Episode 58: type 2 fun // Tuesday, May 26
Yesterday was Memorial Day, a day I’ve loved all my life because it signifies that summer is coming.
As a Minnesota kid surrounded by lakes, Memorial day weekend meant driving up north to the cabin where our family spent most of our summer weekends. These days having a second home is a luxury most of us can’t afford, but back then, most everyone I knew had access to woods and water.
When they were young, my parents spent every summer weekend that they could camping, visiting as many lakes as they could, deciding which ones were their favorites. In a state with well over the 10,000 claimed on Minnesota license plates, this was not difficult to do, and back then, lakefront property was cheap and plentiful.
The year before I was born they found a tiny two-room cabin up on a hill, with a set of steep stairs that led to the water and a cement block boathouse below. Many years later my parents would buy a plot of land down the road and build a place with more rom, but my earliest childhood memories are of cramming into that little cabin not just with my own family, but my grandparents, my aunt and uncle, and my three cousins, who lived down the street from us.
Those were times of sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag. Of awakening in the night to a Daddy longlegs spider crawling across my arm. Of the toilet being clogged almost constantly because that one little septic tank bathroom couldn’t handle the constant traffic. Times of sobbing while my skiis bobbed awkwardly in the water and I cried, “I can’t ski!” Times of getting up after the fifteenth try and feeling more proud of myself than ever before. They were afternoons of carving my own stick to roast wieners and marshmallows. Of catching crayfish with my bare hands as we waded along the shore.
When we were old enough to be out of sight of our parents, the boathouse became a bunk house. A place for watching shooting stars and skinny dipping. A place where my siblings and cousins and I would sleep on creaky cast-off furniture and fall asleep to the sloshing of the lake on the shore.
Memorial Day weekend was generally the first weekend when it was warm enough to put the dock in the lake, a job that took the better part of the day and that involved carrying heavy metal poles and even heavier 4 x 8 foot wooden dock pieces from the shore to the water, and then holding them steady while my dad went to work with the socket wrench and tightened the bolts one by one. The lake didn’t get deep enough to swim until you were forty or fifty yards out, so there were a lot of dock pieces, maybe as many as twenty, though in my memory it seemed like more. If we were lucky, we’d be laboring under the early summer sun. But more often than not Memorial Day weekend was chilly, so we’d stand shivering with blue lips and teeth chattering as my dad gave instructions and we tried to hold the pieces level.
It was a job that most people hired out. This was something my siblings and I occasionally dared to point out to our parents. There were whole companies built on the singular need to have the dock put in and taken out at the beginning and end of the summer.
The job took hours to complete, and we’d all be sore the next day. I’m sure there were other families who did it themselves, but I can’t ever remember seeing them. For the sake of frugality and family togetherness, it was a job we were going to do ourselves. It was what my friend Scott Gullick would call Type 2 fun.
I learned about Type 2 fun exactly a year ago today. Our family spent that Memorial Day weekend camping with two other families. We’d all been neighbors for years, but had become friends when our kids went first to preschool and then elementary school together. It was our first time camping together. Our friends reserved a beautiful, but hard-to-find spot that should have taken us only an hour and a half to get there, but instead took us nearly four, because there was another park with a similar name, which we only realized when we arrived in a spot with no cell phone reception and did not see our friends.
When we finally arrived at the right place, our friends had already set up camp, and the mood was festive. One of our friends was making Palomas with fresh-squeezed grapefruits, and the place worked some kind of magic on our kids, who played contentedly with their friends for hours in the trees and rocks around our site.
It was our night to cook dinner for the group, and so I cooked taco bean soup over a camp stove, and pulled out chips and salsa to snack on. It was a beautiful spot, and the light was yellow on the valley below. As I sliced avocados to top our soup, I felt the stress of the drive melt away--until I felt the blade of my knife deep in the base of my thumb.
My finger began gushing blood immediately. My friend Annie, who is a nurse, pulled out her first aid kit and did her best to clean and close the wound. We debated whether or not I should leave the group to drive ninety miles to the nearest hospital.
As she checked my wound, Annie calmly told me that my injury was so common that nurses have a name for it: “avocado hand.” Annie thought I probably needed stitches. I called my health insurance company and learned that a visit to urgent care would cost me $500. We discussed the pros and cons of spending or saving that money, and I decided to sleep on it. All night long, my hand throbbed, and I was certain I’d made the wrong call.
But the next morning my thumb was looking better. The bleeding had finally stopped, and thanks to Annie’s constant tending, the wound was clean. I was in pain, but I was fine. Also, I was not out $500. We went on a morning hike. The kids had a great time. It was good to be out in nature with our friends.
But by lunchtime, the skies had darkened. The temperature dropped and it started to rain. We scrambled to put everything inside our tents or cars, getting soaked in the process. We’d all been pretty cheerful up until that point, but between the rain and a poor night’s sleep and my finger hurting, I could feel myself starting to unravel. I could tell I wasn’t alone. We took turns being snippy and irritable, and began to talk seriously about heading home early. The original plan was to stay until Monday, but here it was Sunday with no good weather in sight, and we were all cold and miserable.
It was then that Scott told us about Type 2 fun. He said that Type 1 fun is the obvious kind of fun. The fun that is unequivocally enjoyable, the kind of fun where you feel disappointed when it ends. Type 2 fun is different. Type 2 fun is often no fun at all--at least not right away. It can be miserable. And yet, he said, when we look back on life, it’s often the Type 2 fun that we remember most fondly. If we stayed, it would be to create some type 2 fun.
