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Copyright
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019
Copyright © Tim O’Brien 2019
Cover photograph © Tim O’Brien
Joseph O’Neill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Information on previously published material appears here.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008372453
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008372477
Version: 2019-09-27
Dedication
For Tad, Timmy, and Meredith O’Brien
Epigraph
An entry from our babysitter’s journal, January 8, 2008: “You have never lived till you see a two-year-old fall in the toilet.”
And there goes Tad, running through a heavy rain on Rue Malar in Paris, clutching a child’s umbrella, carefully splashing down in each available puddle. After a time, he lifts the umbrella over Meredith’s head and says, “You are my sunshine, even when it’s raining.”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
1. A Letter to My Son
2. A Maybe Book (I)
3. Row, Row
4. Skin
5. Trusting Story
6. First Words
7. Home School
8. The Best of Times
9. Highballs
10. Spelling Lesson
11. Home School
12. Hygiene
13. The Magic Show (I)
14. Abashment
15. Sushi
16. Pride (I)
17. Balance
18. Child’s Play
19. Telling Tales (I)
20. Telling Tales (II)
21. Pride (II)
22. What If?
23. Home School
24. Home School
25. The Old Testament
26. Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (I)
27. The Language of Little Boys
28. Home School
29. Turkey Capital of the World
30. Pride (III)
31. Pacifism
32. Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (II)
33. Home School
34. Home School
35. Easier Homework
36. Timmy’s Bedroom Door
37. Lip Kissing
38. The King of Slippery
39. Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (III)
40. Timmy’s Gamble
41. Dulce et Decorum Est
42. Pride (IV)
43. War Buddies
44. A Maybe Book (II)
45. The Magic Show (II)
46. Practical Magic
47. An Immodest and Altogether Earnest Proposal
48. The Golden Viking
49. Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (IV)
50. Getting Cut
51. Home School
52. Home School
53. The Debating Society
54. Sushi, Sushi, Sushi
55. Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (V)
56. Into the Volcano
57. And into the Stew Pot
58. Lesson Plans
59. Tad’s Literary Advice
60. One Last Lesson Plan
Notes on Sources
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Tim O’Brien
About the Publisher
1
A Letter to My Son
Dear Timmy,
A little more than a year ago, on June 20, 2003, you dropped into the world, my son, my first and only child—a surprise, a gift, an eater of electrical cords, a fertilizer factory, a pain in the ass, and a thrill in the heart.
Here’s the truth, Timmy. Boy, oh, boy, do I love you. And, boy, do I wish I could spend the next fifty or sixty years with my lips to your cheek, my eyes warming in yours.
But as you wobble into your sixteenth month, it occurs to me that you may never really know your dad. The actuarial stuff looks grim. Even now, I’m what they call an “older father,” and in ten years, should I have the good luck to turn sixty-eight, I’ll almost certainly have trouble keeping up with you. Basketball will be a problem. And twenty years from now … well, it’s sad, isn’t it?
When you begin to know me, you will know an old man.
Sadder yet, that’s the very best scenario. Life is fragile. Hearts go still. So now, just in case, I want to tell you about your father, the man I think I am. And by that I mean not just the graying old coot you may vaguely remember, but the guy who shares your name and your blood and half your DNA, the Tim who himself was once a Timmy.
Above all, I am this: I am in love with you. Pinwheeling, bedazzled, aching love. If you know nothing else, know that you were adored by your dad.
In many ways, a man is what he yearns for, and while it may never happen, I yearn to walk a golf course at your side. I yearn for a golden afternoon in late August when you will sink a tough twelve-footer to beat me by a stroke or two. I yearn to shake your hand and say, “Nine more holes?”
I yearn to tell you, man to man, about my time as a soldier in a faraway war. I want to tell you what I saw and what I did. I yearn to hear you say, “It’s okay, Dad. All that’s over.”
So many other things, too. Right now, as I watch you sleep, I imagine scattering good books around the house—in the bathrooms, on the kitchen counter, on the floor beside your bed—and I imagine being there to see you pick one up and turn that first precious page. I long to see the rapture on your face. (Right now, you eat books.)
I yearn to learn from you. I want to be your teacher, yes, but I also want to be your student. I want to be taught, again and again, what I’ve already started to know: that a grown man can find pleasure in the sound of a happy squeal, in the miraculous sound of approaching feet.
I yearn to watch you perform simple acts of kindness and generosity. I yearn to witness your first act of moral courage. I yearn to hear you mutter, however awkwardly, “Yeah, yeah, I love you, too,” and I yearn to believe you will mean it.
It’s hard to accept as I watch you now, so lighthearted and purely good, so ignorant of gravestones, but, Timmy, you are in for a world of hurt and heartache and sin and doubt and frustration and despair. Which is to say you are in for being alive. You will do fine things, I know, but you will also do bad things, because you are wholly human, and I wish I could be there, always, to offer forgiveness.
More than that, I long for the day when you might also forgive me. I waited too long, Timmy. Until the late afternoon of June 20, 2003, I had defined myself, for better and for worse, by the novels and stories I had written. I had sought myself in sentences. I had loved myself only insofar as I loved a chapter or a scene or a scrap of dialogue. This is not to demean my life or my writing. I do hope you will someday read the books and stories; I hope you will find my ghost in those pages, my best self, the man I would wish to be for you. Call it pride, call it love, but I dare to hope that you will commit a line or two to memory, for in the dream-space between those vowels and consonants is the sound of your father’s voice, the kid I once was, the man I now am, the old man I will soon become.
That said, I would trade every syllable of my life’s work for an extra five or ten years with you, whatever the going rate might be. A father’s chief duty is not to instruct or to discipline. A father’s chief duty is to be present. And I yearn to be with you forever, always present, even knowing it cannot and will not happen.
There have been advantages, of course, to becoming a father at my age. I doubt that at twenty-eight or even at thirty-eight I would have fully appreciated, as I do now, the way you toddled over to me this morning and gave me a first unsolicited hug. (You knew I was waiting, didn’t you?) I doubt I would have so easily tolerated the din at bedtime, or your stubborn recklessness, or your determination to electrocute yourself, or the mouthfuls of dirt you take from the potted plants in the foyer, or how, just a half hour ago, you hit the delete key as I approached the end of this letter.
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
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