by Ben George
I take his clock radio to the van. The vehicle is almost filled with the detritus of a young life.
When children are small, time often crawls. Then they grow, and time speeds up; once you couldn’t get away from them, and then they’re never around.
What do you mean, he’s ready to apply to colleges? He was just born! He studies late, to the wee hours, and I cannot sleep myself until he turns his lights off and goes to bed. He struggles through the college applications, bitterly complaining every step of the way. One late afternoon, while he is laboring to complete the application for Northwestern University, which includes the demand that the prospective student write an essay explaining why he or she wants to go to Northwestern, I slip into my study and write a goof version of this essay for him, for laughs.
WHY I WANT TO GO TO NORTHWESTERN
by DANIEL BAXTER
Many is the time I have thought of the pleasing location of Northwestern University, situated on the shore of picturesque Lake Michigan. The campus, I have noted, is close enough to the rocky shore of this Great Lake so that students, carrying their heavy textbooks on the way to classes, can be pleasantly diverted by hearing the sounds of waves crashing on the rocks. These sounds are almost always mixed, in damp and rainy weather, with the sounds of muted foghorns, which make their way into the liberal arts classrooms where Shakespeare’s plays are being taught by bearded and grizzled scholars. Foghorn sounds are like the lowing moos of anxious herds of cows, waiting to be milked. Certainly, from time to time, one must also be able to hear the muted clash and clang of freighters colliding. With the right kind of police scanner, you might also hear the radio distress calls. Perhaps, as Lucretius says in the second book of On the Nature of Things, it is pleasant, even sublime, to see ships sinking in the distance if you yourself are on the shore, that is, at Northwestern, safe in a sort of “ivory tower” from danger. Lucretius calls this the sublime experience of beauty, and so it would be on the campus of this great institute of higher learning, home of the #1 business school in the United States.
But the beauties of Lake Michigan are not the only advantages of which Northwestern can boast, and there are many other reasons why I wish to attend this fine Big Ten center of erudition. The architecture of the buildings varies from Gothic Revival to 1950s Bauhaus to Frank Gehry Las Vegas–style “postmodernism.” This distinctive brand of eclectic architecture, so different from the bland brand of monomaniacal “Ivy League” architecture favored by our so-called “prestige” universities, gives to Northwestern a more democratic and populist “grab-bag” appearance. Moving from one building to another on the Northwestern campus, from the threatening appearance of the music building to the turreted castlelike appearance of the humanities building (where many damsels are possibly in distress), the student hardly knows what to expect from one moment to the next. Call me an eclectic student, if you will, but I must say that Northwestern’s unpredictable appearance, whether you approach it by bus, truck, train, or family car, is one of the particular sources of my interest in it.
On my two visits to Northwestern, I have noticed that most of the learnèd professors are quite mature. Their gray hairs and beards (not on the women, of course) are signs of learning and experience. Walking about on campus, one cannot but be impressed by their slow pace, their hands on their canes, as if they were thinking about “thoughts that lie too deep for tears.” I was impressed by the colossal lecture halls and huge classes, and the Wildcats who were listening and dozing through the lectures, knowing that the professors would cover material that they had missed, their voices echoing in the immensity of the lecture chambers.
Northwestern has lately achieved a bit of a renaissance. I refer, of course, to the superlative record of the Northwestern football team. The school fight song (I have learned it) is the most memorable tune associated with any great public American university that I know of. Any school worth its reputation must have a football team to keep up its manly institutional pride, and Northwestern has lately improved its athletic skills so that it is no longer known as the “whipping boy of the Big Ten.” Now it is the Northwestern Wildcats that are doing the whipping!
In summary, Northwestern has much to offer me in its location next to Lake Michigan, in its surprisingly successful and bowl-headed football team, in its always surprising architectures, and in its wise and aging faculty speaking to crowds of attentive youths. I can imagine myself dressed in the school’s colors of purple and white, waving a school banner displaying the word NORTHWESTERN with pride. I hope you will agree.*
What kind of father would do such a thing? Write a mockery of such an essay? I would. That’s the kind of father I am, the kind of father I have always been.
Daniel got into Northwestern, by the way (without ever visiting it), but did not go there. He went to Carleton instead, which is full of students like him.
Here he is. The chaos machine is finished.† He’s taller than I am, has longish brown hair that used to be blond, and has widely spaced brown eyes that radiate interest and intelligence. He walks with his head slightly bent, as if he were ducking under a doorframe. (Later, in his twenties, he begins to straighten up. But I am still trying to break him of the habit of walking with his hands clasped together in front of him.) He helps me finish loading the van, and we make it as far as Rochester, where we find a Mexican restaurant where we have dinner.* We drive that night as far as La Crosse, Wisconsin. He asks about Tasha, the dog, and Louis, the family bird, who also helped raise him.
These days he works as a successful structural engineer, a bridge designer, in downtown Cleveland. He has published papers I cannot understand. He’s a fine and wonderful young man.
