Things My Son Needs to Know about the World

by Fredrik Backman

  Not. This. Time.

  Kane rushed into the ring and picked up Shawn Michaels by the hair and chokeslammed him straight onto the floor, and all the D-Generation X bullies immediately ran away like scared rabbits.

  It was one of the most beautiful sporting moments of my entire youth.

  And the very next day, Kane and The Undertaker teamed up under the name “The Brothers of Destruction.” And they became the most feared and unbeatable warriors in the entire wrestling kingdom.

  And everyone lived happily ever after.

  * * *

  Until a few years later, when Kane betrayed his brother and choked him out in the 1998 Royal Rumble fight. And then Shawn Michaels helped him lock The Undertaker in a box. And then they set fire to the box.

  But, I mean, that’s not really the important part of the story. Focus on the moral of it.

  The moral is that it’s not always right to hit back. But that sometimes you have to, if you’re defending the weakest.

  Not that I’m saying you’re allowed to fight, that is. Of course you aren’t. Your mother would be angry as hell. So you’re never allowed to fight. Other than with middle-aged Germans in sombreros when they cut in line to the breakfast buffet at hotels, of course. But everyone knows that. They’re an exception. But otherwise: no fighting. Other than when you need to defend yourself. Or defend someone else. Or when someone tries to take the last chocolate waffle. But never other than that!

  Well. This isn’t going exactly the way I planned.

  But, here: I just want you to know that I’m not going to try to trick you into thinking there’s no evil in the world. Because there is. This world sometimes seems like it’s full of incomprehensible, unintelligible, unembraceable, inexorable evil. Violence and injustice and greed and blind rage.

  But it’s also full of all that other stuff. The small things. Kindness between strangers. Love at first sight. Loyalty and friendship. Someone’s hand in yours on a Sunday afternoon. Two brothers reconciled. Heroes who stand up when no one else dares. A fiftysomething man in a Saab who slows down when he sees your turn signal and lets you into his lane during rush hour. Summer nights. Children’s laughter. Cheesecake.

  And all you can do is decide which side you want to be on. Which pile you want to contribute to.

  I won’t always be the best father. I’ve made many mistakes, and I’ll make plenty more. But I’ll never forgive myself if you become that kid in the corner in the playground.

  Whichever of them that is.

  I was almost always one of those ten in the middle, terrified of ending up on the wrong side of the line. Sometimes I still am. Most of us are.

  So be different from me, better, do me that favor. Never keep your mouth shut. Don’t look away. Never be mean just because you can be. Never mistake kindness for weakness. Don’t become the kind of person who stands in an office with panoramic windows in an advertising firm and thinks that “nice” is an insult.

  The Undertaker taught me that. I hope I can teach you the same.

  And, yeah, maybe don’t tell your mother what I said about Kane putting his brother into a box and setting it on fire. She doesn’t understand wrestling.

  All right. Here’s what happened.

  Let’s assume you’re feeling a bit stressed and you spill milk on the diaper bag, and you think, “Damn, this is going to stink, I’ll seem like the worst dad!” So instead you grab the first plastic bag you can find for carrying the diapers and spare clothes for your baby. And you throw all that into the stroller as you grab the garbage bags on your way out the door. And down by the trash cans, you pick them up and something from one of the garbage bags runs down your sleeve. And you’re feeling a bit stressed, so you think, “It’s probably just juice, it’ll dry.” And then you grab the first thing you can find to wipe yourself down. And it just so happens to be a diaper from the bag you packed your baby’s things into. And then you jump into a fairly warm car. And just as you do that, you notice that your baby needs changing. And then you think, “Ah, what the hell, I already have this diaper in my hand, a little juice won’t hurt him!” and so you put the diaper you used to dry up what you thought was juice onto the baby. And then you drive. And twenty minutes later you arrive at preschool just in time for singing. Out of breath and red in the face. With a shopping bag from the local liquor store full of diapers. And your car keys in one hand. And a child that smells like warm beer in the other.

  When that happens, let’s just say that the option of using a diaper bag with a few milk stains on it suddenly seems like a pretty attractive alternative. From a purely good parent–bad parent perspective, that is.

  Let’s assume that.

  Why it’s not worth arguing with your mother

  I wonder who takes a bottle of Schweppes Bitter Lemon from the kitchen counter, pours it out, refills the bottle with water and dish soap, puts it in the sink, and goes to bed.

  Your mother wonders who gets up in the morning, sees a bottle full of what he thinks is ten-hour-old lukewarm soda, and drinks it.

  I wonder who the hell doesn’t realize that dish soap and water will look exactly like a bottle of nicely room-temperature Schweppes Bitter Lemon at ten past six in the morning.

  Your mother wonders who the hell would drink from a bottle of yesterday’s soda in the sink first thing they do at ten past six in the morning.

  I wonder what kind of moron puts dish soap into a bottle.

  Your mother says that at least she isn’t the moron who just drank dish soap.

  She wins.