Here’s a quick list distinguishing Type 2 fun from it’s more glamorous counterpart, Type 1.
Reading Harry Potter? Type 1. Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses? Also Type 1.
Just kidding. I’ve never met anyone who thinks that’s type 1.Bruno Mars? Type 1. Going to the opera? Maybe you’re more cultured than me, and that’s type 1. For me that’s a definite type 2.
Dancing in your living room? Type 1.
Choosing to run a marathon? Running is my sport choice, but even I have to admit that’s some type 2 kind of fun.Sunning yourself on the beach with a pina colada in hand? Type 1.
Surfing on that same beach, even though a full body wetsuit and booties can’t stop you from constantly shivering? Type 2 all the way.And finally, choosing to stick it out and camp in the rain with your friends after almost slicing off your thumb? That, my friends, is the type 2 kind of fun we opted for.
When type 1 fun is over, you feel disappointed. When type 2 fun is over, you feel relieved. There is nothing wrong with type 1 fun--we all need those times when life is just pure, unadulterated enjoyment--but type 2 fun is the kind that sticks with you.
I know there was a lot of whining and complaining during those Memorial Day weekends of putting in the dock. And yet at least for me, those memories are mostly fond ones. Because while the work was hard and uncomfortable, it was work that left us feeling satisfied when it was over. Sometimes we even figured out how to make it better while we were doing it. We’d sing at the top of our lungs, or play chicken as we floated the dock pieces out to deeper water. Standing quietly in the water and holding the pieces steady, I learned for the first time how funny my soft-spoken brother-in-law is. Every now and then those times of work included serious conversations, too, the kind where we let each other into our lives.
It seems to me that whether or not you’re able to enjoy type 2 fun at the time, there has to be a perspective shift. It’s a kind of fun that happens largely in retrospect. It’s not so much about reframing a negative moment, as it is about finding a better way through it. It’s less about changing your situation and more about identifying the small and significant ways to survive it well.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m a bit of a type 2 junkie. As a lifelong distance runner, I’ve been on a long hunt for type two fun. So much of that sport is pain and suffering; I would not describe even my best races as blissful or easy; they were times in my life when I learned how to tolerate pain so efficiently that I came out victorious. They were type 2 fun.
Most of my favorite books and movies are ones that made me cry. Some of them really made me work to get through them. Come to think of it, novels that are purely type 1 fun, page-turners that lack a certain heft and artistry in the writing, don’t interest me at all.
Surface-level chit-chat has never appealed to me. My best friendships are the ones where we’ve seen each other at our worst, and not only stuck around, but dug in deeper. So yeah, maybe I’m drawn to type 2 fun.
For many of us right now, so much of the day to day is challenging. It’s easy to get discouraged. It’s easy to get lost in the work of putting one day after another, to feel the chill of the water and wind, to lose sight of the thing we’re working toward. Sometimes surviving is the best we can do.
It’s not a given that we’ll find type 2 fun in a bad situation. I have plenty of memories that still make me wince years later. Certainly there are moments so painful where there is no type of fun to be had. Where all you can do is get through it.
So much of parenting is all about type 2 fun. Work you do now that you hope will pay off later. Yes, there are moments of type 1 time, the tender kisses on cheeks, the times I catch my older kids reading to the little one, the moments when we all get so silly together that we can’t stop laughing. But we’re in a stage of parenting where those type 1 fun moments are relatively rare. I’m told that as children get older, these type 1 moments are more frequent. I hope that’s true. But sometimes I think that in the search for type 1 fun, I miss the invitations to the fun that is type 2.
Whether your arms are aching from the heavy load you’re caring or you are shivering in the rain, my gift of daily sanity to you today is this: if it’s possible, give yourself some type 1 fun.
But also, be on the lookout for type 2 fun, because a life with no type 2 fun is a shallow one. Type 2 fun is the kind that gives us opportunities to change and grow during hard times. It gives us the chance to band together with others and figure out how to get through.
This year for Memorial Day we were hoping for some Type 1 fun, a day trip with the same friends we were camping with in the rain a year ago. We were going to take a ferry to Angel Island, an island of park land that sits in the Bay between us and San Francisco. It’s a place we’ve always wanted to visit, a place that somehow, even though we’ve lived here for sixteen years, we haven’t made it to yet. We had to cancel those plans; Angel Island isn’t yet open, and ferries aren’t running there since the Bay Area’s shelter in place orders have not yet been lifted.
Instead, we met up with our only local family for some social distance splashing in the river. We picnicked and sipped rose in the sun. We provided in conversation what we wish we couldn’t yet give in embraces. It was a day of type 1 fun. We all needed that after this pandemic spring.
But there’s a part of me that misses the type 2 fun we had last year, camping in the rain with our friends. It’s not that I’d want to repeat our chilly camping trip, or the pain of almost slicing my thumb. But I’m glad we had those experiences together. It’s what made us miss being with them yesterday, one of the things that has strengthened our friendships in the intervening year. Type 2 fun will do that in a way that type 1 fun never can.
However you spent this Memorial Day, I hope you had some type 1 fun. But if the fun you had was more of the type 2 sort, I hope you’ll recognize in that the shift you made to get there, and feel good about that, too.
As we enter this pandemic summer, whether your city or state is open for business or you’re still sheltering in place, my daily gift of sanity for you is this wish: that someday soon, you’ll remember that this time was hard, but we did it together. That when you look back on this moment in history, you’ll recall a time with plenty of type 2 fun, and some type 1 fun, too.