Dad's Maybe Book Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. A Letter to My Son

  2. A Maybe Book (I)

  3. Row, Row

  4. Skin

  5. Trusting Story

  6. First Words

  7. Home School

  8. The Best of Times

  9. Highballs

  10. Spelling Lesson

  11. Home School

  12. Hygiene

  13. The Magic Show (I)

  14. Abashment

  15. Sushi

  16. Pride (I)

  17. Balance

  18. Child’s Play

  19. Telling Tales (I)

  20. Telling Tales (II)

  21. Pride (II)

  22. What If?

  23. Home School

  24. Home School

  25. The Old Testament

  26. Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (I)

  27. The Language of Little Boys

  28. Home School

  29. Turkey Capital of the World

  30. Pride (III)

  31. Pacifism

  32. Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (II)

  33. Home School

  34. Home School

  35. Easier Homework

  36. Timmy’s Bedroom Door

  37. Lip Kissing

  38. The King of Slippery

  39. Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (III)

  40. Timmy’s Gamble

  41. Dulce et Decorum Est

  42. Pride (IV)

  43. War Buddies

  44. A Maybe Book (II)

  45. The Magic Show (II)

  46. Practical Magic

  47. An Immodest and Altogether Earnest Proposal

  48. The Golden Viking

  49. Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (IV)

  50. Getting Cut

  51. Home School

  52. Home School

  53. The Debating Society

  54. Sushi, Sushi, Sushi

  55. Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (V)

  56. Into the Volcano

  57. And into the Stew Pot

  58. Lesson Plans

  59. Tad’s Literary Advice

  60. One Last Lesson Plan

  Acknowledgments

  Notes on Sources

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2019 by Tim O’Brien

  Photographs provided courtesy of the author.

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: O’Brien, Tim, 1946– author.

  Title: Dad’s maybe book / Tim O’Brien.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019002551 (print) | LCCN 2019009707 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358116714 (ebook) | ISBN 9780618039708 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: O’Brien, Tim, 1946—Family. | Authors, American—20th century—Biography. | Fatherhood. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Parenting / Fatherhood. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Military.

  Classification: LCC PS3565.B75 (ebook) | LCC PS3565.B75 Z46 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.54 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002551

  Cover photograph courtesy of the author

  Cover art: E+/Getty Images (denim); iStock/Getty Images (note paper)

  Cover design by Michaela Sullivan

  Author photograph © Timmy O’Brien

  v1.0919

  Excerpts from A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, © 1929 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, © renewed 1957 by Ernest Hemingway. Excerpts from Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway, © 1932 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, © renewed 1957 by Ernest Hemingway. Two selections from The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: “The Killers” © 1927 by Charles Scribner’s Sons and “Big Two-Hearted River” © 1925 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, © renewed 1953 by Ernest Hemingway. Text selection as it appeared in Men at War by Ernest Hemingway, © Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust. All reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Excerpt from “One Art” from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop. © 2011 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher’s Note and compilation © 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  Excerpt from “Seaside Golf ” from Collected Poems by John Betjeman, © 1955, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1968, 1970, 1979, 1981, 1982, 2001. Reproduced by permission of John Murray, an imprint of Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.

  For Tad, Timmy, and Meredith O’Brien

  An entry from our babysitter’s journal, January 8, 2008: “You have never lived till you see a two-year-old fall in the toilet.”

  * * *

  And there goes Tad, running through a heavy rain on Rue Malar in Paris, clutching a child’s umbrella, carefully splashing down in each available puddle. After a time, he lifts the umbrella over Meredith’s head and says, “You are my sunshine, even when it’s raining.”

  1

  A Letter to My Son

  Dear Timmy,

  A little more than a year ago, on June 20, 2003, you dropped into the world, my son, my first and only child—a surprise, a gift, an eater of electrical cords, a fertilizer factory, a pain in the ass, and a thrill in the heart.

  Here’s the truth, Timmy. Boy, oh, boy, do I love you. And, boy, do I wish I could spend the next fifty or sixty years with my lips to your cheek, my eyes warming in yours.

  But as you wobble into your sixteenth month, it occurs to me that you may never really know your dad. The actuarial stuff looks grim. Even now, I’m what they call an “older father,” and in ten years, should I have the good luck to turn sixty-eight, I’ll almost certainly have trouble keeping up with you. Basketball will be a problem. And twenty years from now . . . well, it’s sad, isn’t it?

  When you begin to know me, you will know an old man.

  Sadder yet, that’s the very best scenario. Life is fragile. Hearts go still. So now, just in case, I want to tell you about your father, the man I think I am. And by that I mean not just the graying old coot you may vaguely remember, but the guy who shares your name and your blood and half your DNA, the Tim who himself was once a Timmy.

  Above all, I am this: I am in love with you. Pinwheeling, bedazzled, aching love. If you know nothing else, know that you were adored by your dad.

