Dad’s Maybe Book. Tim O’Brien
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throat and saying, “Mom, do you think that getup is appropriate?”
Meredith smiled and said, “It’s only for a magic show.”
Timmy said, “But I just called you Mom.”
My memory is failing, overburdened by the brain-jangling pace of fatherhood, and now, when I try to survey the past several years, I’m mostly left with tiny, disconnected fragments of my life with Timmy and Tad. Each memory-shot exists in its own dimension. There is no before and no after, just flashes in the dark, as if brilliant pinpricks of light suddenly ignite and then blink out in a vast void of prehistory. Nothing connects with anything else. It would be nice to find shape or some sort of modest unity in my threadbare recollections, but I’m resigned to the sad fact that memory—at least my memory—is less a movie than a scrapbook of moth-eaten images and garbled audio clips.
Here, at 2:37 a.m. on August 13, 2013, is a sampling:
Back in 2010, little Timmy and I were inspecting a suit of armor in an old Belgian castle. “Boy,” Timmy said as we moved out into the daylight, “that guy knows how to stand still.”
Tad’s first-grade teacher asked the class to write an essay. On a sheet of white paper, Tad carefully wrote: “S. A.”
The year was 2009 or 2010, and in a park near our house Tad was playing a game he called Stop Sign. He circled his arms above his head, approximating the shape of a stop sign, and trotted up to a five- or six-year-old girl playing hopscotch. The girl hopped right past him. Tad turned and watched. After a second, he yelled, “You better not drive till next week.”
And then, somewhere in outer space, a star ignites, and I watch Timmy at age three or four come limping up to me. What he says, exactly, I can’t remember—something like, “It hurts.” He isn’t crying. He’s puzzled. His leg is broken.
Time passes, and he turns five or six, and Meredith and I are asking how he broke his leg, and Timmy says, “Spinning,” and Meredith says, “Spinning where? How?” and Timmy shrugs as if broken legs are a dime a dozen and says, “On the floor, in the kitchen, Mommy was doing dishes and I was spinning,” and the guilt trip of two parents who never knew how their firstborn broke a leg is partly relieved, partly resolved, though only partly, because there is also the memory of a hospital interview with a kindly social worker whose quizzical expression never changes as we explain, numerous times, that it is all a complete and baffling mystery to us. “Uh-uh,” says the social worker, also numerous times.
And at some foggy point in history, years and years ago, Tad screamed in his sleep: “Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me!” and two rooms away, as I lay reading a book, I was struck by the terrible certainty that my son was dreaming of his father.
Out in the backyard one afternoon, Tad was helping our lawn guy, Jef Pierce, do his weekly mowing. Tad gathered up chunks of firewood and dropped them in front of Jef’s oncoming mower. Jef stopped, tossed the logs aside, and kept going. This repeated itself several times. “Okay, look,” Jef finally said, “why don’t you go get me a glass of water?” Tad stared at him and said, “Why do you want to mow glass?”
And there in a flash of light stands Timmy at age eight or nine—probably eight—pursuing his bizarre new hobby of sushi preparation. Multicourse sushi. From-scratch sushi. Painstakingly presented sushi. More or less edible sushi. He wears a chef’s hat and a white apron. His expression is stern, his hands deep in sticky rice. The floor is littered with bits of crab and avocado and seaweed and cucumber and my son’s homemade spicy mayo. Bamboo mats have been carefully flattened and smoothed on the kitchen table. Expensive glass chopsticks have been encased in cloth napkins. This is my child? A prodigy sushi maker? (I do not care for sushi; I applaud people who do.) At one point, after Timmy offered to prepare still another raw-fish feast, I suggested we go outside and toss around a baseball, or kick a football, or try some other all-American little-boy activity. “Sure, maybe tomorrow,” Timmy said. “Did Mom buy seaweed?”
Of such simple and mundane fragments have the years of my fatherhood been constructed. How little I have influenced my sons’ interests. How bravely they dive into their own. How I would chew and chew that sushi.
One constituent of a father’s pride is simple astonishment. We expect to instruct our children. We are then surprised to find them instructing us.
An illustration:
Several years back, on his ride home from school, Timmy noticed a man crying on a sidewalk along 15th Street in downtown Austin, Texas. The man was probably homeless, though not certainly, for his appearance and carriage had none of the beaten-down destitution of life on the streets. His clothing seemed clean; he was close-shaven; he wore a new-looking cap with the words “Vietnam Veteran” imprinted on it.
Timmy yelled at Meredith to stop the car, but it was rush hour and stopping wasn’t possible. Timmy looked over his shoulder as the crying man receded, and then Timmy himself was crying. He cried all the way home. He cried again at the dinner table. It was more than crying—it was unstoppable, quivering, somebody-has-died wailing. He got out of his chair and lay on the floor and bawled.
Early the next morning, before the sun had risen, I found my son sitting on a kitchen countertop, where he had just finished packing a brown paper bag with little gifts for the crying man on 15th Street. Timmy had packed a yo-yo, a sandwich, a granola bar, a photograph of himself, some fishing line, an apple, and a copy of one of my books. For several weeks afterward, riding to and from school, the boy searched the streets and sidewalks of Austin, but in the end, as anyone might guess, he never again saw the crying man on 15th Street. The sandwich grew moldy. The apple rotted. The granola bar was consumed by Timmy’s brother.
No one in our family has forgotten this episode. Certainly, Timmy hasn’t.
A year or so after the incident, for his English class, he began writing a poem called “My 15th Street Friend,” which is reprinted later in these pages.