Dad’s Maybe Book. Tim O’Brien

had been carrying the hurt inside him for more than a year, that he had cared enough to still care, and that I had so wildly underestimated my own child. I would’ve guessed he might write about Minecraft, or about basketball, or about numerous other interests that appeared to consume him day after day. Not only had he not mentioned his 15th Street friend in many months, but virtually everything else in his life had seemed utterly transitory, here then gone. One moment he’d be clicking a Rubik’s Cube, the next moment he’d be watching NBA highlights, the next moment he’d be wrestling with his brother. Until the day he began writing the poem, I’d taken it for granted that his compassion was as short-lived and perfunctory as my own.

      As an adult, humbled by my own failures and deficiencies, I have come to expect the worst of myself, almost never the best, and Timmy’s compassion for a suffering stranger reminded me of my own pitiful mediocrity: how I donate a few bucks to the United Way but then avoid the eyes of the homeless. I may feel saddened, but I don’t cry. Nor do many others. Nor, I guess, do you.

      Now, after the passage of several years, what strikes me is the realization that an eight-year-old kid had become a better person that I am, able to feel what I do not. What had years ago been painful to me, seizing me by the throat, has now become little more than nervous embarrassment. What had once been empathy has become what Kafka calls the “frozen sea” of mankind’s heart. If a person’s humanity is measured by quality of feeling, my inner sea had frozen miles deep. This may be part of growing up, or part of living in an imperfect world, but it is no less depressing and no less despicable.

      Timmy’s poem, and the incident that generated it, made me want to take Kafka’s ax to the frozen sea inside me, and maybe that explains, at least in part, why this maybe book is being written in the first place. I want to hammer away at the ice. I want to yell I love you, I love you, with every stroke on this keyboard.

       17

      

       Balance

      A few days ago, Meredith and I attended Tad’s weekly soccer game, which concluded in a rare victory for my son’s not-very-talented assemblage of six-year-olds. Tad did not score. He does not believe in scoring. In fact, during the course of the game, Meredith and I could not help noticing that the boy seemed to be intentionally kicking the ball to his opponents, or at least in the general direction of his opponents. At halftime I asked my son about this.

      “Well, sure,” said Tad, plainly bewildered, “but I was kicking the ball pretty straight, wasn’t I?”

      “Very straight,” I said. “Except straight to the other team.”

      “Is that bad?”

      “Not exactly, but the whole purpose—”

      Tad looked up at me as if he were about to cry.

      “I felt sorry for them,” he said. “I mean, we were really, really clobbering them.” His eyes swept back and forth. “I thought you told me sharing is a good thing.”

      Timmy plays lacrosse. Not well. He stands motionless at midfield. He balances his lacrosse stick on the middle finger of his right hand, the stick artfully vertical against a blazing-blue Texas sky. He seems to be auditioning for the circus.

      Again, I asked about this.

      “It’s not easy,” Timmy said sharply. “I mean, you try it.”

      There is nothing in either boy that resembles athletic aggression. Where the competitive instinct might reside, there is instead a very sensible pain-avoidance instinct, or, as Meredith optimistically calls it, a propensity for excessive kindness. Which is not, I suppose, such a terrible thing.

      Still, I’ve suggested that Timmy give some thought to moving his legs during lacrosse games; I’ve advised Tad to try sharing the soccer ball with his teammates, just for the experience of it.

      No luck, I’m afraid.

      And so, after some soul-searching, I’ve become more or less resigned, as fathers must and should, to letting the boys pursue their own visions, athletic and otherwise. But the whole letting-go frame of mind comes very, very hard for me. It’s hard to stay silent on the sidelines, hard not to yell pointed instructions to my kids, and hard to be cheerfully encouraging after another midfield balancing act. True, my sons are young, but I want good things for them, happy things, and I’ve learned that athletic accomplishment can make a boy’s life considerably less stressful, especially in the teenage years, and even more especially in this sports-crazy state of Texas. Around here, Scrabble experts don’t get elected prom king.

      Meredith, of course, jumps all over me when I ramble on like this. “Are you kidding me?” she says. “We’re raising a couple of prom kings?”

      “Well, no, but—”

      “Prom kings?”

      Swiftly, I cover my tracks, admitting it was a terrible example. But even so, in my head, I can’t help flashing back to my high school years. I would’ve killed to be prom king. I would’ve eaten salamander guts.

      “Okay,” I’ll say. “What about homecoming king?”

      It is February 5, 2012, a Sunday, and Timmy and I have just returned from unicycle practice in the cul-de-sac across the street. The boy has found his sport. Today, after months of false starts, Timmy navigated a complete circle all on his own. What joy on his face, what joy on my face. A unicyclist!

      And behold: Tad, too, has blossomed into a whiz-bang athlete. A hula hoop pro!

      For many, many months both boys have been pursuing their off-the-beaten-track sporting specialties, and although their feats may never be celebrated in the pages of Sports Illustrated, I challenge any high school linebacker to execute a striptease, underwear and all, while simultaneously keeping two hula hoops in motion. I challenge Shaq O’Neal to mount a unicycle.

      Decades ago, after the publication of my first book, I called my mom and dad to ask how they’d feel if I were to drop out of graduate school and devote myself to becoming a novelist.

      “You’ll regret it,” my mother said. “For sure.”

      “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Harvard is Harvard,” said my father. His voice seemed to me uncommonly ardent, a little desperate, as if I were contemplating suicide or bank robbery or both at once. “Listen to me. The world is full of people who think they can be writers. I’m one of them. Look how it turned out. Don’t do it.”

      “All right, thanks,” I said, and then I did drop out.

      Not immediately: I waited a couple of years. And yet in the midst of that phone call—somewhere between “Listen to me” and “Don’t do it”—there was a finality that slammed down on me with the full weight of the future. I remember hanging up the phone. I remember staring down at my hands. I remember how free I felt, how light and happy, and yet a moment later I was struck by a dizzying and unmistakable surge of terror. I knew what was coming. I would be exchanging security for jeopardy, forfeiting a Harvard degree for a degree in advanced uncertainty. The consequences, whether good or bad, would be with me forever.

      Almost certainly what my mother and father had wanted for