  In many ways, a man is what he yearns for, and while it may never happen, I yearn to walk a golf course at your side. I yearn for a golden afternoon in late August when you will sink a tough twelve-footer to beat me by a stroke or two. I yearn to shake your hand and say, “Nine more holes?”

  I yearn to tell you, man to man, about my time as a soldier in a faraway war. I want to tell you what I saw and what I did. I yearn to hear you say, “It’s okay, Dad. All that’s over.”

  So many other things, too. Right now, as I watch you sleep, I imagine scattering good books around the house—in the bathrooms, on the kitchen counter, on the floor beside your bed—and I imagine being there to see you pick one up and turn that first precious page. I long to see the rapture on your face. (Right now, you eat books.)

  I yearn to learn from you. I want to be your teacher, yes, but I also want to be your student. I want to be taught, again and again, what I’ve already started to know: that a grown man can find pleasure in the sound of a happy squeal,
in the miraculous sound of approaching feet.

  I yearn to watch you perform simple acts of kindness and generosity. I yearn to witness your first act of moral courage. I yearn to hear you mutter, however awkwardly, “Yeah, yeah, I love you, too,” and I yearn to believe you will mean it.

  It’s hard to accept as I watch you now, so lighthearted and purely good, so ignorant of gravestones, but, Timmy, you are in for a world of hurt and heartache and sin and doubt and frustration and despair. Which is to say you are in for being alive. You will do fine things, I know, but you will also do bad things, because you are wholly human, and I wish I could be there, always, to offer forgiveness.

  More than that, I long for the day when you might also forgive me. I waited too long, Timmy. Until the late afternoon of June 20, 2003, I had defined myself, for better and for worse, by the novels and stories I had written. I had sought myself in sentences. I had loved myself only insofar as I loved a chapter or a scene or a scrap of dialogue. This is not to demean my life or my writing. I do hope you will someday read the books and stories; I hope you will find my ghost in those pages, my best self, the man I would wish to be for you. Call it pride, call it love, but I dare to hope that you will commit a line or two to memory, for in the dream-space between those vowels and consonants is the sound of your father’s voice, the kid I once was, the man I now am, the old man I will soon become.

  That said, I would trade every syllable of my life’s work for an extra five or ten years with you, whatever the going rate might be. A father’s chief duty is not to instruct or to discipline. A father’s chief duty is to be present. And I yearn to be with you forever, always present, even knowing it cannot and will not happen.

  There have been advantages, of course, to becoming a father at my age. I doubt that at twenty-eight or even at thirty-eight I would have fully appreciated, as I do now, the way you toddled over to me this morning and gave me a first unsolicited hug. (You knew I was waiting, didn’t you?) I doubt I would have so easily tolerated the din at bedtime, or your stubborn recklessness, or your determination to electrocute yourself, or the mouthfuls of dirt you take from the potted plants in the foyer, or how, just a half hour ago, you hit the delete key as I approached the end of this letter.

  You had awakened from your Shakespearian slumber. You were on my lap, squirming, and then you whacked the keyboard and let out a delighted squeal when I muttered a nasty word or two.

  I’ve rewritten what I can remember. And now you are on my lap again, my spectacular Timmy. I’m using your fingers to type these words.

  I love you,

  Dad

  * * *

  2

  A Maybe Book (I)

  And then it becomes November 22, 2018.

  My son Timmy has grown into a tall, basketball-loving fifteen-year-old. He has a brother, Tad, who is thirteen, and both have a father who, at age seventy-two, is at last approaching the end of this book of love letters to his children, along with a few anecdotes and some tentative words of advice.

  I began writing back in 2003, stopped for a while, then resumed near the end of 2004. My intent was to leave behind little word-gifts for Timmy and his yet-to-be-born brother Tad, who had been conceived but was still waiting in the wings. The idea was to dash off a few short messages in a bottle that my kids might find tucked away in a dusty file cabinet long after my death. I was fifty-eight back then, not yet an old man, but the mathematics of mortality were already forbidding. It struck me that by the time the boys reached middle school, their father would almost certainly be mistaken for a grandfather, or maybe a grandfather’s elder brother. And I was correct about this. In the years between 2005 and 2019, Walmart cashiers and IHOP waitresses would receive my pissed-off glares, my sullen wags of the head, as I informed them that, no, those two boys were my own personal kids. There was nothing funny about it. There was nothing cute.

  Reality is reality.

  And so, late in 2004, near the end of October, I resolved to give Timmy and Tad what I have often wished my own father had given me—some scraps of paper signed “Love, Dad.” Maybe also a word of counsel. Maybe a sentence or two about some long-ago Christmas Eve. My father had always been a mystery to me, and he remains a mystery, and with this in mind, I wanted to offer Timmy and Tad a few scattered glimpses of their own dad, a man they might never really encounter. There was no literary impulse involved. There were no thoughts about making a book. My audience—if there would ever be an audience—was two little boys and no one else.

