Chip Off The Old Block - by Scott Alexander
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Chip Off The Old Block<br>...
Scott Alexander<br>Jul 01, 2026
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I.<br>Having kids has given me new appreciation for old poetry. The first time I read Song of Hiawatha, I skimmed over the part in Book 3 where Hiawatha first meets his father Mudjekeewis:<br>Filled with joy was Mudjekeewis<br>When he looked on Hiawatha,<br>Saw his youth rise up before him<br>In the face of Hiawatha,<br>Saw the beauty of Wenonah<br>From the grave rise up before him.<br>"Welcome!" said he, "Hiawatha,<br>To the kingdom of the West-Wind!<br>Long have I been waiting for you!<br>Youth is lovely, age is lonely,<br>Youth is fiery, age is frosty;<br>You bring back the days departed,<br>You bring back my youth of passion."
But this passage communicates a secret of parenthood, something I’ve never seen discussed anywhere else. By the time you’re a parent, you’re on your way to being old, ugly, tired, and cynical. I certainly was. This felt like a brute fact about the world: we all know time only moves one direction. Then I had kids, and got confronted with people who were basically me, but young and beautiful and happy. That part of them which wasn’t me was the other person I love best in the world, also transmuted into a young and beautiful and happy form. This was a completely unexpected delight which nothing besides this one fragment of poetry had ever tried to prepare me for.<br>I might never have noticed this if I’d only had girls. I love my daughter, but I’ve never been a little girl; it doesn’t bring anything back for me. It’s like Mudjekeewis says - you’ve got to have a son to see your youth rise up before you.
Sometimes this is fire and passion and beauty and so on. But also, I was a bit of a weird child. I understand lots of children love trains. But probably not many get an article in the local newspaper about how train-obsessed they are. My mother still has it, framed in the guest bedroom, to embarrass me whenever I visit. Beside it are little pictures of me in my train engineer’s cap and train t-shirt and train pants holding my train book in one hand and railroad caboose lantern in the other. Every so often I will find I still remember some weird fact about the maximum speeds of various 1980s train designs, memorized before I could consistently use the potty.<br>Surely there can’t be a gene for train obsession. And I certainly didn’t pass it down on purpose. But my son is obsessed with trains. He describes the bars of his crib as a choo choo because, if you turn your head sideways, they look like a railroad track. He describes the wall around the neighbor’s yard as a choo choo because, if you’re standing on top of it, the pattern of bricks looks like a railroad track. He describes the armrest of his rocking chair as a choo choo, because . . . I still don’t understand this one. He insists on reading Blue Train, Green Train again and again. His favorite toy is a wooden railroad set. His favorite place to go is the train station.<br>(I asked some of my friends with male children how into trains they seemed, and they all answered “not particularly”. Then I mentioned this to an uncle, who informed me that my cousin is a top model train reseller on eBay. Maybe it is genetic.)
Playing with a model railroad at the children's museum.<br>When I was young, my OCD was much more disabling. The worst was my closet door. I had to close it seven times every night before I was satisfied. It’s been decades since I was that bad; my children can’t know anything about it. But lately, my son has taken to obsessively closing the door to the cabinet in his room at night. One evening, after he must have shut it ten or twenty times, I almost yelled at him: “COME ON! YOU KNOW YOU ONLY HAVE TO DO IT SEVEN TIMES!” But maybe he doesn’t know; maybe the genetic transmission isn’t that high-fidelity.<br>The good news is that all of this gives me a new ally in all my little quarrels with my wife. I’m hypersensitive to being startled when I’m drifting off to sleep; I used to grumble whenever my wife made a tiny amount of noise, and she would grumble about my grumbling, and finally we learned to compromise at some level that worked for both of us. But now it’s great! Whenever my wife makes a tiny amount of noise around bedtime, my son will wake up and scream, and he literally doesn’t know the meaning of the word “compromise”. As a result, everything is much quieter. Except for the screaming.<br>Or: I get irrationally annoyed if someone leaves a room without closing the door, but it’s fine, it would be weird to bother people about it, it would seem too confrontational to conspicuously get up and close the door, so I just take a deep breath and forget about it. Except that now I don’t have to, because my son immediately gets up from whatever he’s playing with and closes the door for me.<br>The bad news is that my daughter has inherited all of my wife’s traits, so now it’s 2-2. My room and my son’s room are spotless - my son...