Dad's Maybe Book

by Tim O'Brien

  Whatever you do, do not begin a story like this:

  Batman weighed one hundred and eighty-eight pounds. His hair was black. His complexion was fair. Young Batman grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, where he spent an unhappy and disturbed childhood. His grandfather was well known in town as the man who had invented the machine that lays down lane stripes on highways all across America. Batman’s mother was an insomniac. She could sew pretty well. She loved a good pork chop. Batman’s father preferred seafood. The church Batman attended was made of limestone. His school was a brick structure. The family car was an Oldsmobile.

  You see the problem, right? I could pile on this sort of detail for many, many pages, but eventually something must happen—an unusual or surprising or sad or exciting event. Stories are about people (or talking tigers) doing things and feeling things. Pork chops and highway stripes are important only if they fit into the fabric of interesting action.

  A better story, although not a great story, might begin like this:

  When Batman was six years old, he grew a big bushy tail. Often, it popped right out of his pants. This was embarrassing, especially in a place like Sioux City, Iowa, where tails were very much out of fashion. As a result, Batman had no friends. Kids laughed at him. One day after school, as Batman was walking home, his tail dragging in the mud behind him, he looked back and saw that he had painted a long dark stripe down the center of the road. His grandfather, who happened to be driving by, took note of this, and of how the stripe neatly divided the road into two separate lanes. What a wonderful way to prevent collisions, thought his grandfather. If only that stripe were yellow! And so that night at dinner, Batman’s grandfather talked with great excitement about building a machine that would duplicate what he had witnessed on the road that day. “We’ll make millions, maybe billions,” he said. “We can finally get out of this cruddy town.” No one else at the dinner table seemed impressed. (“Pass the pork chops,” said Batman’s mother.) But the next morning, undaunted, the grandfather tied young Batman to the rear bumper of the family Oldsmobile and handed him a can of yellow paint. “Just dip in your tail whenever it runs dry,” said the grandfather. “A nice straight line.” And so, for miles and miles, Batman painted a neat yellow stripe up and down the city streets, past limestone churches and brick schoolhouses. Not a month later the city’s accident rate had dropped dramatically. Batman suddenly had friends. A parade was held in his honor. Sioux City, Iowa, became known, and is still known today, as the safest city in the safest county in the safest state in America. And young Batman had his first sweet taste of what it is to be a hero, almost a superhero, although to this day his tail remains an appendage he takes great care to disguise. You probably hadn’t even noticed it.

  I certainly don’t claim literary merit for this example. But I do think you would pay attention, Timmy and Tad—a chuckle here, a raised eyebrow there.

  “I didn’t even know Batman had a tail,” Timmy might say.

  And Tad would say, “Well, Idid.”

  21

  Pride (II)

  Timmy and Tad, here’s another story I’ve made up for you. It goes like this:

  You’re at a five-hundred-dollar-a-plate fundraising dinner, black ties, ruddy faces, and Karl Rove is over in the corner manhandling a martini, and Don Rumsfeld is explaining to somebody’s ex-wife why it is that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to denouncing wars, because of course that sort of thing undermines war morale, and what kind of war morale would you have if you didn’t have a war? It’s not a fun dinner party. Trans fats have been consumed by these people. After a while, to break up the monotony, for no particular reason at all, some damned fool mentions his children—an offhand remark, nothing profound, probably just to lighten up the chitchat about waterboarding and electronic eavesdropping and the dangers of probable cause and why terrorists don’t need trials to determine if they’re terrorists, because they obviously are terrorists, otherwise why would they be getting tortured at Guantánamo? Right then—at the mention of children—you stop whatever you’re doing. You dip into your wallet and pull out a stack of pics and spread them across the dinner table and say, “That’s Tad, our five-year-old, he’s the wild man,” and then, after a rewarding moment or two, you say, “That’s Timmy, our gentle soul.” Then you wait. You watch Rumsfeld and Rove gaze down covetously at your children. One of them shakes his head and says, “Man, your kids make mine look like slime.” You politely agree. You’ve been expecting this. For the past half hour, in fact, you’ve been expecting that sooner or later, maybe in a few seconds, maybe after the champagne toasts, somebody like Laura Bush will sidle up to you and whisper, “Listen, what about a trade? Even-steven? My kids for yours?” You aren’t surprised by this. Your children are cuter and smarter than everybody else’s. And so naturally you’ve been expecting the President himself to stroll up with the news that Tad and Timmy have been selected as recipients of the Medal of Freedom. Right now, George W. Bush and Cheney are over at the bar, comparing their Vietnam War experiences, but you figure it will take only another heartbeat or two before they’ve exhausted the topic. So you wait. And, sure enough, a moment later they chuckle and slap hands and make their way toward you with purposive strides. “We heard about your kids,” Cheney says, “and we’re wondering . . . I’ll be blunt about this . . . We wonder if Timmy might give us a few unicycle lessons. George and I, we’ve been trying like the devil, hours and hours in between WMD briefings—but, well, I hate to admit anything, of course, but we simply can’t get the hang of it. Same with the hula hoop. The hip action, it’s not easy.”

  The President of the United States frowns quizzically. “Yeah,” he says, “especially when you’re stripping.”

  You expect all this. Your sons deserve this.

  True, there’s an element of fantasy involved, but these prideful musings about Timmy and Tad are probably recognizable to more than a few other parents. Do not most fatherly hearts flutter during a June graduation ceremony? Is not the breath of most fathers stolen away as a beloved son crushes a ninth-inning homer or as a beloved daughter spikes a volleyball?

  * * *

  Pride, of course, is listed among the seven deadly sins. It may be, in fact, that pride reigns as the king of sins, the governing sin of sins, the sin that permits all other varieties to take root in godless man. So, yes, I feel guilty. What a despicable heathen fatherhood has made of me. I have become an obsessive, unrepentant, and joyful celebrant of Timmy and Tad—so prideful that I often take pride in my own pride. The boys may fail at something nine times out of ten, but it is the tenth that I mention to strangers who have had the bad luck to take a seat beside me in a dentist’s waiting room. (Both kids, I’ll offhandedly point out, have perfect teeth. Never a cavity.)

  Another example:

  The topic of report cards came up during a recent gathering with friends. I sat silently for a time, imagining how I would slip in a few remarks about my sons’ recent straight A’s. The conversation rambled along for two or three minutes, but no one looked at me, no one asked my opinion. I grew impatient, then sullen. Eventually, after a young mother declared that report cards aren’t everything, I abandoned my fragile dignity and pointed out, rather forcefully, that although report cards may not be everything, they are certainly something, otherwise why were we talking about report cards in the first place? Why bother to hand out report cards? Why give grades at all?

  “Well,” the young mother said, “just because your kids get straight A’s—”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  She laughed. “Maybe not, but you said it a week ago. And the week before that.”

  “I did?”

  “And the week before that.”

  My friends fell silent. A couple of them grinned. Most were careful not to look at me.

  * * *

  One of the more noticeable aspects of being a father at my age is that almost everything is taken to excess, including prideful thoughts. We are all locked up on deat
h row, to be sure, but now, at age sixty-five, I’ve found myself trying to squeeze all I can into a rapidly shrinking allotment of days and hours. Where a younger father might tell his children he loves them sixty thousand times over a lifetime, I feel the pressure to cram those sixty thousand I-love-yous into a decade or so, just to reach my quota. A younger father may mete out his I-love-yous two or three times a day. I shoot for ten times a day. This behavior—the imperative for excess—spills over into virtually every crevice of my life with Timmy and Tad. I try not to miss their basketball games, because one day I will not be there for the next basketball game. I kiss the boys on the lips, because one day my lips will not be there to kiss. Although it may seem contradictory, an older father’s impulse for excess involves a retreat from the world, a ruthless insularity, a kind of sealing off from what is inconsequential or distracting. More and more, I resent obligations that make me pack a suitcase. I resent answering doorbells and telephones. I resent driving to the bank, speaking invitations, fueling my car’s gas tank, and getting dressed for dinner parties. (I resent getting dressed, period.) Anything that pulls my attention away from Timmy and Tad, which is just about everything, comes at the price of squandered time and squandered opportunity.

