Letters to My Son. Kent Nerburn

and cares of daily affairs. The song that lives in our hearts, the song that we have waited to share, the song of being a man, is silent. We find ourselves full of advice but devoid of belief.

      And so, I want to speak to you honestly. I do not have answers. But I do understand the questions. I see you struggling and discovering and striving upward, and I see myself reflected in your eyes and in your days. In some deep and fundamental way, I have been there, and I want to share.

      I, too, have learned to walk, to run, to fall. I have had a first love. I have known fear and anger and sadness. My heart has been broken and I have known moments when the hand of God seemed to be on my shoulder. I have wept tears of sorrow and tears of joy.

      There have been times of darkness when I thought I would never again see light, and there have been times when I wanted to dance and sing and hug every person I met.

      I have felt myself emptied into the mystery of the universe, and I have had moments when the smallest slight threw me into a rage.

      I have carried others when I barely had the strength to walk myself, and I have left others standing by the side of the road with their hands outstretched for help.

      Sometimes I feel I have done more than anyone can ask; other times I feel I am a charlatan and a failure. I carry within me the spark of greatness and the darkness of heartless crimes.

      In short, I am a man, as are you.

      Although you will walk your own earth and move through your own time, the same sun will rise on you that rose on me, and the same seasons will course across your life as moved across mine. We will always be different, but we will always be the same.

      And that is what this book is about. It is my attempt to give you the lessons of my life, so that you can use them in yours. They are not meant to make you into me. It is my greatest joy to watch you become yourself. But time reveals truths, and these truths are greater than either of us. If I can give them voice in a way that allows me to walk beside you during your days, then I will have done well.

      To be your father is the greatest honor I have ever received. It allowed me to touch mystery for a moment, and to see my love made flesh. If I could have but one wish, it would be for you to pass that love along. After all, there is not much more to life than that.

       CHAPTER 1

       THE SHADOW OF THE FATHER

      The image of my father floats like a specter before me as I try to form my thoughts about manhood. I see him as he is now — a shell of a man, lost in private memories, spending his days idly flicking a television from channel to channel in hopes of finding something to occupy his time.

      I see him as he is, but I remember him as he was.

      I remember his strong back as he worked late into the night, weeding or raking or painting, the sweat forming a great, swooping arc down the middle of his spine.

      I remember his perfectly ordered workbench in the basement with a hook for each tool and a label on every box.

      I remember his outbursts of anger, his halting attempts to talk to me about sex.

      I remember his silences and his diligence, his inarticulate efforts to show me through ritual what he could not say in words.

      And I remember his unspoken pride as his children grew, graduated, found mates, and went off into life.

      He remembers little of this. His memory has begun to fail. The man who would recite me Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address from memory can no longer remember the day of the week. His workbench is in shambles and bits of long-forgotten projects sit in dusty piles behind boxes in the corner. The man who in memory towered over me, all shoulders and biceps and strength, seems shriveled and small, cautious in his gestures and tentative in his gait.

      I should feel sadness for this, and I do. But it is a sadness mixed with awe. With each passing day I realize more how much he lives within me, and how great a shadow he casts over my life.

      It is the same for all men. None of us can escape this shadow of the father, even if that shadow fills us with fear, even if it has no name or face. To be worthy of that man, to prove something to that man, to exorcise the memory of that man from every corner of our life — however it affects us, the shadow of that man cannot be denied.

      I am lucky. Though his anger ran deep and his heart was lonely at its core, my father did me no damage. His hand was always on my shoulder when I needed it, and he worked hard not to visit the sins of his father onto the life of his son.

      Other men have not been so lucky. Their memories are filled with violence and brutality, the smell of alcohol, moments spent cowering in corners beneath the sound of breaking glass.

      Others have only the aching emptiness where the memory of the father ought to be.

      But we all labor under the shadow. It makes us who we are and shapes the man we hope to be.

      To become a father is to understand the power of that shadow from the other side. You realize that the touches you make upon your son will shape him, for better or for worse, for his entire life.

      And who can know which touches have meaning? A word here, a glance there, a time together, a time apart — which will be the moments that will rise up in memory and shape the child who looks without judgment on all that you do and say?

      I see an image before me. It is an apartment hallway, bathed in half-light. My father stands there. I am behind him, a frightened ten-year-old, peering tentatively toward a door. We have a bicycle with us. It is a purple “racer,” as we called them, with hand brakes and a gearshift. It is the most beautiful bike I have ever seen. We are returning it to its owner.

      My father had found this bike on one of his early-morning walks along a city beach. He had kept it in our garage, covered with a blanket. He wouldn’t let me ride it because, he said, it belonged to someone else. For weeks that bike had stood in our garage as my father advertised in the local papers for its owner. I had secretly dreamed that the owner would never call so I could have that bike for my own.

      But the owner did call, and now we are standing at his door prepared to return his bike to him.

      My father knocks. The door opens a crack. A man peers out and looks past us both toward the bike. He pulls it in the door and examines it. My father and I stand in the doorway, waiting.

      “It has a lot of new scratches on it,” the man says.

      My father says nothing.

      The man turns the wheels, test the handlebars. He looks at my father accusingly. I want to cry out that there are no new scratches, that it has been under a blanket in our garage. Instead, I look down. The bike glints and shines in the hallway gloom.

      The man pulls it further inside and mutters, “I suppose I should give you something.” He pulls out a crumpled bill and tosses it toward my father. My father gives it back.

      The man glares at us and goes back to examining the bike.

      We turn and walk down the hall. I grab my father’s shirt. “Why were you so nice to that man?” I ask. “He was really mean.”

      My father keeps walking. “Maybe he’ll pass it along someday,” he says. I trail behind him through the spare yellow light. We never mention that bike again.

      This image fades, recedes, is replaced by another.

      It is many years later. I am visiting a local jail on some minor administrative task.

      While I sit in the waiting room I notice the name of one of my former students on the prisoners’ list. He has been arrested for some act of public drunkenness and destruction of property. It is not his first arrest.

      I have always liked this boy. He has a winning smile and there is a genuine kindness and love of life somewhere deep behind his eyes.