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.
