Dad’s Maybe Book. Tim O’Brien

      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