  The art of talking to strangers

  Here are two things we apparently need to stop doing when strangers bend down over your stroller to look at how cute you are:

  Me sneaking up behind the stroller, hissing, “Say hello to my little FRIEND!”

  Me sneaking up behind the stroller, hissing, “Dance, puppets. Daaance!”

  So. Yeah. This is mostly feedback to me.

  You just carry on.

  WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT STARTING A BAND

  So, son, let me explain to you that all this that you see around you right now is called “life.” It’s going to be complicated at times and it’s going to demand certain things of you. You’ll need to be honest and brave and just. Love and be loved. Fail. Embarrass yourself. Triumph. Fall from something. Fall for someone.

  And you’ll need to start a band. I might as well say that right now. And the first thing you’ll need is a good name.

  Sure, there are people who will say rubbish like “the music has to come first,” but honestly, those people’s music is always rubbish. A good name always comes first. Like “The Who” or “The Smiths” or “Nuns with Guns” or “Draco and the Malfoys.” Quality band names, every one of them. My friend R was in a cover band called “Stiff Nipples” for a short time. Not quite as good but also not entirely bad.

  I myself have always dreamed of having a power metal band called “Frightening Lightning.” On the T-shirts, all the i’s would be lightning bolts. That’s really the most important thing to know about starting a band: that the name should look good on T-shirts. In Frightening Lightning, my friend R would be in charge of speakers, my friend D in charge of the tour bus, my friend J the cords and cables, my friend E would be in charge of getting gas station hot dogs, and I would be in charge of T-shirts. Your mother, of course, keeps claiming that T-shirts aren’t “real instruments,” but honestly: your mother doesn’t know the first thing about music.

  The second most important thing about starting a band is that you do it with your best friends. There are moments in life where someone might try to make you question why a modern man in a high-technology society needs a best friend. But your mother buys a lot of crap from eBay. And we move basically every third year. That’s a lot of stuff that needs to be carried. And, what the hell, sometimes you just want someone to play video games with. A best friend is good to have.

  There aren’t really any fundamental requirements for
that, of course. But since we’re already on the subject, let’s establish a few all the same: A real friend won’t steal your crush. A real friend won’t ninja loot your warrior in World of Warcraft.

  Yeah, that’s basically it.

  You can have a best friend like Ron in Harry Potter. But, well, you know. He whines a lot, doesn’t he? It’s worthless. Plus he steals Hermione, the bastard. No, it’s better to have a best friend who’s like Chewbacca in Star Wars. He’s more the kind all your crushes think is cute and a good listener, but who they just want to be friends with. Man-At-Arms from He-Man is a quality choice too, because he won’t ever judge you, no matter who your crush is.

  Or you could have one like Goose in Top Gun. Although he dies. And that’s honestly a terrible character trait in a best friend. If I’d had the chance to choose, I probably would have gone for someone like Samwise Gamgee.

  Say what you like about Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings, but Samwise Gamgee would damn well never steal your stuff in World of Warcraft!

  Plus, I think Samwise would have been a good rhythm guitarist. Chewbacca’s more of a drummer. Man-At-Arms is a keyboardist. Ron Weasley probably plays bass, the bastard. The bass player always steals all your crushes. And yeah, Goose is dead. So he doesn’t play anything. Other than dead, that is.

  Not everyone will understand why you need to have a band. I’m not going to name names. Partly because I don’t want to single anyone out and partly because you already know your mother’s name. But she doesn’t get this. Always moaning about why I “can’t just go for a coffee like a normal person” and how I “can’t spend time with other men without having some kind of activity associated with it.” It’s all lies, of course. I don’t need an activity to be able to hang out with other men. I just think it’s nice to have something to do while you’re together. Plus, being in a band is cool. It could be a rock band. Or a pop band. Or a cover band. As long as it’s something where you can gather around and look at one another and say, “But you know, when the band makes it big…”

  And yes. The band will probably never make it even out of our storage unit. And, to be completely honest, it actually doesn’t even need to be a band. It could be a football team we’ll never get around to starting or a bar we’ll never buy or a perfect bank robbery we’ll never carry out. (That’s partly because we don’t want to go to prison, but mostly because none of us really knows where to get hold of the bag of automatic weapons, an amphibious car, four empty oxygen tanks, a dozen parachutes made of Ziploc bags, a man-size jar of honey, and six robot sharks and the rest of the stuff we need for our plan, but that’s a different story entirely.)

  Sometimes, it’s just nice to go someplace where people care about a good T-shirt, that’s all. So you need a best friend. Someone who knows who you were when you were fifteen. Someone you don’t need to explain everything to. Someone you can drink whiskey and lie with. Someone you can call up and say, “Want to watch the game tonight?” Or “I was thinking of test-driving a car over the weekend, want to come along and finish all of my sentences with ‘that’s what SHE said!’?”

