by Ben George
“Wow,” Mason said, looking over the twisted, smoldering metal. “They’re just gone.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Fire does that.”
He pointed at the charred wreckage and debris and said, “Is this what the buildings that fell on my birthday looked like?”
“Sorta, buddy. Sorta.”
What I wanted to say is that they didn’t compare. Or that they compared only in their unexpectedness, and, in that way, compared with any other unforeseen, outward danger. In a more insightful moment I might have said that a lot of things don’t compare even if they look the same or share the same histories. Or blood. I might have said you can go crazy living a life by comparison. In a more insightful moment I might have said there can be dangers within and dangers without, and you can control only so much.
Buildings go up in smoke. Cars speed through neighborhoods. Planes fall from the sky. Fathers stagger home drunk. You can’t chase away all the dangerous things with flailing arms and curses. This much I know. The dangers I can chase away, however, the ones that stare back from the mirror, the ones that seem wired into the genetic map, those I can, and have, chased away, more or less. I still fall down, just differently. I erupt over small things. I am impatient with my children on mornings when we’re running late. I am preoccupied with work, with tasks that dog me. My attentions are divided. In these regards, I am not that much different from other fathers. The pressures and fears and worries are always there, for most of us, I would guess. And like so many fathers, I am always trying to slow down and stop the clock. I am trying to pay attention.
And when I am not paying attention, I can count on my children to call me on it. A month or so ago, I was lying in bed reading when Madeline—who was not yet three—crawled up on my chest and grabbed my face with both hands. “Look at me, boy,” she said. It was one of those comments that was by turns hilarious for its Katharine Hepburn–like coolness, and arresting for how it undivided my attention and pulled me into the present.
In The Gift of Fatherhood: How Men’s Lives Are Transformed by Their Children, Dr. Aaron Hass argues that fathers need to find their way to the “Zen of Fatherhood” and work to secure an “orientation of the present.” I’m not entirely sure I will ever find the “Zen of Fatherhood” (or the art of motorcycle maintenance, for that matter), nor am I convinced that books like Dr. Hass’s fine volume will show me the way. I picked it up because I have been thinking about fatherhood lately and about my failures and blunders and my ongoing mission to root out the ne’er-do-well that lurks within. Little in the book surprises me. Hass articulates what most of us already know about fatherhood. It’s difficult and rewarding. It is important to be present, to foster a loving marriage, to “discipline with love,” and so on. There is much that is implied, too. Don’t spend your nights at the bar. Don’t piss on your bed. Don’t fall down the stairs. It is a clean and orderly book that seems written for a clean and orderly reader. After all, the kind of father who would buy this book and who would read it straight through (I did not) probably doesn’t need any of the advice contained its pages. And the fathers who would benefit most by reading its pages—fathers like my own, for instance—never will.
The book did articulate the importance of tuning in to those Zen moments, and for that I am grateful to have thumbed through its pages. Zen moments abound. Consider the Sunday afternoon I stepped into my children’s bedroom and spied Madeline sitting on Mason’s lap. He had been reading her a book. Now they were chatting. He was talking about how he would go to Harvard when he graduated. I froze and thought, “Maybe all my hand-raising might pay off.” Maybe you can script the future in some small way. Maybe you can reorder the stars, after all.
NOTES FROM ADOLESCENCE
RICK BASS
Another August has gone by, and another year without getting my young daughters in to meet their country music idol—who, truth be told, is really a long-haired handsome rock star who happens to wear blue jeans and have a banjo player in his band. It relieves me hugely that if the girls are going to listen occasionally to country stations, they admire this star’s music, rather than the flag-draped commerce of stay-at-home crooners who wax and wail with alternating doses of self-pity and passive-aggressive “bring it on” jingoism; and the girls have learned, as well, to recognize the repulsive misogyny too often prevalent on the country radio stations, an altered misogyny, even slightly more dangerous than the purer form, in that it masquerades as a nod-and-wink parody of misogyny, as in, “We’re just singing this to be funny,” or “We’re just singing this to make money, we don’t really believe this stuff in real life.” Misogyny for Fun and Profit.
The country rock star, however, is not simply the lesser of the many evils available on these stations. Instead, seemingly miraculously, he makes art and rhythm out of some of the things my wife and I try to stress to the girls regularly in our dry-as-dust lectures about a culture that is too often predicated upon an ability to race downward toward the bottom. It pleases me, as a citizen and a parent, to hear the positive values espoused in the star’s songs, which possess their fair share of heartache, disappointment, setback, and longing—the stuff of life—as opposed, perhaps, to the stuff of the country rock star who has it all. The songs are about celebrating the specificity of each moment, about taking nothing for granted. Songs about how incredibly quickly the days go by.
This last idea carries particular resonance for me. When each of the girls was born, everyone told me how fast it would pass by. Often, these were the first words out of people’s mouths. And I understood and believed them, and lingered as long as possible. But then despite my foreknowledge, the girls started growing up and pulling away.
