by Bruce Feiler
Having said that, we have deep resources to draw on—two loving families, many friends, each other, and active minds that lead us both to develop fourteen-point plans for nutritional supplements and to imagine many scenarios, both dire and full of hope. And we have already found occasion to laugh. For instance, why exactly does the examination room of the leading orthopedic cancer surgeon at Sloan-Kettering hospital have a copy of Tennis Week at the top of a stack of magazines for patients to read?
How is Linda? A star. One of the first casualties of this news was a trip to Nantucket we had planned to celebrate our fifth anniversary. It was to be our first without the girls since they were born three years ago. Linda swallowed, teared up, took a breath, and moved on. As anyone who has been through one of these situations knows, the burden is invariably hardest on the spouse, caregiver, or “co-survivor” as they are sometimes called. Linda will have many challenges balancing her work, the needs of the girls, and an intermittently grumpy, perpetually gimpy husband (OK, so the grumpy has been there all along, but the gimpy is new!). Chemo is fun for no one. With that said, Linda’s nonprofit, Endeavor, is thriving. Last year the organization marked ten years/ten countries of helping entrepreneurs around the world, and Endeavor is poised to receive a generous grant from a private foundation in the coming weeks that will accelerate its growth. I can say with conviction that it is extremely important to me personally that Linda continue to devote as much time as possible to her inspiring work and continue to make some of the handful of international trips she has planned in the coming months. Life will change, but it cannot stop. In that spirit, I would like to ask anyone reading these words to join me in ways large and small to help keep Linda’s spirits up and to help her continue to give off the light she does to so many.
How are the girls? Eden and Tybee are also thriving. Turning three proved to be the moment when the gender switch flipped, and they are deeply focused on ballet, as well as princesses, cupcakes, and all things pink and purple. Actually, they are focused on one particular pink leotard and one chosen pair of purple “footed tights.” Three years of parental determination to bypass traditional gender color coding was summarily tossed down the pastel fairy hole. In the last few weeks the girls went bowling, boating, and played miniature golf—all for the first time. And at least one of those activities may be for the last: When Papa Alan, who’s just getting the hang of his new motorboat, decided to merely put-put around the harbor and shy away from the open seas, Eden quickly blurted out, “When are we going to go faster?!”
We have been consulting with experts on how and what to tell the girls about my illness, and early indications are to be honest but nonspecific and have everyone repeat the same line: “Daddy is sick. The doctors are helping him. He’s going to get better.” Then we will watch like hawks to see if there is any change in behavior, including a lack of focus, increased aggression, or nightmares. They already see that Daddy is on crutches, and we can watch them adjusting. When Linda and I rejoined them on Cape Cod this week after a few days consulting with doctors in New York, Eden said, “I’m so happy you comed back.” We are proud of them, we love them, and I look forward to walking them down the aisle someday and to leading them on short walks, at least, around the world.
What can I do to help? We are very grateful for the many people who have asked this question, and the honest answer is that we’re trying to think through how to provide guidance that is truthful, realistic, and meaningful—and respects the genuine emotion behind it. We’re already finding that giving people specific things can be helpful—“Hey, Ma, I need a shower stool” “Hey, Sis, we need a three-ring binder for all the paperwork” “Hey, Bro, can you take some pictures of me before I lose my hair.” If you give us some time to suss out more completely what we’re facing, we’d love to have your support.
That’s the view from week one. I have been overwhelmed by the many e-mails and calls that have already started to come in. We read every one. Please know that the onslaught of doctor consultations, insurance negotiations, crappy days, and glimmers of clarity in which I try to find some productivity or study the origins of a grand plié might mean I don’t have time to write you back, but your thoughtfulness will continue to give me comfort and strength. It is my intention to send out regular letters in the coming months to update you on my progress.
In the meantime, may you find clear skies out your window this summer, may your arrows all point forward, and may you find your way onto the open water sometime soon going just as fast as you want.
Until then, take a walk for me.
Love,
.5.
JEFF
Approach the Cow
THE DUNGEON DISCO IN THE Castle Assumburg youth hostel in northern Holland was blaring Michael Jackson and throbbing with red lights as I slipped out the back door and stared at the cow farm just over the moat. It was the summer of 1983, a few weeks after my high school graduation, and I was just beginning a six-week student exchange program in Europe. My first trip abroad, the tour was a gift from my grandmother and would lead us through the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and France. It was Tuesday, so to speak, so we were in Holland.
Not exactly a disco goer, I had snuck out the serfs’ entrance and was soon joined by our coleader, Jeff, whose parents had started this student travel company thirty-two years earlier in Putney, Vermont. Tall, lanky, with an angular nose and a boyish bowl of brown hair, Jeff could alternate between the hick Vermont farmer who loved to shovel manure and the cosmopolitan French-speaking college senior whose mother was Dutch and whose father grew up amid the footlights of Broadway. Mostly he was an imp, with a wicked sense of adventure, and he could tell I was just naive and untraveled enough to be a perfect foil for his evangelical mischievousness.
“Ever been cow tipping?” he asked.
“Cow what?” I said.