  There is, I realize, something dissolute about these old-man excesses, including the flamboyant pride I take in my sons. I have become excessive in ways that would have bewildered me as a younger man or would have caused me to wag my head in disgust. Boastful fathers once made me chuckle. Boastful otherfathers still make me chuckle. Yet I’ve come to believe—probably in defense of my own profligacy—that fatherly pride is an involuntary, maybe even biological state of being, a human condition on the order of what the biblical ancients called original sin. Pride seems to be encoded in the double helix, no more reparable than our need for oxygen. A father’s pride can be contained, I suppose, but it cannot be eradicated by the exercise of volition. I’ve tried to bite my tongue. I do bite my tongue. But it heals in an instant.

  * * *

  What is the difference between pride and love?

  On the one hand, we can surely love someone or something without necessarily experiencing a sense of pride. On the other hand, it is difficult to envision feeling pride without an accompanying sense of love. To take pride in one’s work, for example, seems to embrace some degree of love for the work itself, or love for the eventual outcome of one’s labor, or love for the challenges and satisfactions found in the attentive pursuit of a particular task. Similarly, to take pride in one’s children—to feel pride—is also to feel something intimately associated with the complicated emotions we call love. Do we experience the swollen sensation of pride when LeBron James or some other stranger scores a game-winning free throw? Almost certainly not. Do we feel pride when a daughter or son does the same? Almost certainly so. One involves love, the other does not.

  With this in mind, I offer an illustration drawn from recent history, an incident that has been keeping me awake at night, sometimes bubbling with pride, sometimes bubbling with love, but mostly bubbling with both at once.

  On July 18, 2009, our family was vacationing in southeastern France, in a beautiful but very expensive town called St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Around noon on that sunny July day, Meredith and I had ordered drinks at an outdoor bar on the grounds of our way-too-ritzy hotel, both of us feeling fraudulently upper crust as we watched Timmy and Tad play Ping-Pong on the far side of an expansive green lawn. The hotel was way beyond our means, a miscalculated extravagance, and for two days our family had been immersed in a bizarre, we-don’t-belong-here self-consciousness, as if we’d been miscast in an old Grace Kelly or Cary Grant movie. The hotel’s clientele was without exception bejeweled, chic, wealthy, and superbly tanned. There was no Burger King on the grounds. The hotel’s pizza, at eighteen bucks a slice, tasted like duck liver. Months earlier, stupidly, we had reserved a room here out of misguided romanticism, perhaps in the fantasy that the Prince of Wales might solicit our attendance at a yacht party or that Johnny Depp might invite us for a game of croquet up at his villa in the bluish hills above town. Nothing of the sort had occurred. Virtually no one had spoken to us, including most members of a hotel staff that seemed reluctant to refresh a drink or to provide directions to the men’s room. We had walked everywhere, partly to save money, partly to avoid confrontations with what we’d taken to calling “la snootiness de Cap-Ferrat.”

  Still, we had persevered, grimly faking it, as we were still doing on July 18, 2009, when my cell phone rang midway through a twelve-dollar glass of flat Coca-Cola. It was my sister calling from Texas. My mother had died.

