Jed Wolf

Neither of my parents had a sense of humor. Whenever I said that, they disagreed as they did with most of my opinions. They would’ve preferred hearing how appreciative I was to be raised at all, but like Frankenstein’s monster, the shred of self-preservation which kept me ungrateful, also prevented me from flinging myself headfirst from a third-floor window during one of their tennis games. 

They criticized me for clowning around and considered all childishness banal. When my cynicism emerged around age thirteen, my parents finally related and we began drinking together and smoking pot. Everyone else thought they were cool until one snowy moonlit night loaded and high, I took off across the yard and ordered them to follow my tracks. 

In a wintery version of “Fox and Hounds,” a game I’d played where a fox drew chalk arrows for hounds to follow on neighborhood streets and walls, I knew every inch of the snowy wonderland and made a great arctic fox.

Stoned enough to keep following, my parents trudged along after me in the twinkling darkness, illuminated only by occasional streetlights as I meandered ahead of them through a golf course and into the next town. I was amazed each time I stopped and waited. Seeing them emerge in the distance hot on my trail, felt transcendent but after flattening our bodies on a snowy beach and narrowly escaping a security guard’s searchlight, they blamed me for nearly getting them arrested.

I cherish the trust we felt that night and tried to reenact something like it decades later when I wheeled my formerly hunky father around the Bronx Zoo against his wishes, but nothing fun ever happened in my family without wine. Taking my mother on one last Caribbean cruise after she could no longer walk, she suspected I might drown her as I lifted her into my arms and carried her awkwardly down to the water like Frankenstein.

Sprung from the same era as early science fiction, behind my family’s appearance was a laboratory where unintended consequences bubbled. I never took that jump, drowned my mother, or parked my father too near the gorillas.

I have only one regret; I would’ve liked to learn about punch lines a lot sooner.