Dad's Maybe Book

by Tim O'Brien

  At its heart and in its governing passion, none of Hemingway’s fiction is truly about warfare, or about bullfighting, or about fishing, or about shooting birds, or about drifting down the canals of Venice. To the extent that stories are ever about anything but themselves, Hemingway’s great subject is the bizarre reality that reality will cease to be. It’s a generalization, for sure, and one to which there are glorious exceptions, but it may help explain Hemingway’s insistent focus on the dying, but not the killing, aspects of warfare.

  Figuratively, but also literally, I’m quite certain that when Ernest Hemingway sat down to write in the early mornings, and as he slipped into the ballet of imagined events and imagined human beings, he was often engaged in something close to a dress rehearsal for his own coming extinction. He was practicing.

  56

  Into the Volcano

  For the past two weeks, off and on, Tad has been working on an interdisciplinary school project that combines elements of sixth-grade history and mathematics. Along with a classmate, my son decided to focus on the construction of an imaginary Utopia, a world in which sixth-graders might live in peace and domestic tranquility.

  Yesterday morning, with only mild and obligatory curiosity, I asked Tad to tell me a little about his project.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s complicated. All the streets in Utopia have to make different angles. Like, Sweet Street has to be at a sixty-degree angle to some other street, and Bunny Boulevard has to make one side of a parallelogram. Like that, sort of.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “And what about the history part?”

  “Mostly we just make that up,” Tad said, “but first we had to learn what Utopia is—I mean, what other people think Utopia should be like.”

  “Did you get some good ideas?”

  “Well, no, but my own ideas were excellent. You want to hear them?”

  “I sure do,” I said.

  And then, for ten or fifteen minutes, Tad described the building blocks of a sixth-grader’s ideal world. Predictably, the streets of my son’s Utopia were paved with Hershey bars, the shops offered unlimited free ice cream, the schools were in session only one day a week, summer vacation lasted eight months, and teachers were hired only if they were a lot, lot dumber than the students. “That’s why everybody gets A’s,” Tad said.

  “What else?” I asked.

  “Robots do all the cooking and cleaning.”

  “Great idea.”

  “All the cars are self-driving. That way Mom isn’t so stressed all the time.”

  “Makes perfect sense,” I said. “What else?”

  “Well, everybody who gets married has to have one boy and one girl. If you have two boys or two girls, you have to swap one boy for a girl or one girl for a boy.”

  “Swap your own kid?”

  “That’s the basic idea.”

  “So your mom and I would have to swap you for a little girl?”

  Tad hesitated. “It’s not real,” he said. “It’s Utopia.”

  “But aren’t Utopias supposed to be good?”

  “I guess so. Maybe you could swap Timmy.”

  “Well, look,” I said. “In your Utopia, how old is a kid when the parents have to make the swap?”

  “I don’t know. Six or seven, I guess.”

  “Tad, do you want a new mom and dad?”

  “What?”

  “Where did you get this idea?”

  “Nowhere. I thought it was cool.”

  “It is cool,” I said quickly, “but it’s a little . . . Did you mention this to a teacher?”

  “I can’t remember. Maybe not yet.”

  “You’re happy here, aren’t you? With me and Mom?”

  Tad gave me a puzzled stare. “I think so, sure. Anyway, I forgot to tell you about the volcano.”

  “Volcano?”

  “It’s part of Utopia. What happens is, when people are about eighty years old, these guys take them up to the volcano and throw them in.”

  “Throw who in?”

  “The old people.”

  “When they’re eighty?”

  “Yes,” Tad said, “but if they want, they can ask to get thrown in when they’re seventy, after they’re too old to do anything interesting.”

  “Who throws them in?”

  “Just these guys.”

  “Guys like you?”

  “Pretty much. It’s the most honorable job in the whole Utopia.”

  “Of course,” I said. “It sounds honorable.”

  “Why are you giving me that look?”

  “Tad, do you know how old I am?”

  “You’re not eighty, are you?”

  “Not quite.”

