Dad’s Maybe Book. Tim O’Brien
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including what I just had to say about chipmunks and apples and eyes. Seek the exceptions. Memorize the fallacy of composition. Remember that even mathematicians demand proofs. Raise your eyebrows when you hear the phrase “courage of conviction.” Remember that Adolf Hitler and the executioners at Salem had the courage of lunatic conviction.
You were born, Timmy, in a time of epidemic terror—airliners crashing into skyscrapers, anthrax arriving in the morning mail—and among the casualties of terror is our fragile tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty and all that is unknown. The word “perhaps” becomes “for sure.” The word “probably” becomes “slam dunk.” Truth, or what we call truth, becomes as wildly cartoonish as the big bad wolf. I realize, Timmy, that in the coming years you, too, like our country at the moment, will find yourself terrified—of love, of commitment, of madmen, of monsters in your closet, of me—and tonight I’m asking only that you remain human in your terror, that you preserve the gifts of decency and modesty, and that you do not permit arrogance to overwhelm the possibility that you may be wrong as often as you are right.
Listen, I’m afraid, too, Timmy.
I’m afraid to leave you alone in your crib on Christmas Eve. And I’m afraid of leaving you alone forever. There will come a Christmas Eve, maybe in five years, maybe in twenty-five, when I won’t be here to look after you, and I guess that’s why I’m writing these things down. Not just to offer advice, but to give you the voice of your father.
It’s late.
I’m going to bed now, Timmy.
But before I switch off your night-light and close the door, I need to let you know that you will have a brother arriving sometime next June. Set a good example for him. Stop eating cockroaches. Learn to change your own diapers. Do all you can to look after your new brother, Timmy, even if it’s true that at the moment you do not have a brother.
After one broken leg, and after a bazillion spills and crashes and near amputations, my daredevil son Timmy collided with his third birthday. A few days later, his brother, Tad, became a stylish one-year-old.
It has been an amazing time in the life of this Johnny-come-lately, fifty-nine-year-old father. So many indelible moments: How last night, as I put Timmy into his pajamas, the boy whispered, “Be gentle with me.” (This from a kid who would happily dive headlong from a third-story window.) Or how, not long ago, Tad embarked on his first treacherous steps through the world. Treasures such as these are captured in countless photographs that clutter the surfaces of our house: Timmy with his arms wrapped around his brother’s neck in what appears to be a police submission maneuver; Tad gazing at the camera with the eyes of a seasoned fashion model.
The word “amazing” doesn’t do it justice.
And yet on the dawn of this Father’s Day, June 18, 2006, the thought occurs to me that neither boy will remember more than a fragment of our miraculous time together. That which is everything to me will become almost nothing to them. If I were to vanish from their lives at this instant, my sons would have no recollection of their father’s face or voice or human presence.
Seems impossible, doesn’t it? But even as adults, we salvage precious little from our own lives. Vividly lived-in minutes and hours seem to erase themselves as we scurry toward eternity—the meal we savored, the joke that had us laughing all night, the TV program that held us transfixed. Almost all of it is lost.
Right now, as I look back on my own childhood, I’m left with only a handful of interior snapshots. Among them are one or two of my father, who died on August 10, 2004—yesterday, it seems. (My reflective mood on this Father’s Day is surely connected to the hole where my dad used to be.) One of those early recollections involves a couple of playmates who had stopped by the house one afternoon while my dad was on the telephone. After hanging up, my father turned and said, “Guess who I was talking to just now? The Man in the Moon!” My friends and I were flabbergasted. “Call him back!” we yelled, and so my dad dialed—or pretended to dial—and for ten or fifteen minutes he carried on a make-believe conversation with the Man in the Moon, relaying our questions and inventing answers that seemed to come from the far reaches of the solar system.
“The Man in the Moon says it’s lonely up there,” my father told us. “He wants you to pay him a visit.”
“He does?” I said.
“You bet,” said my dad. “Right away.”
We were willing, of course, but the logistics seemed complicated.
“Okay, but how do we get there?” one of us asked.
My father nodded. He passed along the question, listened intently, and said, “The Man in the Moon says you have to visit him in your dreams. You have to dream your way there.”
Whether the incident happened just as I’ve described it or in some other approximate way, I can’t be sure. Memory is fallible. What matters on this Father’s Day is that I can still see my dad smiling down on me as he spoke into that telephone. And now more than ever I dream my way back to him.
Beyond anything, I am struck today by the gap between what is memorable to an adult and what seems to matter to a pair of little boys. Like any young kid, Timmy and Tad live fiercely and absolutely in the moment. A dropped pretzel is a matter of life and death. But an instant later the pretzel is forgotten, succeeded by some other weighty distraction, perhaps a bouncing ball. For children, it seems, everything matters. Yet very little matters for long.
The other day, as one example, I was practicing a magic trick with Meredith, the finale of which was to make her disappear from beneath a white curtain. Timmy, who had been looking on silently, exploded in tears. “You made Mommy go!” he yelled, or screamed, or whatever you wish to call a roof-rattling, bone-melting cry of distress. Here, I thought, was something he would surely remember forever. It occurred to me, in fact, that I might soon have to hustle him off to a child psychiatrist. (Sophisticated young Tad, on the other hand, was distinctly unimpressed by my magic. He crossed his legs, yawned, and pretended to light a cigarette.)
As swiftly as my expertise allowed, I made the boys’ mother reappear. After a tense few moments, Timmy reached for the curtain, studied it closely, and then grinned and said, “Do that again. Make her go for a long time.”
The volatile, unpredictable workings of a child’s mind will come as no surprise to any parent. What had seemed an enduring trauma turned out otherwise—except perhaps to Meredith. Years from now, my wife and I will still be rehashing the incident, partly laughing, partly wondering. But for Timmy it is already a distant and blurry memory, if a memory at all. Multiply that example by a thousand others, or twenty thousand, and you begin to understand what gives me wistful pause on this Father’s Day.
True enough, most of the events of my own early years have gone wherever our lives finally go—maybe into that hole I mentioned. And it’s also true that Timmy and Tad will experience the same melting-away process. Still, like my own father, I hope to leave my sons with at least some sense of my enormous love for them. Maybe tonight, before bedtime, I’ll lift the boys onto my lap, pick up the telephone, and launch into a conversation with the heavens. Maybe I’ll have the wit to invent clever dialogue. And maybe a few decades from now, as my sons begin to feel the cool, insistent press of middle age,