I liked Moore

When I started reading Moore’s piece, I thought I was reading a piece defending fathers. I thought Moore was making an argument that they’re undervalued, that they’re important caregivers, too. The first two paragraphs latch onto Tim Allen and his missing father, and Moore follows this with a fact about how male carp are vital in protecting their babies. But then he starts talking about the tragic life of the man who played the father in Father Knows Best, and of his own father, and the dad in Leave It to Beaver, and vasectomies, and wolves, emperor penguins, and Y chromosomes. And when he’s talking about these things, he isn’t always making the same point, that these fathers are essential and underappreciated. The form also invited me to expect that Moore would be making a clear point. One by one, I thought, he’d go down the alphabet, conveying messages that all begin with the same letter and that support the same argument. This pattern actually does carry through for a while, A through E all being points that made me more appreciative, or at least more sympathetic, of fathers. But the Father Knows Best piece, about the guy who attached a hose to the exhaust pipe of his car, and then the following paragraph, about the geneticists trying to track down Ireland’s forefathers, started to mess up the flow of ideas I had expected. And that’s what I liked most about the work. It felt like a real meditation. I began to no longer think of Moore using the alphabet as a means of organizing his thoughts. Instead, I started to feel that he was letting the letters pull his feelings in various directions, and he seemed willing to explore the different thoughts about fatherhood that came to his mind.