“Cows sleep standing up, so if you sneak up on them upwind, you can push them over and they’ll make a giant thud on the ground.”
Before I could figure out if he was making this up, we had jumped the moat, scaled the barbed wire, squished through the mud and patties of dung, and were just about to approach some poor dozing cow.
And I had discovered the great passion of my life: the unexpected, never-ending university of travel.
I ALMOST DIDN’T TELL Linda about my idea of a Council of Dads. It would be too upsetting for her to imagine; too morbid to consider. We should focus on the positive. We should live in the moment. But within twenty-four hours I had lost my resolve, and as soon as I described my still unformed conception, the idea no longer belonged just to me. It was ours, somehow. Really, it was hers, because Linda was the one who might someday be called on to choreograph the relationships between these dads and our girls.
Yet even after I conceded that her views carried more weight than mine, we soon twisted ourselves into knots. “I love him,” she would say of a prospective dad, “but he doesn’t represent who you are now.” “He’s great,” she would add of another, “but what about this part of you.”
We needed a set of guidelines.
First, no family members. The man I’m closest to in the world is my brother. I also have brothers-in-law, cousins, and the like with whom I share any number of bonds. But we figured these men would naturally have relationships with our girls and would share in family occasions throughout their lives.
Second, men only. I have been blessed since I was a teenager with unusually strong friendships with women; my list of closest friends would probably be split fifty-fifty. But we concluded that with their mother still in their lives, what our girls would need were fatherly voices to fill the vacuum of my absence.
Third, intimacy over longevity. We decided that some of my more recent friendships might better capture the man I had become and father I wanted to be.
Fourth, only one friend from each phase of my life. And finally, a dad for every side. We didn’t set out with a preconceived number—and did
n’t care whether the men were fathers themselves—but instead looked for men who might capture different aspects of my personality. As Linda kept repeating, “I want men I can call when I face some challenge and the girls come to me and ask, ‘What would Daddy think of this?’” In the end we chose men who embodied parts of me.
AND FROM THE BEGINNING, Jeff Shumlin was on the list.
In the decades since we first stepped into that cow patch, Jeff and I had strengthened our bond. He and his brother eventually took over their parents’ student travel business. Jeff settled in bucolic Putney, married a photographer, and had two children. He volunteered as a fireman, served as a selectman, spent part of every day riding around on his tractor, and, yup, shoveled manure.
And for me, Putney became a sort of storybook playground, a place where I went to chop wood, pick apples, and tap maple syrup. It was a place where Jeff’s neighbor stood in the barn, sliced a breath mint with his pocketknife, and stuck a piece in the gap of his front teeth. It was a place where the general store sold Chef Boyardee and Yoo-hoos and made me feel like Homer Price and his doughnut machine. It was a place I went after every breakup and bad review.
And Jeff became that friend from the summer I grew up. He was my camp counselor: racing me to the top of mountains, throwing me in the lake, nearly shooting me in the head when a deer jumped from behind a tree and leapt over my Elmer Fudd hat. He was my life coach: pushing me to study abroad, hectoring me to marry Linda. He was my big brother, the one whom I always looked up to, because I wanted to, because he deserved it.
And when I got sick, Jeff was the one who started sending me a postcard, every day, snow or shine, vacation or work, and vowed to continue for as long as I was ill.
It was this mixture of qualities I wanted Jeff to convey to our girls: the connectedness of someone who understood the value of neighbors, along with the openness of someone who spent half his life living and working in other parts of the world. Jeff would show the girls how to engage their community, then carry that way to experience life with them around the globe.
Jeff would teach them how to travel.
So a few weeks after my diagnosis, we loaded the car, packed up the girls, and made the drive up Route 91 to our farm away from home in Vermont. That afternoon, Jeff took our girls for a ride on the John Deere, then led them on a chase after runaway pigs. Afterward, he and I drove to an abandoned barn overlooking an apple orchard, with a stretch of green hills in the distance. We set up a pair of beach chairs. “The best thing I can do is read this,” I said. I took a deep breath and began to read my letter to the dads. Tears mottled my voice, and I could barely complete the words.
Will you help be their dad?
Will you be my voice.
I suddenly felt old. Yet I also felt secure. Mostly, as I watched his eyes well up and his body stiffen, I felt sad to be burdening him with my pain.
Then the letter was over and the view before us no longer seemed beautiful. The ground had become almost a burial spot. We were two travelers arrived in a place where we didn’t want to belong.
“Yes,” Jeff said, answering the request that I had forgotten was in my letter. “I’d be honored.” He paused.
“But I’m not a man of words. I’m a dad by example.”
Suddenly my idea was no longer just mine. And no longer Linda’s, either.
It was his, too.
It had life.
GEORGE SHUMLIN WAS A high school English teacher in Putney in 1949 when he sailed home from a summer in Europe. One night a huge storm rocked the Nieuw Amsterdam, and most of the passengers fled to sleep. “Even the bartenders were sick,” Jeff explained. “My father went looking for people to play cards. One of them was my mother, who was studying in British Columbia. She also had a strong stomach and knew how to play bridge.” The next summer the two spent a week together in Paris; the following year the head of George’s school proposed they lead a group of students to Europe. The only catch: They had to get married or they would set a poor example. They had spent fewer than ten days together.
