by Tim O'Brien
Humility is not a bad idea, Timmy.
There’s nothing immoral about the word “maybe.” This entire maybe book, like our lives, is full of maybes—all those undiscovered truths, all those forgotten truths, all those unknowable truths—and it’s okay to say “maybe” even when you believe you have access to some self-evident, ironclad, miraculous, and eternal Truth.
It’s also okay to say “I don’t know,” even when you’re cocksure that you do know.
It’s okay to say “It seems” instead of “It is.”
And so, please, watch out for absolutism, Timmy. Chipmunks are absolutists.
An apple a day may not always, or ever, keep the doctor away.
An eye for an eye may end up becoming a million eyes for a million other eyes, and some of those eyes may belong to children like you.
Be suspicious of slogans and platitudes and generalizations of any sort, 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.
8
The Best of Times
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 be
dtime, 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, they will find comfort in the memory of their father saying, “Sleep well. I’m watching over you. I’m the Man in the Moon.”
9
Highballs
It’s November 9, 2007. Timmy is four and his brother Tad is two. We are vacationing in the Bahamas, and at the moment it is 3:40 in the morning, still dark outside, and Meredith and the boys are sleeping soundly in the perfumed Bahamian night. I’m sitting on our narrow hotel balcony, gazing out on the lights of Nassau, a town where my father once worked for a hotel called the Royal Victoria. The hotel is gone now, as my father is, but from this balcony I can look across the harbor to the spot where, in the 1930s, the Royal Victoria had for years reigned as one of the world’s grand establishments. There, my dad spent many of the happiest days of his life. He was not yet an alcoholic. He did not yet have children. He was young and single, and he had the run of a fashionable hotel on a beautiful and hospitable island, and, knowing my dad, he surely made the most of it. As I sit here now in the dark, it strikes me that, like my father, I’ve undergone a pretty radical transformation since my younger days. One kind of fun has replaced another. Where before I had taken pleasure in my own well-being, I now take much greater pleasure in the well-being of Timmy and Tad.
As one conspicuous example, the boys are now going through a zealous costume phase, and Meredith and I have spent the bulk of our vacation chasing after Batman and Spider-Man and assorted creatures from outer space. Yesterday, the kids went bodysurfing in their costumes—Timmy was Superman, Tad was a bunny—and more than a few bewildered stares came their way as they emerged from the Atlantic like the survivors of some comic-book shipwreck. They dine at Nobu in their costumes, go down water slides in their costumes, climb rock walls in their costumes, stroll through the casino in their costumes, and high-five puzzled lifeguards in their costumes. The boys are no longer content with store-bought outfits; Meredith devoted the first day of our vacation to manufacturing a pair of unicorn horns, using rolled-up socks, coffee filters, and plenty of ingenuity. Though it’s embarrassing to admit, I’ve sometimes joined the boys in their costumed reveries, patrolling the Bahamian shoreline in my homemade Hulk getup.
What fascinates me, in part, about this costume obsession is the uncompromising earnestness with which Timmy and Tad engage in the fantasies of make-believe. For them, make-believe is the real world, and the real world is make-believe. In one way or another, and to one degree or another, this is how I’ve led a great deal of my own life for the past sixty-some years. I’ve dressed up in an Armani suit and pretended I belonged among the rich and famous; I’ve dressed up in white linens for a cameo role in a movie called The Notebook, pretending I was at ease in the presence of Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams; I’ve dressed up in a helmet and rucksack and pretended I was a competent soldier; I’ve dressed up in a magician’s top hat and pretended I was making miracles happen; I’ve dressed up in blue jeans and a baseball cap and pretended I was a happy guy.
Two afternoons ago, after I’d lost a hundred bucks at the blackjack table, we took a cab into Nassau, where we spent a few minutes visiting the piece of ground on which the Royal Victoria Hotel had once delivered to my father the only untarnished joy he had ever mentioned in my presence. Meredith snapped a couple of photographs. Timmy and Tad stood nearby, a little impatient, flapping their Batman capes at passing pedestrians. For me, those few minutes were important. I was hoping for . . . Who knows? Nothing revelatory, nothing startling, but maybe some whisper out of history, maybe a tree my father might have climbed, maybe a flowered path down which he might have embarked on a midnight stroll in the company of a highball and a pretty young woman. But time had done its work. Almost all had been obliterated. A small commemorative plaque, mounted on a concrete block along a sidewalk, informed passersby that here had once stood the Royal Victoria, except here was no longer here, and the name Bill O’Brien did not appear on the plaque, and after all these years, a kind of shabby, ill-tended dreariness had replaced romantic summer nights and popping champagne corks and tuxedos and fourteen-piece orchestras playing music that could be flirted to and snuggled to and danced to. All that was now a parking lot. The hotel permanently closed its doors in 1971, stood vacant for a time, and was destroyed by fire in the mid-1990s. As with a broken toy, something sad and depressing had subverted not only the Royal Victoria, but also my father’s expectations about what the world would offer to him in the years ahead—a glamorous lifelong cocktail party that over time turned very ugly. The fantasy became asphalt. My dad ended up hiding vodka bottles in the basement of a small, unstylish house in southern Minnesota.