“Oh, they’ll come back,” everyone said. (There were even more people telling us this than had told us that the days would go by quickly.) It’s hard to imagine that they’ll come back, though, and the fear that they won’t is further magnified by the fact that with savage acuity my oldest daughter has zeroed in on, and identifies daily, the multitude of flaws within me, which are intensifying, like some dreaded curse, as youth and strength and focus and everything else exfoliates from me, leaving only rubble and clumsiness. The bifocals, the diminished hearing, the pause for a deeper breath when going up a flight of stairs, the absentmindedness that was always present but which is becoming amplified: how can she bear to be seen with me?
“Dad, stop treating me like I’m twelve,” says the fourteen-year-old, Mary Katherine. And she’s right: but I can’t keep up. “Dad, you’re so protective,” says Lowry, the eleven-year-old. And again I plead guilty: slow, and guilty.
“They’ll be back,” everyone keeps saying. As if you get a second chance at love. Many days it is a leap of faith to believe this truism, whereas I believed the earlier one intuitively. And what none of those earlier advice-givers ever mentioned was how god-awful much it would hurt, once the pulling away started. As if this revelation possessed so much density and pain that not even the most callous or insensitive among them had the heart to reveal that forthcoming leave-taking.
Which returns me, indirectly, to the country rock star. Back in the early days of Mary Katherine’s pulling away, I had gotten into my mind that one way to inoculate myself against any pending wave of scorn might be to show her that I could still possess some worth in her world.
“Maybe I’ll see if I can interview him,” I told her one evening when she was being distant. Where had my chum gone, the girl of only a year ago, only six months ago? “Maybe we can interview him together,” I said. “Maybe all three of us will,” I amended—for how could one daughter get preferential treatment when the star was the idol of both?
Mary Katherine turned to see if I was joking. “Yeah, well, that might be cool,” she said. “Sure, OK. I guess.” She was washing a dish and it seemed to me she lingered there at the sink for a moment or two after the plate was finished: as if wanting more conversation, more connection. Or so I chose to hope. I have no idea what she was th
inking, but I imagined it was one of two things: either her teen heart was leaping with a wild joy that would never do for her father to witness, or—more likely—she was thinking, “Oh yeah, right, another big idea he won’t be able to deliver.” The rock clubhouse I’ve been working on for ten years now, with more yet to go. The vacation to Australia for which we’ve been saving. Etc. Less than perfect, so far.
Thus began the year in which I set about trying to arrange a simple meeting with an entertainer who was, unfortunately (from my perspective), having the biggest year of his career, to the point where things might have been easier had the girls decided they wanted to meet one of the Stones, or a Beatle.
I read all the trade magazines and began pitching the story idea to editors of those magazines, as well as to larger, general-interest magazines with which I had worked on other stories. I contacted friends in the public relations industry, who put me in touch with friends of friends in the recording industry.
As with most things, the first five or six degrees of separation were shed quickly—within the first day or two, we had closed the distance between utter anonymity and near access almost completely, and were visiting with people who knew people who worked with him; and not long after that, I was trading cell-phone messages with his road manager.
I had high hopes, but, in order to keep from jinxing it, mentioned none of it to the girls, instead allowing them to go about their lives harboring the thought that maybe such a thing might work out someday, but more likely than not, it wouldn’t; that I was probably just being old dreaming dad again, well-intentioned and sweet but in the end ineffectual, unpossessed of the power to shape the world in such fashion as to fit their dreams.
But after closing those first five or six degrees, I hit the wall: rejection everywhere I turned. “No, no,” came the expected answers. “No, he doesn’t do that kind of thing anymore.” The responses from the star’s camp were understandable, but oddly, even the editors and magazines I was counting on to help give me entrée were suddenly incommunicado: as if some great Murdochian invisible e-mail had gone out into their blood saying, “Do not do this story, protect our property…”
It was the damnedest thing. Did they not see what a great story it was? Even magazines that had been asking me to pitch them various story suggestions didn’t respond. I had written before for these magazines—about firefighters and dictators and bird dog trainers and Olympic athletes—but now they thought I either was unsuited to writing about country music or was instead, again, simply a fan gone a-stalking.
Which I guess I was.
We began to go to concerts. Not stalking. Just going to see him, and to listen to the music. Or one concert at first, anyway, at which—in a bolt of grand luck at least partly inspired, I like to think, by the residue of my efforts, the hundreds of pages of letters and queries, and the hundreds of futile phone calls—the star’s road manager saw our daughters sitting in the distant balcony of the Paramount Theatre in Seattle—the cheap seats—and invited them down to the front row, where, in the midst of his thunderous, enthusiastic show, the star held his guitar down into the crowd and let them play a few chords.
So goes childhood; and so it should be.
I wrote a little essay about that experience, published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. The morning after the essay appeared there was an e-mail from some Hollywood person—the first time in my twenty years of writing that someone from that neighborhood had gotten in touch with me—saying that he had a deal to make a movie in which the country rock star would be featured, and wanted to know if I had an agent, and if I would be interested in writing the screenplay.
It was August, summer in Montana. I stood outside by the garden talking on the portable phone and said yes. This Hollywood person stated that just the previous week he had eaten lunch with the star. Then the Hollywood person, whom I did not know from boo, said he was going to put his boss on the line.