“They went off to do something fun that summer and quickly realized the value of experiential learning,” Jeff said. “And that very much became the core of our philosophy. Growth through a sense of community; immersion as the key to learning.” Within a few years Kitty and George started Putney Student Travel, which in time grew to include hundreds of students. As soon as Jeff and his siblings were born, they were thrust into the family business. “My father would drive to New York and see off every group,” Jeff said. “He would make a speech at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel on Central Park South while we ran crazy in the back of the room.”
“So what did he say?”
“He talked about the difference between mass travel, where everybody is isolated in buses, and really getting off the beaten track: taking risks, living with families, doing things that are uncomfortable. My father has a certain gravitas—the way he looks; the way he speaks—and he would set a tone that this was a serious cultural experience.”
When Jeff was in college, he was pressed to start leading trips. With his gift for languages and boyish instincts, he was a natural. “Sure, we would touch on big tourist attractions,” he said, “but I also knew how to turn left down some little alley and lead the kids to some undiscovered part of Paris, or put them on bicycles and hop out to the beach in Brittany and make a bonfire at night with a bunch of French kids.”
“What’s the value in those?”
“Ask anyone who has traveled and inevitably the most valuable experiences are when pitfalls come up. The day it’s rainy and miserable and you get up early to be the first one in line at some museum and you get there and it’s closed. You think quickly, you look around, and you go into a tiny hole-in-the-wall café where old men are playing checkers. You get a hot chocolate, you sit down next to them, and you talk about your life. They share theirs. And you have this bonding that you never anticipated, and that is much more valuable than going to the museum and reading the guidebook and listening to the tapes.”
Jeff was preparing to lead his third Putney trip in 1983 when I sent in my application.
“You were the perfect foil for my experiential philosophy,” Jeff recalled. “First, you were a blank slate. Second, your essay opened with the line ‘I am a people person.’ From the beginning, when I threw out a crazy idea, you were ready to give it a try. If I tried to lift the spirits of the group by breaking into song—and I’m naturally an inhibited person—you were a great contrast to me because for you the whole world is a stage. You threw open your arms, and before long you and I were singing gospel and other students were diving right in. And we did this while accomplishing some inane task, like climbing off trail up a mountain in the Swiss Alps just because why take the zigzagging trail.”
I have two primary memories from that summer, I told him. The first is a string of minor hooliganisms that seemed magical to my buttoned-down, apple-polishing self: cow tipping in Holland; lifting a tiny car in Florence from its parking space and turning it around to face in the opposite direction; sneaking through an open door in the Paris Opera House and sprinting through the underground tunnels in mythical pursuit of the Phantom of the Opera. I asked Jeff what those experiences say.
“It says that the style of leadership I embodied involves a good dose of immaturity!” We laughed. “Seriously, my philosophy has always been: Take the risk. Do something silly. We had no right to be in the back of the Paris Opera House. But if we’d met someone, what an explanation it would have been to say we were just trying to understand the world a little bit. And what if we got thrown out?! It would have been a great story we could all tell our grandchildren. So, seize the opportunity. Turn the car around. Approach the cow.”
My second memory involves a week I spent with a family in Groningen, Holland. My first night, after a startlingly white meal of fish, potatoes, and yogurt, the family retired to the television, and I retreated to the water closet. There was only one probl
em: I couldn’t figure out how to flush the toilet. There was no handle, no button, no lever, no rope. The tank was located near the ceiling, and I decided to flush the toilet manually. I stood on the lid, reached up toward the tank, and was just about to remove the cover, when…there was a knock on the door.
“Are you okay?” someone inquired.
“Um, I’m fine!” I sang.
The family shuffled back to the living room, but their teenage daughter leaned close to the door and whispered, “Pull down the pipe!” That night I cried myself to sleep. A week later, after biking the nearby dunes and stuffing liverwurst into muslin casings in a butcher’s basement, I had forged such a deep connection with the family that when it was time to leave, the daughter and her friends came to the train station with a giant American flag and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” as we pulled out.
“That story would bring tears to my father’s eyes,” Jeff said, “because it’s the crux of his speech on Central Park South. ‘It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to take adjustment. But get your hands dirty, go into the basement, and stuff liver into a sack. Be a traveler, not a tourist.’”
“So what is a traveler?” I asked.
“A traveler is someone who can let go of what is familiar and in a very conscious way seek out what is different. It is someone willing to slow down enough, get off the pressured, achievement track, and seize the opportunity. It is someone willing to break the routines of home: what you eat, when you sleep, how you wash.”
He went on. “It’s meeting the cheese maker in a village, and before long you’re in the barn up to your elbows in whey. It’s sleeping on a dirt floor in Tanzania, using a pit latrine, screaming every time you see a bug, then realizing that the people who live there, the ones who carry water in a bucket for miles, are just as happy, if not more so, than you are. It’s being at a reception in Afghanistan, eating unidentifiable food, then discovering later that it was goat’s stomach, and that the animal was slaughtered in your honor by people who simply appreciated the ability to interact with you.”
