husband and father. The town discovered this five years later when his son, a classmate of mine, killed him to end the abuse.

As I grew up, a few other, lesser men briefly stepped in as mentors and guides, but I think my early experiences had traumatized me enough. I didn’t get too close to any of them. I did not need further disappointment. I could get by on my own.

And the thing is, I truly didn’t need them at all, because I already had an excellent father figure—my father, Robert Gross! Really, he’s been a great one my whole life: loving, even-tempered, brilliant, funny, generous, adventurous. When I was a kid, though, I don’t know if I would have said that aloud. I mean, he was certainly a better father than so many of my friends’ dads, who if they were around at all were often capricious or dickish, self-involved and superior. But he was my dad at a time when admiring your dad felt backwards, Reaganish. We weren’t living in a 1950s sitcom, after all—this was the 1980s, and we, the youth, had clearly been failed by an older generation. Father Knows Best? Pffthhbbbt. Jello Biafra knows better.

But my dad took my rebellion in stride, humoring my (terrible) tastes and challenging my pretensions without ever belittling them² . Now that I’m a father myself, I realize what a challenge this is: How can you be a friend to your child, to treat them as an equal, and somehow remain parental, a source of authority and stability? I struggle with that every day, and I don’t know how he did it, but it worked so well that I grew up to be exactly like him.

Okay, maybe not exactly, but the parallels are clear: He started out a journalist in the 1960s, even freelancing for Travel + Leisure and The New York Times, before shifting to academia, where he made his name writing a novelistic history of Concord, Massachusetts, on the eve of the American Revolution. Along the way, he got into running (thanks to 6-year-old me, when I saw him shirtless and announced, “Daddy, you’re getting to be a very fat man!”), learned to cook elaborate lasagne, and was an early user of computers to aid in his research and teaching. I wouldn’t say I’ve followed in his footsteps, but we’ve certainly been hiking the same trail.

And if that trail leads where I think it does, I’m happy to stay on it, for my dad has accomplished something I hope to do as well: He’s let me see who he is as a human being, not just as my father. A couple of years ago, for example, he had a new book coming out, and as the release date approached, I was observing him closely. He’d been writing for publication for more than five decades at that point, and this book had occupied an enormous amount of that time. He was a pro; surely he’d be sanguine about this moment—confident and unshakable. Surely I could learn from his approach.

Not at all! He was instead a ball of anxiety, fretting about every review that was printed, and every review that wasn’t printed. What did they get right, what did they get wrong, what did they overlook, why did the publication hire this reviewer instead of that reviewer? This was all reassuring in a way I hadn’t expected: It put me at ease with my own writerly angst, made it seem natural—an inheritance, even.

Beyond that, though, he’s talked openly with me (and my brother and sister) about his relationship with his brother, my uncle Gary, and about the flow of friends into and, sometimes sadly, out of his life. Above all, he has always been honest with us, which again is difficult for parents, especially those who want to maintain an often fragile authority over their children. But he’s never needed to assert authority or act how one imagines a father is supposed to act. He’s never pretended to be anyone but himself—except when he pretended to be Cookie Monster and chased me around our old old house singing “C Is for Cookie”—because he never needed to, and we never needed him to. He’s always let us know just who he is, with all his strengths and his weaknesses, and that is, as Cookie would say, good enough for me.

Anyway! My dad, Robert Gross, is turning 80 in a couple of days, so tomorrow the whole Gross clan is flying him and my mom down to Key West to celebrate. We’ll sit by the pool, consume a ton of seafood, and concoct terrible puns. Join me in wishing him happy birthday, yeah? 🎂🎂🎂

Read Yesterday’s Attempt

1  I may have his name slightly wrong, alas.

2  This was the origin of “It’s not a criticism—it’s an observation.”