by Bruce Feiler
For starters, the act of disrupting your pace brings you into contact with more people. We weren’t fifteen steps onto the bridge before a group of men said to me, “Whoa! You’re doing this on crutches?! Good luck!” It also creates a bond with others who are slowed, disrupted, or struggling with their own displacement. You develop a citizenship of the estranged. In just the few days before our crossing, I quipped with a businessman in a knee brace, offered to trade maladies with a man in a neck brace, and patted the back of a woman in a walker.
At the risk of admission: I was never nicer than when I was on crutches.
During a visit to New York in the years before the bridge was built, Mark Twain described a desert of solitude, buzzing with impatient hurriers. His portrait captures most people I know today. “Every man seems to feel that he has got the duties of two lifetimes to accomplish in one, and so he rushes, rushes, rushes, and never has time to be companionable—never has any time at his disposal to fool away on matters which do not involve dollars and duty and business.”
Few things rupture this tempo more than the inability to hurry. And the interruption becomes an invitation. Stripped of status and authority, the invalid becomes open to community. Going fast, you head only for your destination and inevitably arrive alone. You assert yourself on the world. Going slow, you allow yourself to encounter your surroundings and invariably arrive helped along by strangers.
You discover.
In the 1840s, when walking was just becoming a source of recreation across Europe, a new type of pedestrian appeared in Paris. He was called a flaneur, one who ambled the arcades and strolled the parks in a silent labyrinth of observation and leisure. One emblem of that idleness was the fashion among flaneurs to take a turtle for walks and let the reptile set the pace.
As a paean to slow-moving, I love this notion. And it seems particularly appropriate for the Brooklyn Bridge, which has its own history of Noah-like crossings. The first person to ride across in a carriage took along a rooster; cattle were charged a nickel to cross in those days, sheep and hogs two cents; and soon after the bridge opened, P. T. Barnum herded twenty-one elephants across the main thoroughfare, before deeming it satisfactorily solid.
Above all, I could relate to the flaneur’s commitment to the measured tempo. The single most common shard of wisdom I encountered in my excavations of fatherhood—from my grandfather’s tapes to my father to my surgeon—was, “Don’t be in a hurry.” Slow down.
Take a walk with a turtle.
And behold the world in pause.
AND EVERY ONCE IN a while, stop entirely.
We reached the apex of the bridge. It was just before noon. Eden wanted to eat her picnic immediately, while Tybee was more interested in ogling the joggers wearing no shirts. “Daddy, when are you going to take your shirt off?” she asked. We found a sheltered spot against the face of the tower and spread out bagels, cream cheese, fruit, and milk. A grape rolled through a gap in the planks onto the cars passing beneath us, and Tybee wondered if she could squeeze through and retrieve it. “I think I would have to be very tiny,” she said.
“Girls, guess what?” I said. “After lunch, I have a surprise!”
“Oooh, cupcakes?!” Eden cooed.
“No, not something to eat,” I said. “Something to do.”
Whitman, himself a well-known walker, frequently crossed the river from Brooklyn to Manhattan. His sentiments to those who might cross after him were the same I would speak to my daughters were they to cross someday without me.
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d…
These, and all else, were to me the same as they are to you.
Above all, I would urge them to cross as often as possible, and be able to say, as Whitman did, “I too lived.”
When our picnic ended, we packed away the half-eaten bagels and empty grape stems. “I wonder what Daddy’s surprise is!?” Linda said. The girls rubbed their hands together. The cyclists and joggers were zooming past us now, blowing whistles to frighten pedestrians from their path. Teenagers were posing for cell phone pictures. An artist hawked charcoal drawings. Saturday noon was rush hour on the Brooklyn Bridge.
I tugged the girls closer and pulled open my shoulder bag. They reached in and lifted out a small red-and-yellow tablecloth, which I spread onto the wooden planks. They reached in again and retrieved four saucers, four cups, a creamer, and a fractured sugar bowl I had glued together the night before. Finally I retrieved the ultimate accessory.