  In 2004, Timmy was barely a toddler, and his brother Tad was little more than a pinprick of protein awaiting the light. But even so, for the next fifteen years, I talked to them on paper as if they were adults, imagining what they might want to hear from a father who was no longer among the living. I told the boys stories about their youth, and about my youth. I talked to them about books I had loved, writers I had admired, a war I had visited, a woman named Meredith who would become their mother. Along the way, I offered a few pointers about this and that. I admonished them to think for themselves, warned them against hypocrisy, and lectured them about the soul-throttling dangers of absolutism. I conducted home schooling classes. I wrote to the boys—no doubt in way too much detail—about my fascination with the battles of Lexington and Concord, and how, in a great many ways, my own war in Vietnam struck me as eerily similar. Over and over, I told them how very proud I was of their Rubik’s Cube speed-solving, their hula-hooping, their report cards, their unicycling, and especially their acts of kindness and human decency. I reminded them of funny things they had said and done. I reminded them of sad things, too—one concussion, two broken legs, my mother’s death. I applauded their first intelligible utterances. I used the stories of Ernest Hemingway as a window through which they might glimpse the things that have preoccupied me for more than fifty years—making sentences, making stories. I rhapsodized about my lifelong love for magic, a hobby that later led me to try my hand at performing the sorts of illusions found inside books. And so on.

  I did not write to the boys often. Sometimes months would pass between the opening and concluding words of a single sentence. (Twice, an entire year passed.) Eventually, in late 2014, Tad proposed the idea of a maybe book. Meredith overheard. “You don’t have to commit to an actual book,” my wife said. “Just a maybe book. What you’ve written about fatherhood might mean something to other parents.”

  “Or their kids,” said Tad.

  The result is Tad’s maybe book.

  Like the life I have lived, and probably like anyone’s life, these pages suffer from irreparable disunity. The book skips around in time, mostly because time has skipped around on me. It skips around in content, because my life’s contents have skipped around on me—terror to grief to rage to broken love to despair to elation to late-night conversations with eternity. In a novel or in a story, the illusion of order can be imposed on a human life. But in a book that remains essentially a compilation of love letters to my sons, the imposition of order would be an artificial disgrace and, worse yet, deceitful. My kids are real kids, I am a real father, and chaotic messiness has been the humbling theme of our time together.

  Tad, thank you for the book’s title.

  Timmy, thank you for your sternly revisionist views in regard to my faulty memory: “Dad, it didn’t actually happen that way.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “I don’t remember. But not that way.”

  3

  Row, Row

  Timmy is just over two months old, nine weeks to be exact, and he won’t stop crying. He seems to hate his brand-new world and all things in it, including his crib and his rattle and his mother and me.

  Colic, say the doctors, but the kid hates eating and he hates not eating. He hates sleeping and he hates not sleeping. He hates being held and he hates not being held. He hates light and he hates dark. He hates hot and he hates cold and he hates all temperatures in between. He is full of fury.

  I have fathered Jack
the Ripper.

  At the moment, in these early-morning hours of August 28, 2003, I’m taking a break while my wife Meredith sits in the laundry room with our howling little hater. A pediatrician has suggested placing him in a basket atop the clothes dryer. The machine’s warmth and its humming motor have worked their magic, to be sure, but only on my exhausted wife, whom I last saw in a state of semiconsciousness.

  Timmy just keeps crying and crying.

  I hear him now, three rooms away, and it’s not baby-crying. It’s hate-the-world crying. It’s bloody-murder crying. Something is wrong. This cannot be normal.

  Meredith and I are first-timers at the whole baby thing, a pair of rookies, and we are not only incompetent but we’re getting scared. I’m scared, in fact, at this very instant. In a few minutes I’ll be shutting down my computer and returning to duty, except I have no clue as to what my duty actually is. Do I dump the boy in his crib and hope he howls himself to sleep? Do I try to silence him with coos? Do I sit with him in the laundry room for the next three hours? Right now it’s 1:10 a.m. and Timmy has been crying since . . . well, since he was born. Nothing stops him—not for long. We’ll pick him up and snuggle him and walk him around the house, and for a short while he may (or may not) settle down. But then he tightens up, fidgets, squirms, and eventually convulses in a deep, full-body shudder, as if electricity has just sizzled through his bones, and then his face goes wrinkly with hatred and he lets out a Frankenstein screech that wakes up the nomads in Libya. We’re afraid the police will come. We’re afraid neighbors will nail bomb threats to our door. We’re afraid, quite literally, that our little boy hates being alive.

  * * *

  Our nerves are shot. We’re exhausted. We have no family nearby, no wise and experienced relatives, no one to spell us for even a few hours. Worse yet, the pediatricians and their nurses seem fed up with our panicky phone calls. Over and over, they use the word “colic,” or the word “fussy,” as if we’re too dumb to remember that these are the words they’ve been uttering for weeks on end. They murmur reassurances. They tell us to be patient. They tell us all babies are different. They tell us Timmy is going through a “phase.” Both Meredith and I get the impression that we’re overreacting, perhaps exaggerating, and that we should man up and shut up and take our medicine.