by Tim O'Brien
The problem with this sort of thinking, pretty obviously, is that it has the sound of half-baked determinism, a survival-of-the-fittest rigidity that is at odds with the gentling subtleties of modern-day psychology. Even to my own ear, these concerns have the ring of something illiberal and Darwinian, not to mention way too Texan. I should be content with hula hoops. I should let the kids define themselves, each according to his special talents. And no doubt I should celebrate Tad’s soccer ball sharing and Timmy’s peculiar midfield balancing ballet. I realize all that. Yet when I stroll down high school hallways, as I often do on my travels, there is no mistaking the fact that athletics matter a great deal: the letter jackets, the rah-rah posters, the parent booster clubs, the no-expense-spared gyms and stadiums and locker rooms. And like it or not, ignore it or not, these high school kingdoms are often ruled more by popularity than by probity, more by charm than by charity, and not infrequently more by brawn than by brains.
For boys—and now for girls as well—athleticism remains an important coin of the realm, and like my own parents, I am sometimes drawn to impose my own yearnings on Tad and Timmy. How do I stop wishing that they might someday score a goal or two? How do I stop wishing for a moment of deftness or speed or strength or competitive spirit? How could I stop wishing for some plain old competence?
It isn’t that I care about sports—I don’t. What I do care about, probably too much, is the happiness and security of my sons, and now, as I sit writing these lines, I envision their coming teenage years and all the stresses that can add up to real pain for a kid. Right now, I suppose, their unaggressive antics seem cute; right now, it’s okay—or almost okay—that people chuckle and wag their heads. But in a few years Timmy’s and Tad’s dogged pacifism may be viewed as considerably less than cute by their coaches and teammates. Chuckles might hurt. Failure might hurt even more. One thing can lead to another: self-esteem problems, a sense of not belonging, humiliation, ridicule, second-class citizenship, and abject defeat in the teenage hierarchy wars.
All this, I realize, could easily be dismissed as a father’s obsessive hand-wringing. But cliques do exist. Kids can be cruel. Every day in this country, 160,000 children skip school because of bullying. The whole popularity imperative is an old and clichéd story, almost a funny story, unless of course you happen to be that unpopular bozo who can’t hit a baseball or catch a football, in which case you own the cliché. It’s all yours and it isn’t pleasant.
Tad and Timmy aren’t in that boat yet. They’re young. They’re still finding their way. They have plenty of time, and so, for now, all I can do is hope for the best. And who knows? Kids develop at different rates, in different ways, and maybe the boys will turn out to be terrific athletes. Maybe prom kings. Maybe Friday-night heroes. In fact, in a decade or two, they may well become headliners at Cirque du Soleil, a couple of sequined superstars, a tightrope-riding unicyclist and a stripping hula-hooper.
* * *
In the decades since that phone conversation with my mom and dad, I’ve often tried to rearrange things in my head. I’ll imagine my mother saying, “Of course, do whatever’s right,” and later my father will come on and listen to me for a while and finally say, “Well, I messed up my own dream. I was too lazy, too scared, too something, and I don’t want you to end up like me. Harvard’s just a fancy word. Go write your books. I’ll pretend I’m you.”