And just after midday, with Lady Liberty to our left and the Empire State Building to our right, with hundreds of hurriers bustling around us, and for no other reason than we’d reached the end of a long year, we clinked our cups, tilted our kettle, and held a tea party on top of the world.
FOR YEARS I SUFFERED from a recurring dream. I would be walking, or climbing, or fleeing something. And I would stall. My legs would turn to mush, or get trapped in some quicksand, or bog down in some existential mud. Then I would wake up—exhausted, panting, and scared.
I never told anybody about my dream. After a while, maybe a decade, I told myself it was probably about ambition, some deep-rooted fear that I might never get to the place I wanted to get.
Then one day, not long before we set out across the Brooklyn Bridge, I realized that I hadn’t had the dream since I’d gotten sick. It was a shocking discovery, sort of like losing a relative you didn’t exactly love but had grown accustomed to having around. But in my case, the loss was more eerie. As soon as I couldn’t walk, I stopped dreaming that I couldn’t walk. In the year that I could barely get anywhere, I stopped dreaming that I couldn’t get where I wanted to go.
My revelation presented two possibilities. The first is that my body had somehow known all along about the weakness of my legs. Tipped off by some genetic malfunction, my unknowing mind had sent out warning signs that I would someday be stopped short of my dreams.
The other possibility is the more preferable one. I was no longer dissatisfied. Having slowed my pace of life, I was no longer trying to get to a place I wasn’t meant to be. The year I couldn’t hurry, I stopped trying to hurry someplace else.
Having finally stopped trying to be someplace else, I was finally happy right where I was.
WHEN THE TEA PARTY concluded, I asked the girls whether they would like to continue walking across the length of the bridge, then take a taxi home, or retrace our steps and walk home from here. Eden spoke first. “We want to walk all the way across the bridge aaand walk back home!” Linda looked at me and winked. “That’s our girls!” she said.
.24.
HUG THE MONSTER
September 1
Dear Tybee and Eden,
The last of the sea oats are bending under the weight of late summer and the afternoon sun is just stretching out its amber farewell toward the tidal pools on Tybee beach. Another summer is ending, and with it our time in this briny paradise, the offbeat island that has always embodied for your mother and me the fusion of your two names.
As a writer, I’ve spent my entire adult life composing words I hoped others might read. I write these words in the deepest hope that you don’t read them for a long, long time.
But I write them nonetheless, with the emotions so raw, because I want you to hear them from me.
In your second year of life, you first lit upon words. You forged a friendship with letters and language, and that was a pleasure to watch and a marvel to behold. On your second birthday, your mother and I festooned an inflatable alphabet around our home. The letters didn’t stick so well; some were drooping by the time we brought you downstairs in your nightgowns; but Eden took one look at the rainbow of ABCs and exclaimed, “All the letters came to visit!”
The next year, with ballet and fairies consuming your fancies, we hung pink and purple tutus in similar garlands around the house. “All the tutus came t
o visit!”
A few weeks later, I went for a routine doctor’s appointment. That doctor sent me to another doctor, then another, until I eventually learned that I had a very rare, very aggressive illness that suddenly put my life in peril. I sat on a stoop on a Manhattan street corner, put my face in my palms, and wept. A few hours later I came home and lay down in bed. You immediately came sprinting in after me. You looked in the mirror, clasped your hands together, and started whirling in a circle in a homemade dance, then collapsed to the floor, giddy with joy. My heart collapsed with you.
I thought of all the hugs I might not give to you, all the kisses I might not get. I envisioned the broken hearts I might not mend, the tears I might not blot. I imagined the giggles I might not hear, the songs I might not make up, the doubts I might not assuage. I tallied all the pithy daddyisms I might not impose on you so frequently until you finally snickered and rolled your eyes. Try something new every day. Start with the facts, the decisions will make themselves. When all else fails, read the instructions.
I thought of my voice, and what your life might be like without it.