  Even as I received the terrible news, I was conscious of the brilliant-blue Mediterranean, the swimmers and seaplanes, my kids playing Ping-Pong on a lawn of green velvet, the flat Coca-Cola in my hand, my irritation at an aggressively unhelpful waiter. I was conscious, too, of France itself, and of how strange it was to be hearing details of my mother’s death at such a great remove and in such an unfamiliar place. From the time I was about Timmy’s age, six or seven, I had been dreading this moment, wondering how I could possibly hold myself together, and now I sat in an outdoor bar in St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat with a flat Coca-Cola in my hand, my mother dead on the other side of the world, my children playing Ping-Pong in the ridiculously expensive French sunlight. In those bleak, sickening moments I was made keenly aware of how Minnesotan I was.

  After the call, Meredith and I walked across the lawn to the Ping-Pong table.

  I told the boys my mother had died.

  They were young and had little to say. I did not say much either—almost nothing.

  For a long time that afternoon, I played Ping-Pong with Timmy and Tad, not really in France anymore, not really anywhere, and then later in the day, as the sun went down, the four of us headed off for dinner in the town of St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, walking down a long, gently sloping hill toward the bay.

  I reached out and took Timmy’s hand.

  We were subdued.

  The sky was purply red.

  Grace Kelly strolled arm in arm with Cary Grant through the tropical shadows. Soon there would be stars. My mother was dead.

  “Are you thinking about Grandma?” I asked Timmy.

  “No,” Timmy said. “I’m thinking about you thinking about Grandma.”

  22

  What If?

  Neither Tad nor Timmy has asked me about Vietnam, not a single question, and for the past year or two, this has been bothering me. Am I that uninteresting to them? Are they not mildly curious?

  And so, one evening, after a great deal of thought, I tried to approach the subject through a back door, telling the boys a quick story about my own father’s wartime experience, how my dad had been assigned to a destroyer during World War Two, but how the ship ended up sailing without my dad on board. Not long afterward the ship went down with all hands. Or so my father claimed. True? Untrue? Partly true? I don’t know. For me, I’ll admit, the anecdote has an archetypal quality that seems fishy, too perfectly rounded, too perfectly climactic, more like a fateful parable than a story from the real world.

  Timmy and Tad were also skeptical, but truth or falsehood had little to do with it.

  “Is this, like, one of your stories with a moral?” Timmy asked. “Like we’re not supposed to join the navy?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “It’s just something my dad told me.”

  A little later Tad said, “It’s a cool story, but I think your father was trying to scare you.”

  “How so?”

  “Well,” said Tad, “you wouldn’t be here if your dad got on that ship. I wouldn’t be here either.”

  “That is scary.”

  “And Timmy wouldn’t be here. We’d all be nothing. We wouldn’t even know we’re nothing.”

  “Right,” I said.

  The conversation soon went elsewhere. Ten or fifteen minutes passed, and then Timmy said, “I just thought of something a lot scarier.”

  “Such as?”
I said.

  “What if you and Mom got married while you were in high school? I’d be fifty years old.”

  “True.”

  “I’d be almost dead.”

  Meredith and I looked at each other. Nobody was laughing.

  And then, for several days afterward, Meredith and I had trouble erasing the picture from our heads. Two points in time had fused. There was the lasting image of Timmy at age fifty, yet he was also an eighth-grader, a unicyclist, a Rubik’s Cube enthusiast, a dreamer, a shy twelve-year-old with false teeth and a potbelly.

  “Some things,” Meredith said, “I don’t want to think about.”

  23

  Home School

  I do not know if my sons will ever wish to be professional writers—I hope not—but barring a catastrophic sequence of events, they will certainly need to write. In high school and in college, whether they like it or not, they will be called upon to compose clear and effective sentences, and later on, in adulthood, they will discover that precious few pursuits in life involve no writing at all. At the moment, Tad plans to “cuddle bunnies” for a living; Timmy expects to be drafted any day now by the Los Angeles Lakers. Yet even if these unlikely scenarios pan out, the boys will surely find themselves writing letters, text messages, postcards, emails, tweets, and whatever other forms of written communication become fashionable in the coming decades. They will need to express their thoughts with language, for which (at present) there is no substitute, and therefore a few words of advice are in order: