Baseball Boys

April 4, 2014: Driving Eli to school, sometimes I get lucky.  Occasionally one or both of Eli’s closest friends will be ambling in the direction of the high school and I can to offer a ride.  I love that moment. These kids are big now, pretty much taller than me, and can be, on any given day, morose or ebullient, dragged down by homework and family or buoyed up by the same and a thousand other things I will never hear about.  But they are good boys, good kids, interesting and able kids.  This is the end of Eli’s junior year of high school, and he has a small group of good friends and a larger group of acquaintances, and then of course family, cousins and histories that ring him and give him his horizon.

They talk about music and sports.  They wear their fancy baseball uniforms with the raised logos and their name on the back. They’re not stoners and none have steady girlfriends--school takes up too much of their night.  It is, in many ways, a very innocent time, a lovely time, though I know not an easy one, despite appearances. One of the boys had his brother die mysteriously last fall—suicide is the guess. They all struggle to do the homework, so much of it meaningless and they know it.  They put up with arbitrary changes to their schedule and try to take pride in what they do.  Their lives are highly ordered and they are lucky.

It wasn’t that long ago, Christmas, I think it was, that Jacqueline and my other boys were untangling themselves from the car and walking into the house on Christmas Eve. Everyone went up on ahead, but Eli hung back, waiting.  The moment we were alone, he burst into tears and pressed his big head into my chest, crying.  “Oh, dad,” he said, “I just can’t forget about it.”  I knew what he meant, the way his friend’s brother died.  It broke my heart, this tough kid still balled up inside.  I put my hands on his head and let him cry.  “I just don’t know how to go in there,” he said, the house bright and Christmas tree in the window.  I told him it would be ok. That he was being a good friend to the family who lost their son and brother. I said other things, expressed in words and in silence.

All three of these kids were hurt by that death.  This is not a simple time for them, despite this generation’s affluence.  There is no clear-cut sense of danger.  It comes from the kids you pass in the hallways (a mother snuck into the school last week to stab a student who was hassling her daughter; the mother was hit with a Taser gun and arrested).  It happens at Fort Worth, with suicides, with car wrecks, with cancer.  In a world that is so heavily ordered, safe and promising, around them is carnage and arbitrary violence.  It is as if we have an autoimmune disease as a culture, our body attacking itself for no good reasons that I can detect.  Maybe it has always been like this.

I stopped the car in front of the high school.  Exquisitely beautiful young black girls were flowing like a flock of exotic birds or flowers down the sidewalks.  None of us noticed. My angular boys got out and stood together for a moment, saying thanks, worrying about first period and physics and slamming the car doors too hard.  It occurred to me I might take their picture; my camera was on the dashboard. Just a moment of them together, seventeen, sixteen years old, shambling in with their backpacks and baseball uniforms along the wet sidewalk.  But I didn’t.  Didn't want to embarrass them. Lying in bed last night, I regretted that missed opportunity, and spent time thinking on my way to sleep of Eli as a baby, a young kid, his sweetness, of his older brother the same way, open heart, how irremediable all those moments are.  

Hearing the wind roar down the valley from far off, my wife asleep, I felt for a moment the delight of fall, the keening feeling that is both joy and loss together.  How you feel everything moving through you without touching.  I should have taken that picture, but that only makes it worse somehow and there is nothing that needs to be stopped. And then I got up early, still thinking about the my kids, all of them, my own five and these others and my students, and have watched rain mix with snow all morning into the woods behind my house as the light comes up, beautiful and completely out of control.

Here's Joy: Eli and Basketball

[This blog post is meant to be read publicly, with other voices chiming in in the bold parts for emphasis].

Here’s joy: getting off work and driving though the Central New York winter up Interstate 81, past the Preble rest area, past Tully, past LaFayette, past Nedrow, and taking exit 17 into the south side of Syracuse like I have done literally countless times before, waiting at the long stoplight under the overpass, listening to cowpunk blues or podcasts or silence, and angling then along snowy streets in the general direction of the school, watching the mid-winter evening stoplights brighten up and throw pinkish-grey blotches on the snow as I worm my way deeper into the town, and finally arriving at the parking lot, dark now and full of cars, mostly parents’ cars: minivans, SUVs, no trucks, no sports cars, and walk through the metal detectors 
(empty your pockets completely, sir), 
get wanded just for fun and security, pay my two bucks, and listen.

[You’re late] 
I’m always late.  They have almost always already begun.  I can hear their shoes squeaking against the floor and the echo-y reverb all the way down here, near the entrance, and the place smells like a school, not like paste and dust 
[that’s elementary school] 
or anxiety and chalk 
 [that’s middle school], 
but like sweat and concrete and damp bathroom
s.  I’m in a 
[high school] 
and my son Eli is playing on the Junior Varsity basketball team this year.  He and his friend Ben are the only white kids on the team, which doesn’t automatically mean they are outclassed, but they might be.  And I’m proud of him: he worked hard to get on the team, never once missed a practice, practiced all year and played for hours with his brother or by himself if need be into the half-dark light and playing on asphalt, cracked and sloping, with a shitty cheap basket that falls over if you knock it, practicing until he can hit it most all the time, he’s a real good shooter, making hard shots and running drills and keeping score against himself and psyching himself into the game, cursing the imaginary opponents and talking trash to them until their confidence wavers and he grabs the ball from their imaginary hands and, orbiting like Rodney Jones, stuffs it down the throat of the hoop in front of the stadium full of fans and haters alike who stand at the goal and roar.

Except, of course, there usually is no crowd.  Just the empty sound of a basketball against the asphalt echoing off the garage door.  The shudder of the hoop when it’s sprung.  The sound of the ball crashing lightly against the fence.

In the gym, tonight, it’s a cacophony.  The buzzer is always, in every gym I’ve been in, airplane-loud, national disaster tornado-warning loud.  
The people in the crowd are almost all yelling to be heard 
and at the game, and the coaches bellow out code words like 
“2-4” 
and 
“5-1,” 
indicating some sort of defense strategy.  I slip in and nobody notices me leap up the bleachers to the middle top where I can see out.  I have a hotdog and some tortilla chips in my hands I bought on my way in, and I’m scanning out to see if Eli’s on the court, but usually he’s waiting and watching.  He watches everything, and it makes me feel as if I understand the game just to follow his gaze as he scans the game, even though I know it doesn’t really help.  There is a thing called “travelling” which is a penalty like “offsides” in football, and in both you have to stop the game.  Fouls in basketball make the ref explain himself to the scorekeeper, and he indicates the errant player’s jersey number (star-hand + fist means 5-0 or fifty).  There are several types.  You can grab somebody (indicated by putting your hands on your hips in a pouty sort of way) or make the fist sign, which means that you grabbed their wrist, which is illegal.  I have never yet seen a single foul take place, as they must be hidden by the smash-up of bodies under the hoop, and many parents on our team are very dubious about the calls.  There is general disbelief, outrage, and even wounded cries of protest: 
“Yo, ref, are you kiddin’ me?  O, My GOD!”  
I find this delightful.  We do not protest fouls against the other team, however, and find them instead one more sign of a just and orderly universe.

Keep in mind that these are kids, sixteen and seventeen years old, none of whom were this tall and strong last year, and who have played together for three months.  Only five key players are allowed on the court at a time, and they have worked out a surprisingly sophisticated system for keeping the ball circling in on the basket, trying to pass it among themselves as they tighten the noose, coordinated and wolf-like, closer and closer until someone, by dint of his wit, strength and speed can find a hole in the defense interference and burst up with the ball, rising above the greedy hands of his opponents, and, at the apex of his leap toss the ball in an graceful arc that will take it into the throat of the basket and down.  
YESSS!

Imagine running in front of a train, pausing on the tracks long enough to thread a needle, and then jumping off in time.  Could you do it?  Obviously in basketball there is no sudden death move as in front of a train, but there’s risk.   Public embarrassment is a little death and a horrible thing.  Keeping a game face, not revealing in your expression the confidence-crushing fact that you just got confused in front of you parents, friends, and teachers and enthusiastically passed the ball the point guard on the other team — well, it’s hard.  Especially if there is a lot at stake.

The game is only half the reason people go.  The tortilla chips and hotdogs (each only two dollars) are another good reason.  But the main attraction for the audience is probably the 
audience.  
Over the percussive redounding is an underthrum of social politics.  I watched with wonder once as a young girl and her friend wound their way through the guys sitting in the stands, literally brushing against many of the young men there who steadfastly ignored them (game face again), and then the two split up.  One of the girls sat next to one guy.  He was impassive, staring out at the game.  She sidled in quite close to him and just sat there, waiting.  Her friend walked at the bottom of the bleachers in a slinky way, carefully avoiding making eye-contact with her partner.  I’m not sure what going on, but abruptly, as if called off by the coach, the two girls exited the stadium giving off the vibe that something had been resolved. I looked to the refs for explanation of what happened with the girls.  Was there a foul?  Grabbing?  Hand Holding?  He did not explain.

I bring a book sometimes but never read it.  I usually find joy in just being there.  It’s my chapel, as Pico Iyer put it in an article we read.  Where he notices “the worn stones, the little crosses,” I have come to notice the loud black girls, the girlfriends (?!) sitting on the sidelines with the team, the hulking drake Muscovy parents, giant men in leather jackets that spell out in sequins on the back “MGM BOXING ” and “THE STRIP.”  The  smell of popcorn,  and the parents yelling out “Tyquan, Tyquan” as he makes another two points look easy, or watching Eli get the ball and drive through the throng to the three point-line where he stops and pauses -- 
the train thundering down upon him 
-- and leaps up to make a high arc with the basketball that falls, most of the time falls, straight in and through the basket without even ruffling the skirts of the net.  

That’s joy.
That's joy.

Playing Catch

Jackson is on his way upstairs.  This could take a while, as he tends to get caught in various temporal eddies, where he swirls for what (to us) can be a minute, or five, or a half hour.  I asked him once what happened when I sent him upstairs to get his shoes and 20 minutes later he ambled down the stairs in them.  What did you do up there? I asked, not unkindly.  He replied that he was sitting on his bed, just thinking.  It’s hard to know if that’s what he remembers or what he did.  It was another time zone, another discourse, a different operating system.

            We just played ball in real time.  He’s got quite an arm, and this year I get to see him mutate, under my gaze, from a smallish, loud child with a squeaky voice to a larger, thumpier version of himself.  The topography of his face is shifting, too, as his eyebrows become more like eaves over his eyes, his face narrowing.  Sometimes when he enters the room I don’t quite know who he is.  There are two inches or more unaccounted for by some basic reference circuit in my brain, and his new height delays my recognition.  That must be a basic filter for recognizing, height is.  His mom, my wife, is pretty short; his father is about my height.  This is the fourth time I’ve been an observer to this long moment, the period that comes after the baby teeth fall out and before the wisdom teeth break through.  Some inner chemical mechanism slides into place and slowly, over the next few years, he spins into a new identity.  It’s like watching one of those cool hidden doors in an old movie.  There is a grinding sound and the wall is transformed into a door. You walk through, it closes behind you as if nothing had changed, but actually everything has changed. You’re in the secret laboratory they always talked about.  For the next few years you get to tinker with the basic elements of life in your dark experiments.  Plus you eventually get a driver’s license and girlfriends.  What a trip.

            Jackson is deep into lacrosse, a game so infernally complex that the Iroquois invented it to drive the colonists back to Massachusetts or wherever they came from.  Not infrequently I stand on the sidelines of the game completely unable to recognize Jackson but for his jersey number, which I can't always make out, and so have to look for his helmet which has some subtle distinctions from the others.  The boys sweep back and forth across the playing field here in Tully.  The flat fields between the ridges on either side of this glacial valley frame their play. They seem to know what they are doing. There is a lot of yelling, and you get to actually whack your opponents with your stick, a refreshingly honest practice, I think.  In comparison, baseball seems very abstract.  When you’re on the offence in baseball, the hitter stands alone and swings at a ball.  That fast ball, intentionally directed away from the hitter, functions as a stand-in for the opponent. You don’t attack anybody, don’t even touch them.  It’s closer to chess than lacrosse.  Much more cerebral and less confrontational.  I hear the Iroquois around here, who invented the game, used to play lacrosse without helmets, gloves, or pads.  Without fields, too, for they would chase each other through the woods and probably beat the shit out of each other with their sticks.  Now that’s gutsy.  I would so fail.

            My dad would have too.  In fact, he failed at every sport, every competition that required physical display.  He used to run when we lived in Iowa, long before running was normal in the countryside.  He quit pretty quickly.  Our neighbors would pull up alongside him and ask how he was doing, if he needed a ride.  The good people, farmers all, who offered to help, must have been perplexed.  Doubtless their whole day was spent loading hay and cooking and running to the feed mill and welding broken plow tips back on the damn machine.  So Professor Franke is charging down the rutted road in shorts again, wearing a pair of nice new shoes he is just going to wreck in the mud, and doing it for no good reason but to go around the fields?  Can you say a little more about how that works?

            My dad's running didn’t last long.  Yet about the same time, I joined the track team at United Community School in Boone, Iowa, where I ran a series of drills across the football field on nice days and practiced passing the baton sometimes.  Hurdles were a challenge as I was the shortest kid in school, even shorter than Raj Lartius (our only non-European student, though we did have a black girl for one day in sixth grade and we all agreed that she was very nice and that you can’t judge a book by its cover). Raj was nice, too, but smart enough to avoid anything short kids should avoid, like pole vaulting, hurdling, and discus throwing.  Plain vanilla laps and sprints -- he knew how to play as a member of the team, not make a big wonky deal of himself.  That is not an easy lesson for all of us.

            My single venture into sports meant I had to stay after school and run laps with Raj and others, which was difficult since it was so often snowing in March, April and May.  It was also hard because I had very short legs and moved them slowly, so eventually they gave me the discus to throw.  You have to understand that throwing the discus is not easy.  There is a complicated sequence of steps you have to take as you pirouette around on in the box, holding a heavy piece of iron.  Imagine a cold metal Frisbee.  Imagine dressing in shorts and a t-shirt in the incessant, driving, snow-scented wind and waiting your chance to do the three-step-and-release dance, releasing the object correctly, using your entire body like a sling, snapping the discus into flight.  Imagine it snapping into flight and dropping into the saturated turf about 18 inches past your shoe.

            This did not disappoint me. I was disappointed, however, when our track meet was cancelled because of snow.  My moment in the spotlight was taken from me, which was mostly ok because I knew I was terrible, but I had secret naive hopes that I might be able, somehow, to fling that damn discus all the way into the next cornfield.  I wanted my chance.

            But our second track meet was also cancelled.

            As was the next, and the next, and the next. Snow fell for every scheduled competition and make-up day that year, except for the very last meet.  I don’t remember riding the bus out there, who we played, where it was, but I do remember it was spring and there were dandelions up in the green.  I remember that one kid on our team snorted a huge blast of something aerosol in his nose and staggered around (it wasn’t me), and we all agreed that he seemed like a good kid, and, sadly, you can’t judge a book by its cover.  But it wasn't all fun and games.  We forgot to bring the discus to the one and final meet and then found, after we arrived, that the “home” team didn’t have one either.  We had no choices but to simply skip the event.  All those months and days after school, all those parent trips to the school to pick me up, all those laps, all for nothing.  Though I had no prayer of throwing that thing a tenth the distance most kids could, especially not big corn-fed Iowan farm boys, boys who could wing that god-dang thing, there may have been some tears.  I was sort of proud of the fact that I could throw the discus out of the ring, sometimes.  It seemed entirely possible that today was the day I would actually throw it, not just drop it in the right direction.

            Thus ended my sports career.  My parents were, I’m sure, relieved, my dad especially, as he was the principal chauffeur after school.  I think it was on one of those long drives home after track practice that he told me of his adventures with baseball. Apparently it didn’t go well.  He described himself as a “dreamy” child and his lack of enthusiasm for organized sports meant that he was automatically put in the outfield.  He didn’t have glasses at the time -- didn’t even know his vision was bad.  He would stand in the outfield for hours and when there was a rare high fly ball he would see nothing and hear nothing but his teammates yelling at him to catch it, catch it, catch it! – and then hear the ball hit the sod.  Or, worse, smash right into him.  The rhythm of sports became, for him, absolute boredom punctuated by screams and then a mysterious whack out of the sky. The next day he would have to stand in that humiliating social hierarchy, the bunch-up, from which captains pick their team.  My father, like me after him, was always picked last, and I imagine the swarthy boys, the ones who knew the names of various football plays and saw their future as little more than a series of sweat-related celebrations, groaned at my father just as they groaned at his son when I was the default last pick and the team had to take me.  Somehow that experience, repeated every recess, didn’t light the fire inside of me for more sports.  My dad and I did throw the ball around once, but it was an awkward affair, and we both spent a lot of time chasing after grounders until we just quit. The whole father and son bonding thing didn’t happen over sports.  It happened, but not in a way that required him to know the rules of some strange game.

            Thus I learned almost nothing about sports.  What I did glean on the field I absorbed while at recess in Napier elementary, one year before the entire empty school, down to the last brick, was sucked up in a tornado on a summer evening, leaving me with a vestigial memory of there being “downs” in football, that there was a thing called “dribbling” and a “lay-up” in basketball, and that there is a process by which you can strike out both by missing a pitch and by not even trying for a pitch, which, you will admit, is a little difficult to understand—an arcane and cabalistic knowledge.  I learned these sciences entirely by playing kickball in the dust beside a line of windbreak trees so threadbare that we’d have to stop sometimes when there was a dust storm, each of us turning away and covering our faces with our shirts while the big red rubber kickball was blown distant into the outfield and pinned against the billowing chain-link fence.

The basics did me pretty fine until I had sons.  Two of my boys in particular zeroed in on organized sports.  I modeled this manly art for them with my short but incandescent period as a kindergarten soccer coach. The position actually did not require any skill or knowledge of the game, but did require me to be really nice to little kids and try to get them to kick the ball in a certain standardized direction: toward the other team’s goal.  That rarely happened and it didn’t matter, which was reassuring to me.  These kids understood nothing except the joy of kicking the ball, of chasing it down. Team play was a hopeless abstraction.  These children were swarmers, and my ignorance was a perfect fit for theirs.

            Both Jackson and Eli love baseball. Eli’s on the Junior Varsity team this year and takes it very seriously like the rest of his projects. Somewhere along the line he learned that doing your sincere best, being a good team player, is the whole point, something that escapes me often. He is, in every way, better at baseball I am. When we play catch he gives me endless advice, assuming the role of the pater familias a little prematurely. Nothing about my stance, delivery, or grip is working, he says. I try. But I have mostly learned that throwing the baseball is in fact not just an instinctual thing.  There is a lot of skill, a lot of practice involved.  He showed me how to lift my opposite leg and make a little stomp as I deliver the ball, catapulting the ball in an arc toward my opponent/collaborator.  It sure feels weird at first, like I’m having a little fit or temper tantrum. My friend Jesse took time to show me his approach, and it mostly reinforced what Eli had been trying to teach me. But the whole thing—the whole thing is so awkward. I know I’m not getting it, but Jesse is as easy as Eli is serious. I can aim the ball, but what does “make an arc” and “keep it tighter to your chest” really mean in terms of physical dynamics? I was describing this confusion to my friend Matt and he understood the terms—his father was a professional baseball (AAA) for a while.  I didn’t have the courage to admit that I don’t even know what AAA stands for, and that old fear, that sense of impossibility, leaked in again.

            It’s spring here. The trees are righteous. When the sun shines on their photosynthesizing palms I can feel the joy. A bluebird has taken over the birdhouse on the edge of our lawn. A few minutes ago a young deer stepped silently and smoothly through the trees, attracting the absolute least amount of attention possible. But I saw it. And yesterday, Jackson and I were in the front lawn, the sun hot but diffuse, and we were playing catch. It went like it usually does: Jackson zinging in fastballs that I have to force myself not to flinch from. The sting in my palm is a disincentive, but I put my all into grabbing the ball. After a while, I noticed that I was catching it above and behind my head, without looking. Sometimes I would have to turn and stretch my gloved hand toward the ball far to my right side, crossing over my body and, to my surprise, there would be a ball in the pocket when I looked. It was a little like Christmas, those unexpected finds. At the same time, I noticed my pitch was getting slightly smoother. I could feel in my arm and torso certain coherence.  My pitches were getting faster, more accurate (with lots of grounders and wild, over-his-head pitches). Jackson never complained.  He takes his sports seriously.  

           I noticed that as it got easier to throw, I began unintentionally gripping the ball more lightly. Loose in my hand, the leather slipped across my fingertips, and I felt my palm and fingers splay wider. My hand became less of a pincer and more of a scoop for throwing. When I got nervous—worried about being able to make a shot or thinking about work, for instance, my grip would tighten up, and the ball would slow down, tangle up, or bounce off the grass once or twice before dropping in Jackson’s general direction.  

            I thought about Eli on the mound, how the whole game is waiting on you, parents and teammates watching you, and the pressure to keep in mind the runner on first base (fast?), the next runner up (who?), the full count (or is it only 2-2?), and the terrible pressure to throw the ball accurately, within inches, but not what the hitter expects and in all this, how hard it must be to relax and focus on the stance, not tighten up your fist and force the ball to the catcher.  The greater the pressure, the greater the need to let it flow over you, aware of it, but not tangled in it.  Oh! In a moment of insight, after stopping a hot fastball from Jackson (thwack)! I started to suspect there was something really wonderful about sport, that it demanded a lot of control, the control that comes from being relaxed in despite the pain and noise.  This is just like meditating.  You have to be fully present.  Catch is like meditating, is like any good practice.  I imagine the post-glacial Iroquois hunting quail down the hill.  If you’re hungry, if your kids are hungry, there is a lot riding on your ability right now to find the right posture, get the right aim, relax, time it right. The more you need it, the harder it is to relax and the more important it is that you figure out how. Good practice is opposed to froth, the frothy of news of the day, the froth of worry and ambition.  So this is what discipline means, I thought, standing in the dappled sunlight, waiting for Jackson to tie his shoe. Discipline is desire with restraint.  It's something you feel in your body, a certain rhythm or posture. To me, that’s the same sort of work a parent might have to learn.  The rhythm, what feels right, the endless repetition as you and your kids are learning with each other -- and practicing on each other, growing up slowly. I thought of my own father and how bad he was at playing catch or anything that smacked of traditional masculine play.  But his instincts were so often right about raising kids (thwack)! He must have been able to feel all the worry and aspirations he had for his kids, but let the tension go, too, not unlike a pitcher or hunter deep in the game.  His was just a different playing field, more cerebral, more academic.  I find myself hoping I can sustain my practice long enough with these boys to learn something (thwack)! And with that thought in my head, I throw another crazy pitch, way over Jackson’s head, deep into the woods.

Stepping up

So we just got back from Joe's final college visit, this time to the University of Pennsylvania (not Penn State).  It's a small campus, or seem that way, with very old buildings and lots of money.  What a joy to be there on a beautiful fall day for their homecoming. Images: boys in khaki pants and blue jackets standing around looking awkward; tall thin man yelling at his family, the tattoos on his neck stretched and uglier than before; Joe talking to me, reading to me, telling me jokes all the way down there and back.  It's a fancy school, very competitive and cliquish, but not a bad place for Joe.  The whole Ben Franklin idealism and activism might not be as vibrant day-to-day as it is on campus.  But it was a very lovely, demanding and strong campus.  It would change Joe's life to go there.

But the reason I'm writing is because soon after we parked, far up the block the marching band started.  Their double drumming and keyboards sounded like like a war starting, or a party, or both.  It was hard not to dance to it.  And Joe realized his polymath friend Jacob might be in that crowd, so we ran ahead -- sure enough, there was Jacob.  He was so happy to see Joe, and hugged him.  That small gesture, the welcome, the friend who make it all real, could have been the moment Joe needed to help him make his part of the decision of where to go to college (the college itself makes the other half, of course).  And I think I saw it there, as we wound through the campus at the tail of the marching band, a little celebration in progress: the small moment where Joe steps up into a new future, as if stepping into an invisible bus that drove his future off but left him walking next to his friend.  A small moment.  I was moved by it, and proud. Again.

Alien Figures

They clean my office once a year.  I do it less frequently.  So by the time I got back after the cleaning weekend, my floor was immaculate, and all the year's mail, essays, books, cables, cords, and binders were put back approximately in the same place as they were when I left, but not quite.  It made me feel that I was walking into someone else's office, like I was a foreigner to the place.  I moved stuff around, puttered a little.  And then, hiding in plain sight but made visible by the subtle changes over the weekend, I found a small framed child's drawing behind my printer, down low.  

The drawing is on construction paper and mounted in a super-cheap pressed paper frame. Behind the glass, in contrasting colors, are two of those weird alien shapes small children make when they are just starting to draw humans, big heads and spidery limbs.  It's labelled "Joe" and "Daddy."  Ok, this would ordinarily not make me pause -- I've seen it a hundred times and more -- but I've been missing Joe lately, especially now that he's going off to college soon, and maybe also a little because he's on his way to New Orleans, flying with his brother and a bunch of other Lutherans to demolish uninhabitable houses there and start making way for the new.  I hear they will also spend some time in the Superdome with 30,000 other faithful, reflecting on their spiritual condition, perhaps upsetting the tables in their own cluttered temples. I'm really glad Joe gets a chance to do this.  He's an intellectual kid and some of the church's habits do not line up well with the scientific mind he's got.  The soul work will do him good, help him know that he's not so alone or so special.  


He's certainly special to me, though.  Yesterday I was driving toward his workplace and saw him walking on the roadside, long, lanky, with that loping gait that white nerdy kids have, all tennis shoes and elbows, and I watched as he looked up and slowly — I saw it gather on his face — come to recognize first the car and then the driver.  He was thrilled to have me pull over, and as he folded himself in, I noticed that his cheekbones and jaw are growing into an adult face, his features growing in, and becoming handsome, really quite handsome.  When we were in the store a few minutes later, teenaged girls would pause their gaze on him for a beat and then -- continue on, shopping for their candy or makeup or whatever it is young girls go to the drug store for.  He is oblivious.


He is a deep-feeling kid, though.  When he was young, we used to dance.  He and I played the hell out of Dwight Yokam's This Time and Pearl Jam's Ten in my first house, in my first living room, first marriage and first child. It was a special time and I knew then, but quietly, the way you will run across an image in a book and know you should remember it, you can hear it ring like a church bell, but the supper is boiling over and the cat is stuck in the basement and the snowplow just walled you in again at the top of your driveway. And so you live through it and store it away hurriedly, hoping the odors and rhythms will be traced somewhere in your Lascaux skull, fearing that it will be discovered as something primitive and undecipherable in later years.  

He would reach up sometimes, very small, and say "Daddy, pick you up?," confusing his pronouns, something that much amused me.  And we danced with abandon (such a lovely phrase), me with a heavy, hot, sweaty baby and him with a taut graduate student new father and us grooving on the riff, listening to the freight-train distance and joy in Dwight Yokam's guitars. Seems like it was always winter, the low sun coming in through the small windows.  At maybe three years, one day he handed me a picture of us, the one I mentioned above, with Daddy's stick arm, fingerless, reaching out to the baby's fingerless stick arm, and he gave it to me with great solemnity. He said to me that it was a picture of us dancing.  He was giving me a gift only I was to have, something the rest of the world could not understand. And I was honored by it.

And yet I have something to apologize for and perhaps one day to expiate: when I said that I would frame it — I was so proud of it — he started to cry.  No, he insisted.  He didn't want anyone to see it.  He was surprised I'd even think of doing that, I sensed. It was our secret, our shared knowledge.  Oh, that was sweet.  So what did I do?  I framed it the next day in that cheap frame and put it in my office. The next time he came by, of course, I didn't even try to hide it and when he saw it, he was horrified — and started to cry.  


He is oblivious to that time, I'm sure does not remember it, but I do.  I remember how I mangled that secret.  And today when I found the picture again it made me choke up, for I remembered again breaking it, the promise, and felt how long ago that time had been already. I am sorry, and yet the picture stays on my desk. And what do you do with regrets like these?

We still reach toward each other, alien figures that we are. I have enjoyed this good, kind boy this summer, which is about all I can do, planning travels and talking about ideas and colleges and people. This sturdy and ephemeral young man, this opinionated and hale youth, the one I recently carried and sang to ("I'm a thousand miles from nowhere / And there's no place I'd rather be") is growing up because and in spite of my mistakes, and today I am filled with a sharp mix of pride and regret that is ameliorated only by picturing him on his own adventures, ones I won't be there to write about.