Now, feeling a pinch in my eyes, I ran a hand across the surface of the Royal Victoria’s dismal little plaque. Nothing much happened except the fantasy that something had happened.
After a time, Timmy approached me in his Batman costume.
He took my hand. He asked why I was crying. I told him I was not crying—I was remembering.
“It looks like crying,” Timmy said.
“I suppose it does,” I said, “but you look like Batman.”
“So what?”
“Well, maybe—” I stopped, composed myself, and lifted the mask from Timmy’s face. “Maybe someday you won’t be Batman anymore. Maybe someday you won’t be a superhero.”
“No way,” Timmy said. “That can’t happen.”
“No?”
“Never,” he said. “Not to me.”
10
Spelling Lesson
Back in second grade—or was it third?—Timmy misspelled the word “utter,” replacing the t’s with d ’s, an error to which his teacher responded with the suggestion that spelling matters. “But they sound the same,” Timmy told her. “How could anybody except a cow tell the difference?”
11
Home School
Two mornings ago, I came across Tad peeing into a wastebasket. Not only a wastebasket, but a wire mesh wastebasket. And not only a wire mesh wastebasket, but a wire mesh wastebasket situated on a bathroom floor that had been very recently recarpeted.
Tad had been potty-trained; he knew better.
I spoke to the boy sharply—earnestly, you might say. Tad froze. His angle of attack became indecisive. His bull’s-eye was no longer the wastebasket, and certainly not the toilet, but instead a point midway between the two. I was furious, as I had every right to be. Scarcely a month earlier, I had selected this new carpet for its lush pile, its regal shade of maroon. (“You’ll be sorry,” Meredith had said.)
Once Tad finished his business, I told the boy to drop to his knees and begin blotting up the mess with wads of toilet paper.
“Why,” I asked, “did you do this?”
I asked heatedly—many times—but my son did not look up at me and did not speak. He was frightened, no doubt, by my tone of voice and by a couple of inappropriate words I summoned. Eventually, just as Tad began to cry, Meredith stepped into the bathroom. She gave me a stern, get-out-of-here wag of the head, bent down to console our son, and took over the cleanup operation. I retreated to my office, where for some time I sat muttering to myself.
Maybe a half hour later, Tad came toddling into my office. The boy’s lower lip was trembling. He looked at me with a combination of remorse, fear, and ferocious concentration.
“I’m really sorry,” he said, “but I have two heads.”
“What?” I said.
“Two heads,” said Tad.
“What?” I said.
“You asked why I did it,” said Tad, “and it’s because I have two heads. One head told me, ‘Daddy won’t like this.’ The other head said, ‘This is gonna be fun.’ ”
A number of thoughts came to me in a rush. My son was not the budding ax murderer I had envisioned only minutes earl
ier; my son was smart; my son apprehended the ambiguities of moral choice far better than any talking head on the Fox channel; my son would become a poet one day, or perhaps a psychiatrist, or perhaps need one.
That night, I moved with newfound respect to the boys’ bedroom for our usual storytelling session. As a writer, I consider it my responsibility to make up bedtime stories for the kids, little ten-minute tales to escort them into sleep, and that night I began my story this way: “Once upon a time, I actually knew a guy with two heads.”
“Really?” said Tad.
“Absolutely,” I said.
“What was his name?”
“His name,” I said, “was Daddy.”
Tad and his older brother Timmy fell very quiet. I could sense the boys shifting in the dark, fixing their attention on my neck and shoulders.
“Two actual heads?” said Timmy.
“At least. Sometimes more than two.”
“Didn’t it hurt?”
“Well, no. Hurt isn’t the word. But it made the world pretty complicated.”
Tad leaned toward me in the dark, perhaps a bit frightened, perhaps in search of head stumps. “So how did you talk?” he asked quietly. “How did you even think about stuff ?”