It didn’t happen that way. But as the years passed I began to feel as if it almost did happen, or as if it could have happened, because my parents were decent and thoughtful people, and because they wanted to protect me from the consequences of failure. Somewhere near the surface of their thoughts, I’m nearly certain, both understood that I was seeking not their permission but a kind of liberation, not their happy hallelujahs but an acknowledgment, however reluctant, that I was ready to weigh the risks all on my own. And of course they were right: the risks were real. I’d be giving up a great deal. By that point I’d completed my Harvard course work, passed my oral exams, and was only a year or so away from a doctorate. Still, I’d known from the start that graduate school amounted to little more than a convenient hideout after Vietnam, a place to put my head together, and my thoughts and ambitions were in no way academic. For more than three years I’d been trooping from class to class, a bit dazed, a bit surprised to find myself alive. I wasn’t unhappy, exactly. I’m not quite sure what I was. Bewildered, maybe. Disconnected. I remember thinking how civilized it all seemed, the campus and everyone on it, so peaceful and abstract and decorous, so weirdly theoretical in comparison to the boonies of Quang Ngai. I was also aware that the war had done things to me that could not be undone. Partly, I guess, I was full of anger. There was guilt, too, and lots of it. I had betrayed my conscience—my own heart and my own head—by going to a war I considered unjust. I had participated in the killing, and I had done so out of moral cowardice. There were no other words for it. I had been afraid of ridicule and embarrassment. I had been afraid of displeasing others, including my parents and my hometown and my country, and when you do things you believe are wrong because you are afraid not to do them, you cannot call it anything but what it is, and the correct word is cowardice. I needed to confront these things. By daylight I was fine, but at night I was not fine. When I couldn’t sleep, which was almost always, I’d get out of bed, sit at my desk, and try to dump the terrible shit on pieces of paper—mortar rounds exploding all around me, a young girl lying dead in a dry rice paddy, her face half gone, one of my buddies telling me to lay off the pity and suck it up and act like a soldier and stop whining about a dead gook.
I’d scribble these things down and go back to bed, and in the morning I’d head for my 9 a.m. class in statistics.
My mother and father knew none of this. For them, Vietnam was history. I’d survived, I’d come home, and it was time now to press forward. They never asked about the war—what did I see, what did I do?—and I never offered much. Each of us, I suppose, was trying to protect the others, which we did with silence, as if to talk about things would pick the scabs and exacerbate the pain and delay the healing. This may seem stupid, or old-fashioned, or callous, or excessively Midwestern, or psychologically illiterate, or emotionally unsophisticated. But they loved me, and I loved them. Not to speak was a kind of speaking, at least in our family, and sometimes it was more powerful speaking than speaking itself.
Surely, though, my parents had to wonder what was eating at me as I considered dropping out of grad school. Surely they were frightened by the prospect. And surely they felt exactly the same helplessness, exactly the same terrified pride, that I feel today as Timmy and Tad begin to move away from what I want toward what they want.
* * *
Back in second grade, almost two years ago, Timmy had joined a unicycle club that met in his school gymnasium three or four afternoons a week. The club had been founded by an inspired, forward-thinking teacher, Jimmy “Pedals” Agnew, whose dream it was to empower young children with the challenge of mastering an extremely difficult but wholly noncompetitive athletic endeavor. There would be no winners and no losers. There would be no scores and no time clock. There would be no first-stringers and no second-stringers. There would be no 1-A and no 6-A. There would be no getting cut from the team. There would be no water boys and no cheerleaders. There would be no pep rallies. There would be no exclusion. There would be no favoritism by virtue of height or strength or speed or other such common standards of physicality. Instead, as Jimmy gently explained to his second-graders, they were in for a long, frustrating, and repetitive lesson in perseverance, lots of spills along the way, day after day of remounting the unicycle and trying again and then trying once more.
Frustrating was the correct word. Repetitive was also the correct word.
More than fourteen months elapsed before Timmy was able to ride at all, and even then Meredith and I would scamper along beside him, each of us holding one of his hands for balance. Many times, I lost hope. While other kids began pedal
ing around the gym—some of them simultaneously dribbling basketballs—Timmy spent his time sprawled on the floor or pinned helplessly to a wall. I worried about what appeared to be motor dysfunction. I worried about epilepsy. And yet the idea of the unicycle had somehow seized Timmy’s imagination. It was what he wanted, not what I wanted. He wouldn’t quit. He accepted the scraped knees and the Band-Aids and the sting of iodine. Slowly at first, and then as if awakened by thunder, Meredith and I noticed something emerging in our son that a novelist might call “character.” Not so long ago we’d been the parents of an unformed, carefree, almost generalized little boy, but now there was a new and emerging Timmyness, a core of being that seemed to forecast what he would become in the years ahead—an earnest, determined, and intensely focused human being. He had ambition. He had an unsettling hardness in his eyes. He’d mutter to himself, pick himself up, and try again. Both Meredith and I sensed that we were now in the presence of this unfamiliar future Timmy, a Timmy who will one day shed the diminutive name, shed his childhood, shed his parents, and make his way forward without us.
