Fielding had landed.  As you see and as so often happens, calling “Police” proves a bad idea.  The evildoers escape and the victims become your wards.  Roberta turned my beloved room into a nursery where Fielding, Quine, and Chicago lounged.  Worse was yet to come.  When I tried to visit my sons, Bart and Fielding blocked me. They told me as a matter of policy, Toms were persona non grata until further notice.  I reminded them I was the father and the Love Machine. Bart swatted my nose in way of reply.  It hurt.  Keep in mind I had no idea how long the bully hoydens planned to block me.  I complained to ailing Chaucey.  He yawned, then observed that he (a) was too tired to deal with the problem and (b) I had cried “Police,” and that choice created the problem.  If I had shown restraint, perhaps Roberta would never have got it in her mind to invite anybody in. She’d have been digging holes in the backyard.  I authored my own misery. 

As pater-familias-in-waiting I despaired.  Fielding and Bart had begun to create a matriarchy in my future realm.  My complaints crashed as fast as they left my mouth.  Roberta did nothing.  When I went to mike, he started a sermon on the Myth of Patriarchy.  Women have always called the shot, he said.  Part of their art is a genius for rhetoric that made it look as if guys run the show.  But who decides when to wean us, when to toilet train us, when to spank us, what we wear, what we eat, what our chores and honey-does are, where the kids get schooled, how to decorate the house, what we do on weekends, and whether to take birth control (as many a conscripted father discovers)?   And all of them have an appealing out.  They can go the way of Sappho, which mike viewed as the thinking woman’s choice.  Sapphists don’t hate men. They have fathers and brothers and men friends.  They know we have a role as congenial friends and, in a pinch, sperm donors, but they’re not much as husbands. They’ve down their homework.  They know what pigs men are.  And if a woman tries to clean up all of a pig’s dirt, she’ll have endless work.   She’ll have an early trip to a graveyard. Many women have this life.  Their hormones doomed them.  In fact, if you study who the men haters are, talk to a het, divorced woman in her 40s.  But that’s all theoretical, he told me.  I had to figure out how to proceed in the now.  What a boon to me living next to a Zen Center was.  I’d listened to their services (lots of loud chants to a beat) through a bedroom window.  How to live with my now crisis, the Buddhists had the answer:  Acceptance.   So, I accepted it.  Time works as a friend if you’re patient. Sooner or later, Bart and Fielding would get bored with protecting the kitties.  I could then become a daddy.  Acceptance works better than resistance.  Resistance to Bart and Field would have amounted to suicide. Violence was their lives’ seasoning.  Anyway, I heard mike’s subtext.  To win, I had to become crafty, had to become, like Odysseus, a master tactician.