Three days later I awoke before dawn with an idea of how I might help give you that voice. I would reach out to six men, from all passages in my life, and ask them to be present through the passages in yours. They might whisper to you, sing to you, profess to you, or write to you. They might take you for a ride on a tractor, or take you out back for a talking-to. They might lend you a hand, lift up your chin, or let down your hair. They might simply listen to you.
They would be a swirl of voices I would hang in your life for all time.
“All the daddies came to visit.”
And I would call this group of men “The Council of Dads.” The men in this circle aren’t my only friends. They’re not my only mentors, teachers, or guides. They’re not my brother, my sister, or my family. They aren’t your daddy, I’m afraid.
But they do constitute various sides of me. They are a narrative of my selves.
In the event of my death, they can carry on my life. If I go silent, they can continue to speak for me.
How you use this Council is up to you. You might ask them about me—what I would have been thinking, what I might have said. You might ask them about you—how you make a tricky decision, how you make a dream come true. You might ask them about themselves.
When I invited each of them to join your Council, I sought from each the single lesson that he might bequeath to you now. Their wisdom, assembled, reads like a psalmbook of living.
Approach the cow
Pack your flip-flops
Don’t see the wall
Tend your tadpoles
Live the questions
Harvest miracles
You may understand some of these ideas when you first hear them; others perhaps you may not understand for some time. But they are truths as deep as I know. And I have gathered them, along with like-minded thoughts from my father, my two grandfathers, and various father figures in my life, as well as a few from myself I couldn’t resist tossing in (Always learn to juggle on the side of a hill; Take a walk with a turtle), into a handbook of fatherly guidance.
When assembling this counsel I have been reminded of the great paradox of parenting: Even as we come to feel we can’t live without you, our primary job is to prepare you to live without us. Our task, in a sense, is to make ourselves obsolete. As babies, you arrive entirely dependent; we then spend the coming decades trying to make you independent, so you can thrive on your own, without us.
You may face this situation sooner than most, I fear. You will have your mommy, and she, as you surely know, is a Council unto herself. Listen to her and you’ll learn truths far deeper than any roomful of men will ever know.
But you might not have your daddy. And where I would have been in your life, a hole will likely be. You may fill that hole over the years with love or grief, with anger or fear, with lollipops or monsters.
All of those are okay.
But whatever you fill the emptiness with, be gentle on yourself. This situation is not your fault. This plight is not your destiny.
The most daring pilots in the world have a motto for how they handle life’s greatest tests. The air force teaches its novices that when they face a life-defining challenge, they should not run from their fear. They should embrace it. “Hug the monster,” they say. Wrap your arms around your fear, wrestle it into submission, redirect it into a source of resilience and purpose.
Hug the monster, girls.
I can be your arms. Because if you know nothing else about me, know that your daddy loved you. I loved when you climbed on my tummy in the morning and told me that snuggling with Daddy was your favorite time of day. I loved when you snickered at my teasing and groaned at my puns. I loved when you made up songs, played rhyming dictionary, or danced. I especially loved when you curtsied. I even loved when I put you in the crying chair, or raised my voice, or counted “One…two…two and a haaalffff…”
I loved when I made a big production out of refusing to read to you, or get you a stapler, or give you a snack after school, until you gave me a proper hug and kiss. I loved when you reached for my crutches, when you patted my scar. I loved when you looked frightened in my direction, and when you grabbed my finger during fireworks, after I said, “Squeeze me if you’re scared.”
You can still do that when I’m gone, you know. Just squeeze your fingers together. I’ll feel it wherever I am.
A few weeks after you were born, we held a party to introduce you to our friends. I gave a short toast that night. My closing wish was, “May your first word be adventure and your last word love.” I can report that the first half of that wish came true. Adventure was one of the first words you learned and one of the words you loved most during those years. Your little lips would curl around its syllables, capturing all the complexity, wonder, and unknown in its meaning.
