Endnote 269: Marlon Bain's letter to Steeply
until the day the father is crushed into aspic in a freak accident on the Jamaica Way and all opportunities for transgenerational instruction are forever lost, and the son never learns how to be a handy homeowner himself, […] and feels terribly inadequate (the son), not only because he is not handy but because this handiness seemed to him to have represented to his father everything that was independent and manly and non-Disabled in an American male.
Context
Bain's capital-D "Disabled," twice: first as a standard of American maleness (handiness = independence = non-Disability, with the unhandy agoraphobic son — Bain himself, smuggled in as hypothesis — on the wrong side), then as category (g) in his taxonomy of what unimpeachable parenting produces. Disability as something you can fail into by inheritance and family system, not just be born to.