“He’s like you with your magic,” Meredith said. “Not all that talented, obviously, but stubborn as stone.”
“Very true,” I said.
“Maybe too stubborn.”
“That’s the danger.”
And so in the cul-de-sac today I let go. Around and around Timmy went, all on his own.
I’m aware, of course, that there is nothing profound in this. Profundity is not the point. All I want is to leave behind a few pages that Timmy might someday find at the bottom of a desk drawer. I want him to know how giddy his father was on February 5, 2012, this eventful winter Sunday, how I yelped with delight as he pedaled away from me. I want him to know that in the midst of my amazed happiness, even as I yelped and chortled, I was struck by the cruel, evil sadness of departure. Why does the world do this to us? Why can’t we be together always? A profound man would have a profound answer, but my love is not profound that way. It has no wisdom. It has no intelligence. My love is profound only as snowfall is profound on a chilly night in February.
18
Child’s Play
Tad, at age four or five or six, once played with two German-speaking boys in a sandbox in Place des Vosges, directly across the street from our hotel in Paris. Everyone seemed to be getting along nicely. Castles were built. There was excellent teamwork. Later, when I asked Tad if he’d understood the two boys, Tad nodded and said, “They know what sand is.”
19
Telling Tales (I)
Timmy and Tad, who at ages five and three are both fans of Winnie-the-Pooh, have taken lately to wearing tails. At our local Walmart, and occasionally at church, the boys sport lengths of clothesline dangling from their trousers. They prowl the neighborhood trailing an assortment of ribbons, coat hangers, balloons, telephone cords, belts, blankets, drapery tassels, and electrical extension cords. People notice. Things have gotten out of hand. Alas, we have become a family of tails, and, though I’m embarrassed to make this confession, my wife and I have been persuaded to spruce up our fashion acts. Meredith jogs in a tail. I write in a tail. Yesterday, in a most undignified moment, I answered the doorbell having forgotten the Slinky jiggling restlessly at my buttocks. Imagine the judgments taking shape in the eyes of the UPS man.
Our household seems caught up in a kind of reverse evolution, tumbling backward through the millennia, alighting in an age in which the ancestral tail was as common and quietly useful as, say, the appendix or the tonsil. Like our tree-dwelling relatives, the O’Brien tribe has grown comfortable with its tails. We groom them. We miss them at bath time. We view their absence in our fellow man with pity and suspicion.
Now, as I sit here with my coffee at the kitchen table, I find myself wondering if something about this tail business might smack of the unwholesome, even of the aberrant and fanatical.
Imagination, of course, is a precious human gift. Still, I worry about the future. I entertain visions of Tad awaiting his bride at the marriage altar with a large powdered tail quivering aloft. And I am not alone in such irrational fears. Meredith won’t admit to it, but over the past several weeks she has been stealing into the boys’ bedroom at night, secretly pulling back the sheets to check for the first hairy sproutings of the real McCoy.
* * *
* * *
* * *
The shadows of childhood can darken our adult lives—that much I know as a certainty—and what parent would not be concerned that present fantasy might somehow influence distant fact? Already the imaginary has embedded itself in the real world. At preschool soccer games, young Timmy is impeded by the awkward mechanics of his “Tigger hop”—four strides and a bounce. Spectators gawk. Coaches squint at me. I feel the chill of silent accusation: what kind of father are you?