  “So you don’t have to worry. Besides, these guys are really good at it. They don’t even burn their hands. And they get paid a fortune.”

  “Tad, do you know what a Nazi is?”

  57

  And into the Stew Pot

  Today Timmy turns fifteen.

  In about a week, Tad becomes a teenager.

  Most often, these birthdays make me aware of the ticking clock, as if I’m running late for an appointment up on Tad’s volcano. This morning, though, all seems well. I’m content. I’m glad another day is breaking. Years and years ago, when I jotted down the first sentence of these reflections, I would not have waged a nickel that at this point in my life I would still be alive, much less reasonably healthy, reasonably active, and reasonably cheerful in the face of slimming odds. True, I occasionally catch a whiff of sulfur; sometimes late at night I feel the heat. But for the most part the volcano seems to slumber, and I doubt that Tad will be tossing me into a fiery eternity before I’ve managed to tie up a few last threads.

  Making my peace with Vietnam is one of those threads.

  Looking up a couple of old war buddies is another.

  And of course attaching the last period to this book is still another. I’ve been at it a long time, probably too long, but over the past week or so, I’ve begun to sense an approaching conclusion. Except for a few bits and pieces, I have said what I needed to say. Only thirty more pages. Maybe forty.

  After that . . . no more early mornings.

  The daily agenda will be simple: sleep until seven or eight, then a round of golf, then practice some sleight of hand, and then settle in to read the books I want to read. At my age, a certain selfishness seems permissible—doing the things I long to do and not what some preacherly internal voice tells me I must do. At the same time, though, I do not foresee a future of slothfulness. I imagine a diligent, determined, and altogether energetic immersion in old age. (If you have to do it, my dad used to say, do it with conviction.) And so with conviction, and maybe with pleasure, I will throw myself into the repose of the elderly, the lemonade and the hammock, the afternoon snooze, the contemplation of failure and error without all those remedial urges of youth. What is broken in my life will remain broken. What is regretted will remain regretted. Wisdom has eluded me for all these years, and I would be an idiot to think that even a modest sagacity might visit me in my decrepitude. Therefore, during what time is left to me, I expect no reconciliations, no revelations, no profundities, no beatific grace, and no peaceful resignation to the ways of the universe. I expect only diminishment and eradication.

  Nevertheless, as I totter toward the grave, I find myself filled with a peculiar curiosity about what is soon to come. Will I go out kicking and screaming? Will I demand a good, fair fistfight with God—no cheap miracles? Will I go dotty? Am I already dotty? Will I even recognize dottiness as I empty the mustard bottle on my final bowl of ice cream? On this birthday morning, especially, I’m struck by a mix of wonderment and awe at my proximity to life’s close: the majesty of extinction, the spectacular finality of finality. It occurs to me, in fact, that Tad’s volcano, with all its fireworks and Gestapo pageantry, is an appropriately magnificent, if somewhat brutal, metaphor for what awaits all of us.

&n
bsp; * * *

  Five decades ago, a similar combination of curiosity and awe had accompanied me through Vietnam, along with a great deal of terror, and now, in my old age, I’m back where I was in 1969. While I certainly do not enjoy old age any more than I enjoyed war, I do feel an intense, almost electric awareness of the physical world, as if everything on the planet has been magnified and brilliantly lighted. When you’re almost dead, things sparkle. What is taken for granted in peacetime, as in youth, suddenly becomes so precious it makes you cry, and if there is any redeeming virtue to growing old, it is the pleasure I take in what had once seemed ridiculously ordinary. Butter on an English muffin. Sitting silently in a room with Timmy. Playing no-stakes Texas Hold’em with Tad. Singing “Happy Birthday” to a fifteen-year-old. Such pedestrian things seem swollen with meaning, even if the meaning mostly eludes me. During the war, the same sort of simple pleasure could be found in the smell of dawn after a night on ambush, or in a river turning muddy pink at the hour of dusk, or in looking up at a few billowy white clouds after some poor soul had lost his legs. All that is equally true of old age. You come to value things that never before had such crushing value.