The next morning, with Daniel sometimes driving (the person who does not drive is responsible for directions and what gets played on the van’s audio system), we head toward Michigan. He instructs me on how to get on to the Chicago Skyway from the Dan Ryan. We both admire the sublimely sinister industrial magnificence of Gary, Indiana. I am proud of him. I love him. And he is a better driver than I am, much more alert, as the young should be, as they must be, to get where they’re going.†
IN TEN YEARS HE’S GOT A CHANCE TO BE THIRTY
JIM SHEPARD
My father bought me a boat when I was about eleven. He got it used, and it looked safe enough to him. It was nothing America’s Cup-ish, just something he thought even I couldn’t get into too much trouble with. It resembled a Sunfish, only tubbier and slower. It was called a Skate. The sail featured an “SK” and an “8.” The first day I had it I trundled it down to the shore on its little hand-trailer, mushed it through the deep sand to the water’s edge, hoisted the sail, sat in the thing, and pooled around in little ovals in knee-deep water near the shore. The second day I took it straight out into the Sound—the wind had picked up a bit—and in ten minutes I was so far out that I could no longer identify any landmarks on the shore.
We lived in Lordship, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound, five minutes from the beach by foot, and my father, one of the great covert worriers anybody’s ever known, dropped by whenever he knew I was down there, just to, you know, check and see if the kid was doing anything stupid, or was still alive.
In this case, of course, the kid was both. I was so far out by then that my father scanned the horizon from east to west and thought maybe I’d decided against going out after all. He turned to leave but as an afterthought asked the lifeguard standing nearby if a kid had gone out that morning on a sailboat with a pale blue hull and a red and white sail. The lifeguard said, “Yeah, that’s him there,” and pointed to a speck-sized triangle.
My mother, who’d followed my father to the beach with a thermos and some sand chairs, entertaining quixotic hopes of maybe a nice family outing, later told me that when she arrived the lifeguard came over to her and said, “Can you get this guy out of here, or take him home? Because he’s scaring everybody.”
What her husband had been doing, in his helpless panic and madde
ned inability to reach me, was striding up and down the beach uttering oaths, as they used to say in nineteenth-century novels, and carrying on an exasperated monologue that featured the bottomless brainlessness of his son’s decision-making capabilities. “Saying the rosary,” is how my mother usually put it.
At some point during my sail I realized, in my own openmouthed eleven-year-old way, that the Long Island shore looked much closer than the Connecticut one, and that black clouds were blowing in. These realizations led to the single prudent decision I made that day: I brought the boat around, for just about the first time in my boating career—nearly tipping in the process, but what the heck; I was only fifteen miles from shore—and sailed it right back in on the same tack I’d taken out. I was still very far from the beach when I noted one tiny figure in particular, stomping back and forth, gesticulating.
I wasn’t allowed back to the beach for a week, and for most of that time whenever we crossed paths my father would look as if he’d just smelled something dismaying, and shake his head. But by the following Saturday, when he found me sitting in the grass doing nothing in particular, he asked why I didn’t take the sailboat out. “Because all you do is get mad,” I told him. “Well, maybe if you stopped playing Magellan, I wouldn’t get mad,” he told me. I took the boat down to the beach that day, and he helped me get it into the water. The wind was blowing onshore, which meant I could only tack back and forth parallel to the beach fifty or so yards out, and I’m sure he misunderstood and appreciated my doing this as a concession. I cruised past him in my tubby little slowpoke of a boat and loved that he was even happier than I was.
I’ve always loved that paradox in my father—the tension between his anxious sense on the one hand that almost anything his kids could do was a potential source of disaster, and his sense on the other hand that wouldn’t it be great if his kids did some of the things he always wanted to do: sail a sailboat, for example, or take a long trip. Take some chances.
He grew up in the Depression with a father who seemed unapproachable on good days and a mother who was solicitous but fearful, and at eighteen, like most everyone else his age, he trooped off into World War II—another effective way of honing your capacity for anxiety—flying ground-attack missions in Burma and cargo over the Himalayas. The attrition rate on the latter missions was around twenty percent. He survived that and contracted malaria, survived malaria and made it back to Connecticut.
By the time I was sentient, it was the early 1960s. We all had our health. His job situation was stable and we lived on a fairly quiet street. What was there to worry about? His kids.
My brother was five years older, and between us we did lots of stupid things, sometimes together, sometimes apart, and those little bits of narrative, once uncovered, always lopped a few years off Shep’s life. (From a very early age we called our father “Shep.” One of my aunts heard me do so and remarked, “Did you just call your father ‘Shep’?” “Yeah. That’s his name,” I explained to her.)
He kept a particularly sharp eye out for anything that seemed like more than the usually intractable unhappiness or instability on our parts. At about the same time I received the sailboat, I remember moping around the house at one point and finally being questioned about it by an exasperated Shep. What was the matter with me lately? “I don’t know,” I told him. “I guess I’m depressed.” I’d gotten the term from Peanuts.
“Depressed?” Shep exclaimed. “What do you mean, ‘depressed’? How can you be depressed?”
“I just am,” I told him.
“You’re not depressed,” he told me. “You’re eleven years old. Eleven-year-olds don’t get depressed.”
I dropped it, but he didn’t. For months afterward, he’d peer at me closely every so often and then say to himself, “Depressed. He’s depressed.”
My mother would ask me something like whether I wanted to go to the beach, and Shep would say, “Don’t ask him. He’s depressed.”
“I could be,” I told him. Which of course caused him to watch me all the more carefully.
Both of his boys kept to themselves a lot and may have seemed to him moody, but I turned out to be the one who, given half a chance, always seemed to get myself into life-threatening situations, and despite all that, Shep never denied me a chance to attempt the kinds of activities that always ended up making him wish he’d never been born.
For example: he countenanced, a year after the sailboat fiasco, my scuba diving, and bought me everything I needed for that hobby except the tanks and regulator, which I borrowed from friends. There was a group of four of us, three of whom had tanks and regulators, and only one of whom had actually been through a certification course. We all had bought spearguns. We did a lot of spearfishing. Long Island Sound, where we did this, in most conditions had all the visibility of iced coffee. How much trouble could four twelve-year-olds get into with scuba gear and spearguns in murky water?
One kid, pursuing an eel, put his spear through the main part of one of my dive fins. Another kid accidentally hit someone else in the chest—but at the very outer limit of the spear’s range (they lost momentum very rapidly underwater) so that the kid who’d been hit turned out to have only a red mark on his sternum once we peeled off his wet-suit top.
“How was diving?” Shep would always say once we got home and were washing everything off. He took the assiduousness with which we took care of our equipment as a good sign.
“Good,” we’d say, as noncommittally as we could.
“I hope you’re using your head out there,” he’d warn us.
“We’re pretty careful,” we’d tell him.
“That’s not stuff you want to screw around with,” he’d remind us.
“It sure isn’t,” we’d agree.
And then as if to prove his point we developed a new game, on a day in which the Sound seemed so empty of life that cruising around with spearguns trying to shoot something seemed pointless. In about thirty feet of water we conceived of the idea—actually, I think I conceived of the idea—of having just one person don everyone’s weight belts, so that that person could be like Deep Sea Diver Dan, galumphing around on the bottom and making slow-motion leaps from spot to spot, like Neil Armstrong on the moon. Everyone instantly recognized it for the innovative idea that it was. I bandoliered on everyone’s belts—my own around my waist and the other three crisscrossing my shoulders and chest—fixed my regulator in my mouth, took a few deep breaths, and allowed myself to be pushed overboard. We used my sailboat, minus its mast, as our dive platform.
Down, down, down I went, and landed in a little cloud of murk. I struggled to my feet. The regulator made its Darth Vader sounds. I hopped around, floating back down to the bottom in a pleasing imitation of weightlessness.
I craned my neck up and could see my three friends twenty feet or so above me, the sunlight filtering down from the surface. (Visibility was a little better than usual.) And here was something funny: because they were in full wet suits and no longer had their weight belts, they were too buoyant; they couldn’t get down to me. I could see them struggling to do so, straining to dive to get a better look at all the fun I was having, and failing to get more than five or six feet deep.
But there’s a detail about diving equipment in the early 1970s that you need to know to appreciate fully the idiocy of what we were doing. In those days you could pay extra to have what they called a J valve: a valve that held five minutes of your oxygen capacity in reserve, in order to let you know it was time to get to the surface. What happened was, your tank stopped providing air, abruptly, and you were supposed to pull your J valve (a metal rod running out of the regulator and down along the cylinder of the tank behind you) to release that last five minutes. But those who wanted to save a few bucks could buy tanks without J valves. Which was, of course, the kind of tank that I had on at that point.
You see where this is going. The boys above me cavorted; I lurched around from spot to spot, happily, and then my air shut off. Mid-br
eath. I reached behind me for the J valve, but of course there was no J valve. I shed my weight belt from my waist, but that didn’t matter, because I had three others crisscrossing my torso. Where were those belts’ release buckles? Well, that was hard to say. My hands scrabbled all over my chest. I found one and released it, but since it was pinned to my body by one of the others, it didn’t fall. Since I hadn’t had any warning, I hadn’t been able to take a deep breath in preparation for this. I waved frantically for my friends. They waved back. I seemed to them to be having fun. Or was I pretending to drown?
At some point my friends did realize that something was wrong, but there was no time for them to shed their wet suits and no way for them to get down to me without doing so. Eventually I did get the other three belts off me—partially by just ripping one off my shoulder and down over my torso—but my lungs had already given out and I was taking in water before I reached the surface. I spent the rest of the day recuperating, and we were all shaken up by what had happened, but not nearly as shaken as we should have been. I’m sure, at least up to now, that this is the closest I’ve come—consciously, anyway—to killing myself.
It makes sense to me, then, looking back, that my father would have seen the main challenge of fatherhood not in terms of some issue of nurturance but more in terms of just trying to get us through our childhood alive and mostly undamaged. I sometimes find myself thinking of fatherhood in those terms, too. Of course I want to be emotionally present for my kids, and a good provider, and all the rest of it. But first things first: did Aidan, our sixteen-year-old, get home all right from his class trip? Is our eleven-year-old Emmett’s croupy cough anything more than a croupy cough? And what if Lucy, our six-year-old, got too close to where the big kids were limbering up with the baseball bats?