“We’re going on a special adventure,” we would say, and your eyes would fill with anticipation.
The second half of that wish—“May your last word be love”—is up to you. And if I’ve learned anything from my illness, it’s that we never know when our last word may come. So I beg of you: Be awash in love every day. That love may come from a friend, a relative, a lover, a child. It may come from all of these, or just one. But if I could leave you with one last bequest: May it always come from each other. Whatever else happens, always comfort your sister.
If nothing else, through each other, you’ll always have a connection to your mother and me.
Because if the paradox of being a parent is that we must make ourselves unneeded, the paradox of being a child is that you discover how much you need your parents only after you think you don’t. You spend your whole lives making yourself independent. You go forth on your own. And at exactly the moment you stop listening to us, you finally hear what we’ve been saying all along.
Until then, I’ll be waiting. Even if you can’t hear me, I’ll be whispering in your ear. Even if you can’t feel me, I’ll be gently pushing you on your own. And even if you can’t see me, I’ll be holding up my finger for you to squeeze when the monster needs hugging.
Take trips, girls. Take chances. Take off.
And every once in a while, take a walk for me.
Love,
Photograph by Kelly Hike
SAY PLEASE AND THANK YOU
AN ENORMOUS TEAM OF PEOPLE contributed to saving my life.
Dr. Diana Santini gave me the alkaline phosphatase test that launched me on this journey, then pushed me to get the follow-up tests. Dr. Beth Shubin-Stein took over my case and provided invaluable advice and introductions. Dr. John Healey is the most inspiring doctor I know and one of the most compelling people I’ve ever met. Dr. Robert Maki was extraordinarily generous with advice, acumen, and fellowship through some very dark and difficult months. Dr. Bebak Mehrara is a gentleman and a master surgeon. Dr. Alison Haimes was a daily font of wisdom and advice, and she became an inti
mate member of our family through her constant presence during this ordeal.
A warm appreciation to the many teams of medical professionals who answered our calls, calmed our nerves, and held our hands. In Dr. Healey’s office: Jodi Roth, Matthew Steensma, and Fazel Khan. In Dr. Maki’s office: Stephen Layne, Linda Ahn, Elizabeth Rodriguez. In the fifth-floor chemo clinic: Sarah Duncan, Stacy O’Neill, Sara Martinez, Ray Rodriguez, Heather Goettsch, and Karen Gormsmen, among others.
For key support along the way, thank you to Dr. Joe Bender, Dr. Bob Mayer, Dr. Alan Muney, and David Davidoff. And a rousing deep knee bend and short jig on the dance floor to the incomparably sharp Theresa Chiaia and her entire team at the Sports Rehabilitation Department at the Hospital for Special Surgery.
I was deeply touched and comforted by the extraordinary goodness of Clarissa and Edgar Bronfman Jr. We were equally overwhelmed by the compassion of Belle and Wences Casares, Melissa and Tim Draper, Paul Fribourg, Ann and Jason Green, Amy and John Griffin, and Peter Kellner.
To all the friends and family around the world who sent expressions of love; poems, prayers, and paisley afghans; and dishes for our casserole club.
To those who offered just the right support at just the right time: Jeanne Ackman, Karen and Bill Ackman, Sunny Bates, Nick Beim, Kimberly Braswell, Justin Castillo, Andy Cowan, Tracey and David Frankel, Caterina Fake, Jan and Gordon Franz, Avner Goren, Diane Galligan and Brendan Hasenstab, Wes Gardenswartz, Lisa Kapp, David Kramer, Corby Kummer, Jane Lear, Lia Levenson and Evan Oppenheimer, Susan Levy, Serge Lippe, Ilene Leff, Andrea Mail, Becca and Dickie Plofker, Joanna Rees and John Hamm, Gretchen Rubin, Peter Schuck, Daniel Schwartz, Chip Seelig, David Shenk, Ken Shubin Stein, Joe Weisberg, Alexi Worth, and Judy and Bob Wunsch.