  Or “Heyyyy, so my wife bought another secondhand sofa online and they don’t have an elevator, so I was thinking…”

  It’s not like I have an activity for every friend. I’m not a freak. Some of them have the same activity. You have your Champions League friends. A few video game friends. While you’re growing up, you’ll have friends you only ever play poker with and friends you only ever go to the pub with. My friend N and I share an office. My friend J and I mostly tell jokes and watch Family Guy. My friend B and I talk about money and politics. My friend R and I call one another and talk for hours about all the stuff people talk about, kids and work and love and things you dream about and things that scare the shit out of you. He was the best man at my wedding. He’s been my best man since we were fifteen.

  My friend E and I? We eat. And by that, I don’t mean we go to vineyards in Provence and sample crackers. I mean we eat sandwiches. And kebabs. And gas station hot dogs. It’s E who taught me that no gas station hot dog on Earth is better than the mustard you put on it. A few years ago, the very best gas station hot dogs on Earth were found at a small gas station in the very southernmost part of Sweden; E still refers to them as “the first Godfather movie of gas station hot dogs” with a dreamy look in his eyes.

  And, sure, sometimes you’ll probably want a friend who can back you up in a fight or cross the North Pole with you. But much more often, you’ll want a friend who’ll just go with you to grab a burger on a Tuesday evening, so you don’t have to be the lonely guy in the burger joint on a Tuesday evening. E’s that kind of guy.

  You just have different kinds of friends when you grow up. Some you play tennis with and some you party with and some you run around town and get into fights with. I used to have one I just drove around listening to music with. He died in a car accident when I was twenty. E took the day off work and drove forty miles just to give me a ride to the funeral. “I’m not good at talking about death,” he mumbled, looking down at the wheel. “It’s fine,” I said, getting out. Once the funeral was over, he was there waiting for me with two kebabs. We ate them in his car. Then we drove around all night, listening to music and eating gas station hot dogs, because E didn’t want me to go home and call the guys I only ever got drunk with. It’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.

  And then we got older. I moved to Stockholm. Met your mother. Got an apartment and a four-wheel drive. And you know what life is like. Though actually, you don’t know yet. It’s just that it’s never like it was before. Suddenly, you don’t have the time. You don’t have the energy. You deprioritize one another. Become adults.

  That’s why you need a band. Just so you have a reason once in a while to meet down in the recording studio (or “our friend Jimmie’s mom’s garage” in layman’s terms). Not because the music itself is so important. But because all the rest of it is.

  E eventually moved to Stockholm too. And I met N here. J and R and all the others stayed back home. Some of us live incredibly different lives now, and some of us live identical lives, only rarely beside one another. Some of us have even stopped listening to Rage Against the Machine. But every time we meet, we still spend a lot of time talking about the perfect band T-shirt. About the perfect song. The perfect guitar riff.

  About perfect memories.

  Like when we were nineteen and got incredibly drunk on R’s birthday, and by the end of the evening E was bent double over the bar and R thought he wanted to say something, so he bent down with his head next to him so that he could hear over the music. And then E threw up in his ear. R still claims he has reduced hearing in that ear. That it’s the reason he never became a better guitarist. “Acoustic feedback instability in the monitoring, you know?” (We don’t know.)

  I just want you to know you’ll need something in your life that’s never going to change.

  So you’ll need a band. If for nothing else than to be able to call them and say, “How’s the new MacBook?” or “What the hell are A.C. Milan doing?” or “Want to come over for a barbecue?” without them getting hung up on details like it being November and you living in an apartment.

  Or for asking for help moving a couch.

  Or for swallowing hard and whispering, “She said yes.”

  Last year, E and I went to a little roadside bar in Ytterån, just outside of Östersund, way out in the north of Sweden. They have the biggest burger in the country there, nine and a half pounds. I guess people deal with their midlife crises in different ways. Some go climbing in the Himalayas, some cross the North Pole, and some take up martial arts. E and I? That burger was our Everest. There and back, it was eight hundred miles and fourteen hours of driving, just to eat lunch. On the way, we discussed what the very best “a man walks into a bar” joke was. We stopped at a gas station and ate hot dogs with strong mustard.

  When I dropped E off outside his house that evening,
we hugged. I can only remember us doing that once before. The day after you were born.

  You weighed two pounds less than that burger.

  So you’ll need best friends. Frodo knew that. Han Solo knew that. He-Man and Maverick knew that. You need someone you can call when you need help moving that bloody bookcase. Or someone you can say “They should play Zlatan Ibrahimović in more of a drop-back position” to or “Have you found a good stream for the new Game of Thrones episode?”

  Or “I’m going to be a dad.”

  You’ll need a band.

  Thinking outside the box

  Your grandpa was here over the weekend and he installed those little child safety locks all over the kitchen.

  The result is that it now takes you about fifteen seconds to get into a cupboard. And it takes me half an hour.

  Communication. It’s the key to every healthy marriage.

  ME: (Looking out of the window) You know that neighbor, the one with the big box on their balcony that you thought was an extra fridge?

  MY WIFE: Yeah.

  ME: That box is probably not a fridge.

  MY WIFE: Huh?

  ME: No. They have a rabbit in there.

  MY WIFE: What? A rabbit? How do you know that?

  ME: Because they have it out right now and they’re playing with it.