We chatted amiably. The boss had just started a new company, and he, too, had just had lunch with the star, and indicated he was best friends with the president of the star’s management company. They flew everywhere together, the boss and the star’s manager—had just come back from a vacation in Europe, in fact, flying on the manager’s private jet, and the three of them would be meeting up again to go mountain biking somewhere in Idaho. Somewhere posh. “He really likes nature,” said Film Guy. “We think you’d be the perfect writer.”
I remember the sun’s heat, as I stood out there in my garden. I remember thinking, “Wow, how am I going to keep this secret from the girls?”
There wasn’t any money available yet—they needed to see two pages first, then another page, then thirty or so, they said—so I went straight to work. I dropped the big novel I’d been working on—the one I still intend to get back to; the Big Novel, as I think of it, as I suppose all forty-and then fifty-something novelists must, at that point in their lives, begin to think of things, as in, “Am I ever going to do this or not?”—and I set about dreaming, structuring, writing a full treatment and synopsis, with scenes and beats, all that stuff.
My benefactors and I corresponded daily—I kept pouring in the ideas, really fleshing the screenplay out, developing it, until I had what I thought was the perfect vehicle for this sensitive, handsome star, who by this time had begun dating a true Hollywood starlet, a grand actress.
In some of our e-mail and phone conversations, my benefactors kept asking me to float my script work past certain other screenwriters, famous and established ones, for ideas, and so I did. I called up my friend B——in Texas, who laughed and told me they were trying to scam me for a free story—“throwing something against the wall and seeing if it sticks” is how he put it—and that these very folks had called him, too. My agent said, “Look, Rick…”
“I’m going to play it out,” I told myself: not really caring so much about the money, but instead holding fast to a vision of the girls, at some near point, buzzing out to the set to watch their star go through his lines. I could always get back to the novel. I still had plenty of time to be a writer. Or at least more of that than there was time to do fun things with my girls before they grew up.
Sure, there was a part of me that whispered daily, “Put it down, walk away; go back to the solitude of your novel; choose literature over family scrapbooks and dream stuff, choose cold art over the long-shot chances at making a fine family memory.”
And every day—moving deeper into the ethereal land of the dream, and of hope—I put aside those whisperings and instead moved forward, as if into the wind and without a map. Is there any foolishness, any craziness, as severe as that of middle age?
It would be interesting to tally the resources spent in the pursuit—the miles of carbon embedded in the script of letters mailed to New York and Nashville, to L.A. and Texas, and the stacks of envelopes, the rolls of stamps, the blizzards of faxes, the triple-figure long-distance bills—and more interesting still to tally that rarer and more precious commodity, time: the days, weeks, and then months accumulating in both the crafting and then the execution of the dream.
But even more costly and precious, I think, would be a tally of the balance sheet of the most valuable thing yet, hope.
I hadn’t given the girls the specifics of the dream—was still planning it as a surprise—but I did let them know that I was working on something, on a Big Idea. A special project.
“How’s it going?” they would ask every few months—those first many months, when the idea was still new—to which I would give the predictable answer of adulthood, and of life—“Well, I’m working on it.”
And sometimes, in their quiet nods, I could see hope, though other times I would see the other thing—the suspicion, or even belief, that it wouldn’t work out.
I suppose I should have been surprised by that call from out of the blue, and to some extent I was; but there was also a part of me that wasn’t: the part that has never been interested in not dreaming big—isn’t that w
hy it’s called dreaming, after all? This was precisely the kind of thing that I wanted the girls to believe in. Some might call it magic; I tend to think of it as just niceness, or sweetness.
Certainly magic was still in play. The star, it turns out, was coming to Montana, to play in Missoula; we got tickets, and that same day a country-music trade magazine called and said they wanted to reprint the story about the Seattle concert, and the publisher of that magazine—who was good friends, he said, with the president of the record company for which the star recorded—would try his best to set up a meeting between us and the star, to get a photo for the magazine.
Feverish calls, frenzied e-mails; I suggested to the publisher a place where the girls and the star and I could meet for lunch and dinner, in Missoula, and make that photograph, and visit, in the most abstract way, about what kind of script might hold the most interest for the star. An environmental theme, a romance, a small-town mill preserved, wild country protected.
Such things seemed very close now, very real. I could imagine my girls sitting at the table grinning, and forgetting to order. I could see them being clumsy with shyness, clumsy with childhood. I could see them later, as adults, laughing at the audacity of youth and dreams and at the splendid way improbably good things could still happen, then and now, on any given day.
We didn’t connect with the star—the calls to the publisher, and to the star’s management company, were not returned—but they did hold some tickets for us at will-call, and we headed south anyway, on a fine fall day, full of hope and excitement and a strange intoxicating elixir of sweetness. An early snow high in the mountains already. And luck was still with us. We got there early, and when I took the girls over to stand by the chain-link fence that separated the star’s idling bus from the real world, the bass player came out, visited a bit, signed a scrap of paper. A nice lady appeared and distributed photos of the star, as well as some of the star’s trademark guitar picks, to the dozen or so young people standing around in the September evening, and it was enough. It was life, and it was good.