  * * *

  Earlier this morning, as I cleaned up the kitchen, the usual bumblebees of memory had been astir in my thoughts, busy little flashes of history. Oddly, one of those bumblebees is still buzzing inside me, and I can’t seem to swat it away. It’s a memory fragment from years ago, back when Timmy was five or six. He had been watching Tom and Jerry cartoons, perfectly content, giggling, and then suddenly he was weeping. I asked what was wrong.

  “Tom’s dead!” Timmy half blubbered, half screamed.

  I took the boy’s hand and led him over to the TV, but he froze and jerked back and refused to take another step.

  “Easy does it,” I said. “We’ll watch together. It’s a cartoon, it’s for kids—I’m sure Tom’s not dead.”

  Timmy said nothing. His lips were trembling. He looked pale.

  I ejected the disc from our DVD player, checked to be sure it was Tom and Jerry, and slipped it back in. For ten minutes or so, we stood watching Jerry taunt Tom in all the usual ways, which I found amusing, but Timmy was having none of it. At one point he put his hands over his face. “It’s gonna happen,” he whispered, peeking out at me. “I can’t watch Tom die again.”

  A moment later, a new episode began. It was called “Heavenly Puss.” After the first few frames, Timmy made a choking sound and bolted from the room.

  Alone, still standing with the remote in my hand, I watched the episode from beginning to end. And, yes, Tom died. (Or so it would surely seem to any six-year-old.) The poor cat was flattened by a falling chest of drawers, slipped out of his body, and made his way to a golden escalator that ascended skyward, far beyond the clouds, ending up at the gates of cat heaven. For reasons I can’t precisely recall, Tom was denied instant salvation—something to do with his nasty behavior toward Jerry—and the heavenly gatekeeper presented Tom with a deadline by which he must earn Jerry’s forgiveness. Alas, the deadline expired, and Tom eventually tumbled through a trapdoor, heading for hell, finally splashing down in a boiling pot of fire . . . or was it magma? An evil-looking devil snarled and cackled and stirred the pot.

  What Timmy had failed to notice—almost certainly because he was in tears—was that Tom eventually awakened from what was only a bad dream. (This was Hollywood’s way, I suppose, of filing down the Pentecostal edges on its children’s entertainment.) Still, that long golden escalator was pretty terrifying, as was the trapdoor, as was the cauldron of hellfire. Like many fairy tales, and like many TV evangelists, any of these images might easily condemn a kid to a lifetime of psychotherapy.

  I turned off the DVD player.

  A few minutes later, after searching the house, I found Timmy hiding under his bed. I coaxed him out, sat in a chair, held him on my lap, and tried to explain that Tom was perfectly fine—it was nothing but a nightmare.

  “Tom’s dead,” Timmy said firmly. “He’s in the stew pot.”

  “Stew pot?”

  “That big black stew pot!” Timmy yelled. “It’s where the dead people go!”

  “Well, Tom’s not an actual person. He’s a cat, isn’t he?”

  “Okay—cats, too! But why does everybody have to go into a stew pot?”

  “It was a cartoon. It was supposed to be funny.”

  “Stew pots aren’t funny,” said Timmy.

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  For a moment or two, my son seemed to calm down, but then his eyes closed and his face collapsed and he was crying again. He pressed his head into my chest. “I’m scared,” he said.

  “I know you are. I know.”

  “I don’t want you to go into a stew pot.”

  “Me?”

  Timmy sat up and looked straight in my eyes. “Well,” he said, “you’re the old one.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “You are.”

  “Okay, I heard you.”

