As I watched them, I sympathized with both father and
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son because I, too, had once turned on the man whose child I was. It was a time when I thought I would never grow up, never be at ease in my own skin, never get it right. It is a time not to be forgotten.
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On a June day, during the summer of my freshman year in high school, I got into an ugly argument with my father. He was a country doctor who had a farm in southern Indiana where he raised Hereford cattle and kept a few horses. That summer he decided to extend the pasture fence along the south field. That's what started the trouble.
We were sitting under a sycamore at the edge of the pasture. My father was thoughtfully whittling at a piece of wood. He pointed to a stand of hemlocks about three hundred yards away and said, "From here to therethat's where we want our fence. Figure 'bout 110 holes. Three feet deep. Won't take forever."
I said in a tight voice, "Why don't we get a power augur?"
"Because power augurs don't learn anything from work. And we want our fence to teach us a thing or two."
What made me mad was the way he said "we want our fence . . . " We had nothing to do with it. The project was his. I was just forced labor and I thought that was unfair.
I admired a lot about my dad and I tried to remember those things when I felt mad at him but I got angry easily that summer. One evening as we checked out the cattle, my father's attention fixed on a river birch that grew on the east bank of the farm pond. The tree forked at ground level and was my retreat. I'd get my back up against the dark bark of one trunk and my feet against the other so that I was wedged solid. Then I could look at the sky or read or pretend.
"I remember you scrunchin' into that tree when you were a little kid," my father said. "You don't do that much anymore."
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Amazed, I heard myself say, "What the hell do you care!" And ran to the barn, let myself into the tack room, sat on a nail keg and tried very hard not to cry. It wasn't long before he opened the door. He sat opposite me on the old stool he always used. Although I was staring at my tightly folded hands, I could feel him looking at me. Finally, I met his gaze.
"It's not a good idea to doctor your own family," he said, "but I guess I need to do that for you right now." He focused on me. "Let's see. You feel strange in your own body. Like it doesn't work just like it always has. You're a little slow. You think no one else is like you. And you think that I live in dim-wit land. You think I'm too hard on you, and you wonder how you got into a family dull as we are.''
I was astonished. I didn't understand how he knew my most treacherous night thoughts.
"The thing of it is, your body is changing. You've got a lot more male hormone in your blood. And, Son, let me tell you, there is not a grown man in this world who could handle what that does to you when you're fourteen. But you have to learn to deal with it. It's what's making your muscles grow and your hair, and it's making your voice change. It will make you a grown man before you know it. At least you'll look like one. Being one is a different thing. Right now you think you can't. Right now you think you're a very misunderstood guy."
He was right. For the past few months I had begun to think no one really knew a thing about me. I felt irritable and restless and sad for no reason. So because I couldn't talk about it, I began to feel really isolated. I wasn't a boy anymore and I wasn't a man. I was nowhere.
"So," my dad said after awhile, "One of the things that'll help you is work. Hard work."
As soon as he said it I suspected this help-me thing was
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a ploy to get me to spend my summer doing things around the place. But there was no way around my father. When he said something, he meant it. That was that.
I began that summer by digging post holes by hand across the north meadow where a new fence was going to go. I did that all morning, every day. I slammed that digger into the ground until I had tough calluses on my hands. But I noticed one day as I was coming out of the shower that my shoulders looked bigger somehow. I hated the work, but still the anger I felt went slamming into the earth and somehow made me feel better.
One Saturday morning I helped my father patch the barn roof. We worked in silence for a long time. Then he suddenly looked directly at me and almost reading my thoughts, said, "You aren't alone, you know."
I looked up at him, squatting near me with the handle of the tar bucket in his hand. "Think about this. If you drew a line from your feet down the side of our barn to the earth and followed it along any which way you pleased, it would touch every living thing there is in the world. That's what the earth does. It connects us all. Every living thing. So you're never alone. No one is."
I started to argue with that idea in my mind, but the notion of being connected to all the life there was in the world made me feel so good that I let my thoughts quiet down and said nothing.
That summer I gradually began to pay attention to doing chores well. I began to take a more serious interest in the farm and ever so slowly I began to feel I could somehow get through this rotten time. My body got bigger, I got hair on my face and elsewhere, and my feet grew a whole size. Maybe there was hope.
Near the end of that summer, I went down to the pond to sit in my tree. It was kind of a last visit to the world of my boyhood.
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But I no longer fit in the fork of the tree and had to scuttle up almost eight feet high in order to get space enough for my body. As I stretched out I could feel the trunk that my feet pressed against was weak. I could push it away easily with my legs. I began to push at it harder until, at last, the trunk gave and slowly fell to the ground, raising dust from the weeds. Then I walked back to the barn, got the chain saw and cut up my tree for firewood.
The day I finished the work on my father's fence, I saw him sitting on an outcropping of granite in the south pasture. His elbows were on his knees, his hands clasped between them. His ruin of a Stetson was pushed back on his head. As I walked toward him, I knew he was thinking.
I sat down beside him on the flat rock. "You thinking about how long this grass is going to hold out without some rain?"
"Yep," he said. "How long you think we got?"
"Another week. Easy."
He turned and looked me deep in the eyes, the way he did when he wanted to be sure he'd gotten the real gist of what you were asking him. Of course, I wasn't really talking about the state of the pasture as much as I was trying to find out if my opinion mattered to him. After what seemed to me a very long time he said, "Could be. You could be right." Then he said, "You did a fine job on our fence. Custom work. Custom."
"Thanks," I said. I felt almost overwhelmed by the force of his approval. I smiled what I am sure was the biggest smile of my life.
"You know," he said, "you're going to turn out to be one hell of a man. But just because you're getting all grown up doesn't mean you have to leave behind everything you liked when you were a boy."
I knew he was thinking about why I had cut down my tree. I looked at his lined face. He seemed much older to
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me now. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of wood. It was about the size of a deck of cards. "I made this for you," he said. He handed me a piece of the heartwood of the river birch. He had shaped and carved the face of it so that the tree from which it came appeared again on the surface, tall and strong and all leafed out. And beneath were carved the words, "Our Tree." And for the first time I felt really good about those words.
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When I was leaving the field that September day, after the Marlins missed their bid to win a play-off spot in front of the home-town fans, I saw the man and boy who had been sitting in front of me in the stands. They were walking toward the parking lot with the noisy crowd. The man's arm rested on his son's shoulder for a moment. They looked relaxed, comfortable with each other, their immediate problem resolved.
W. W. Meade
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The Cheerleader
Everyone wants to be a cheerleader. Every girl wants the chance to shine, to have all eyes on her, to be the one to wear the uniform, be part of the "squad," be in the "in" groupeverything that cheerleading connotes. Any girl who says differently is either the exception to the rule or fooling herself. Everyone wants to be a cheerleaderbut not everyone gets the chance.
In the fall of my senior year in high school, I was faced with more pressure than I knew how to handle. My friends and I were applying to college, taking the college admissions tests and writing essays. Each essay, it seemed, asked a variation of the question, "What makes you different from the other thousands of high school seniors who are seeking admission to our school?" It was in the midst of these other pressures that cheerleading tryouts for the varsity team took place every year.
Varsity tryouts were different from trying out for the freshman, sophomore and junior teams. Pretty much every girl who tried out for those teams got to be a cheerleader because there were two squads for each gradeone for football season and one for basketball. But the
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varsity cheerleaders were ten senior girls who got to cheer for the whole year. Out of the many who tried out, each having had some experience as an underclassman, only that very special ten made it.
Those ten girls knew, without a doubt, the answer to that essay question that the colleges asked. They knew the moment they put on that uniform what made them unique. They felt it the minute they ran out onto the field at the first game. They reveled in it the first time they walked down the halls of the school, all eyes on them.
I knew I had to be one of them.
As I listed all the other things I had done in school and extracurricularall the clubs and sports I had enjoyed, the awards I had won, the jobs I had heldI knew instinctively that none of them was special enough to set me apart. None of them meant what being a senior cheerleader meant. At least to me. At seventeen, I was sure that the college admissions departments felt the same way.
My younger sister, Molly, started high school that year. I thought she would have it especially easy since I had already told her everything to expectwhich teachers to fear, which courses were easy. From my experiences, she already knew which activities were offered and when, and how much time each one required. She even knew many upperclassmen, which was a real plus for a freshman.
The first few weeks of school were fraught with tension for me. With everything going on, I admit I wasn't too attentive to Molly. Still, I waited for her every afternoon in the parking lot to drive her home. I thought that was enough for her, getting a ride instead of having to take the bus, like many of the other freshmen.
Cheerleading practice was held after school and sometimes ran long during those weeks before the tryouts. Molly had to either wait for me or take the bus. Most of
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the time she waited, watching me from the bleachers.
I could see the tension mounting in my friends as tryouts approached. We got into a lot more fights, sniping at one another. One of my friends confided that she thought she stood a better chance of making the team if she lost a few pounds. So she stopped eatingI mean completely! Another girl began skipping other activities to practice after school. She was a really talented dancer and had always loved her dance classes. But she stopped going so she could practice for the tryouts. When I asked her if she was going to give up dance altogether if she made the team, she said yes.
But the worst was when I saw one of my friends crying in the bathroom. When I asked her what was wrong, she told me her parents were getting a divorce. Then she said that if she made the cheerleading team, they would both have to come see her at the games. She thought that might get them back together.
Making that team meant a lot more than it should have to so many of us. But like my friends, I didn't think about whether or not it was worth it.
The day of tryouts came. I gave it everything I had. I screamed the loudest, smiled the widest, jumped the highest. I was perfect. At least I thought so.
The list of the ten girls selected was to be posted that Friday at the end of the day, outside the principal's office. My last class was just down the hall, so I would be one of the first to see the list.
Friday morning, I drove Molly to school as usual. But I hadn't slept well the night before and was so on edge that I thought I'd scream if anyone even talked to me. Molly must have sensed that because she didn't say anything the whole ride to school. But when she got out of the car she handed me a note. I was in a hurry so I stuffed it into one of my books and headed for class.
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Friday was the longest day of my life. The last period was English, and as I took out my copy of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Molly's note fell out. It said,
Dear Sis,
No matter what happens today, whether you make the team or not, I think you are the best sister in the world. I was so scared to start high schoolyou know how lowly freshmen are treated. But having a sister who's a senior makes me special. All of my friends are jealous. I just wanted to tell you.
Love,
Molly
The bell rang, but I didn't run to see if my name was on that list. For just a minute I stayed where I was, rereading my sister's letter, rereading it until the words blurred. Then I stood up, gathered my books and headed for the door.
At the end of the hall I could see Molly leaning against the door, patiently waiting for me to drive her home. Between us, on the bulletin board outside the principal's office, was the list. There was a huge crowd around it already. I knew I would have to wait a long time to get to the front of the line. I looked at Molly and gripped the note in my hand. Suddenly, I knew what I would write for my college essay. I knew what made me different, unique. And it didn't depend on whether or not I had made the squad.
I made my way down the hall, without stopping, my eyes glued to the form of my very own personal cheerleader, waiting patiently there for someone she thought was very special.
Marsha Arons
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The Bridge between Verses
Things do not change. We change.
Henry David Thoreau
My brother is the boy with the big black eyes. He has an aura about him that feels strange and nervous. My brother is different. He doesn't understand when jokes are made. He takes a long time to learn basic things. He often laughs for no reason.
He was pretty average until the first grade. That year, his teacher complained of him laughing in class. As a punishment, she made him sit in the hall. He spent all his time on the fake mosaic tile outside the room. The next year, he took a test that showed he needed to be placed in a special-education class.
As I grew older, I began to resent my brother. When I walked with him, people stared. Not that anything was physically wrong with him; it's just something that radiated from him that attracted attention. I would clench my teeth in anger sometimes, wishing he were like other people, wishing he were normal.
Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul II Page 17