I’ve tried, God knows, to reason with the boys. I’ve used guile and bribery and shameless deceit. (Santa Claus hates tails.) Last night I tried again. “Pretending can be a good thing,” I told the boys at bedtime, “but sometimes it can get you in trouble. It can be dangerous.”
Tad had already drifted off, but Timmy looked up at me with suspicion. “Is this one of your ridiculous stories?”
“Not ridiculous at all,” I said, and then launched into a hastily improvised tale about a little boy who couldn’t stop pretending—always talking to a make-believe dog, eating make-believe pancakes. After a while, I said, the boy couldn’t separate what was real from what wasn’t. It landed him in all kinds of trouble.
“But I thought make-believe was supposed to be fun,” Timmy said.
“Yes, of course it is,” I told him, and then a crucial question occurred to me. “Do you know what pretending is?”
For what seemed a long minute I listened to the whir of a five-year-old’s mind in motion. “Well, actually,” Timmy finally said, using his favorite (and only) four-syllable word, “actually, I guess it’s like when you go away on trips. Sometimes I dream about you. I dream about how you’ll come home from the airport and bring me surprises and play with me. I get sad when you go away, and so I pretend you’re not gone. Is that bad?”
I told him no, it wasn’t bad.
“When you go away,” Timmy said, “I write your name in the sandbox. I pretend you’re pushing me on a swing or making funny faces at me.”
I nodded.
The whole issue of tails dissolved into something pale and trivial. The thought struck me that I should begin cutting back on the travel. Fewer airports, more conversations like this one. I kissed the boys good night.
“What about your story?” Timmy asked. “What happened to that little boy who couldn’t stop pretending?”
“Nothing bad,” I said. “He grew up.”
I left the bedroom and went off in search of my old friend Xanax.
* * *
As I wait for my sons to awaken on this Wednesday morning in July of 2008, and as I still tinker with this piece of writing, I find myself more or less surrendering to tails, at least for the present. As a father, I realize, I have much to learn, or much to relearn, about the power of pretending. Not so long ago, my own father went away on a long trip—went away for good—and, like Timmy, I occasionally get caught up in the world of make-believe. I’ll watch my dad toss a baseball to me, or I’ll hear him singing a few bars of “I’ll Be Seeing You” in his clear, unforced baritone. And in those moments my dad is back home again. Not his body, of course, but whatever it is that abides.
I’m on my second cup of coffee now, a little sad, a little happy, quietly watching the first twinklings of dawn spread out across the panes of glass in our kitchen window.
The human race, I realize, may have lost something when we shed our tails all those eons ago. But we gained something, too. We learned to live not just in the unconscious present, but also in the flow of history and in the possibilities of a miraculous future. True, we cannot bound skyward like Tigger with a thrust of our mighty tails. But we can close our eyes an
d fly into our fathers’ arms. This, I suppose, is why I’ve become a writer.
Beyond anything, though, the events of recent weeks remind me that Timmy and Tad will themselves need good, strong imaginations in the years ahead. After all, biology is biology. People don’t live forever. It’s not a morbid thought, really—it’s almost joyful—but I’m aware that on some future morning like this one my sons may awaken before dawn, brew up a pot of coffee, and sit dreaming at a kitchen table. Maybe they’ll imagine me coming home from the airport. Maybe they’ll see me opening up the front door and taking them in my arms and lifting them up high, a Slinky dangling from my faded old blue jeans.
20
Telling Tales (II)
A quick P.S. for Timmy and Tad:
In a few years, one of your English teachers will probably ask you to compose a story of your own, something completely invented, and I hope you tackle the assignment with the same full-throttle imagination you once brought to your make-believe tails. Be a little boy again. Invent your own talking tigers, your own thermodynamics. Forget reality—whatever you need from the real world will wiggle its way into your story all by itself. Be sure not to bore your teacher (or yourselves) with pages of description, pages of explanation, and pages of background information.