  What happened next has faded from my memory, but over the following decade, the term “stew pot” became a family mantra, those two simple words representing much more than the sum of the parts. The meaning is fluid, largely dependent on context, but “stew pot” encompasses danger and fate and consequence and fear and doom and mystery and finality and foreboding. Before a tough history exam, Timmy might say, “Uh-oh, here comes the stew pot.” Or before one of Tad’s basketball games, as we eye a formidable opposing team, Meredith might glance at me and mutter, “We’re in trouble, time to get out the stew pot.” For me, especially now in the early hours of this June morning, the words “stew pot” carry a stark visual clarity that makes me both queasy and resigned. For years, I’ve been on the fence about the whole cremation versus burial issue—neither makes me jump for joy—and I had been delaying the decision in the hope that more pleasant alternatives might pop to mind: grind me into dog food, maybe, or call in a taxidermist. But Timmy’s stew pot, together with Tad’s volcano, has settled the fire-or-ice conundrum once and for all. Fire it will be.

  And thus another loose thread has been knotted.

  * * *

  A few feet from me, my dad’s urn—his own bronze stew pot—sits on a wide mahogany shelf filled with books, sixty or seventy of them, a resting place that is fitting for a man who so dearly loved to read. Perhaps like other sons, I sometimes talk to the ashes in the urn. I ask for advice. I tell secrets. I express my love. Although nothing ever comes back to me, I’ve grown accustomed to the silence and do not really mind, because my dad is here in this room, on a shelf, just a few feet away, and I know he wants to speak but simply cannot. It isn’t his fault. He’s dead. And whenever and wherever it is, a week from now or ten years from now, whether it’s a volcano or a stew pot or a golden escalator moving through stardust, I hope Timmy and Tad will know in their bones that I want to speak to them, as sweetly and musically as I can, but simply cannot.

  Now, the boys are awake. It’s time to go wish Timmy a happy birthday.

  58

  Lesson Plans

  In the event I’m no longer here in the summer of 2025, when Timmy is twenty-two and Tad is twenty, I invite my sons to write me a short letter, committing to paper a few thoughts about how the world is treating them and how they are treating the world.

  As a purely imaginary illustration, Tad might write that he has delayed his freshman year of college and is raising bunnies on a farm in Peru. In his letter to a dead man, Tad might tell me about the farm, his daily routine, and the ups and downs of keeping rabbits alive. He might confess misgivings. He might explain to me that a single pet rabbit is fine but seven hundred rabbits are not, and that at night, listening to Andean panpipes, he wishes he were enjoying a pizza with friends in a dorm room in Massachusetts. Homesickness may have claimed him, or loneliness, or the realization that bunnies are a staple of the Peruvian stew pot. He might ask for my advice. He might not. If it were possible, which of course it will not be, I
would probably counsel him to stick it out a while longer, if only to discover what adversity might teach him, but I would also enclose, if I could, an airline ticket to the destination of his choice. (Among the lessons of adversity is the lesson that adversity sucks.)

  In any event, I hope Tad and Timmy will also try what I sometimes try, which is to dispatch little mind-letters to my dad, even knowing that he won’t be writing back. Yet I pretend otherwise. Pretending helps. Almost always, at least for a moment or two, I’ll hear an indistinct sound in my head, like a voice murmuring in another room, but not a voice exactly, nor even a sound exactly, just the whispery vibrations that love might make if love could speak, the way we sense love’s presence by some vague disturbance in a summer night.

  I will try to make that soundless sound for you, Timmy and Tad. But if I can’t, close your eyes and imagine it, and what you imagine will be your father.

  * * *

  If one of you is in possession of my urn, do not open it. Pretend that inside the urn is a smiling guy in a baseball cap. Pretend he is singing “Row, Row.” Pretend he is kissing you good night. What we pretend always and forever is.

  * * *

  At some point in the year 2030, I hope you will revisit the house in which you grew up. I did this myself, not long after my own father died, and I was astonished at how each room still seemed alive with all that had occurred inside it. Timmy, I want you to stand before your closed bedroom door. Tad, I want you to peek into that tiny bathroom where you once took aim at a wastebasket. And both of you, please, I want you to spend a few minutes in the breakfast nook off the kitchen, a place where your mother and I wiped spaghetti sauce from your faces and laughed at your stories from school and watched you devour lobster tails on Christmas Eve. We had fun, didn’t we? There was happiness in that house. The house will help you remember.