I stand like tourists at an auto show, watching Tony guide his Mercedes out of the lot. Then we climb into my own car, the treated canvas top raised against the surprising springtime chill, and start for home.
Neither of us speaks. Sam tries out a couple of my CDs, dismisses them with grimaces as geriatric bluegrass crap, and punches off the stereo. We make our way in silence through the night-shadowed, seemingly abandoned town, as if it isn’t the right town but someother. My son beside me yet miles distant, I have little choice at this moment but to acknowledge that I might be lacking some of the necessary tools for what I hope to do in the here and now. To build a solid, lasting bridge between two people, let alone a father and son with a history like ours, is a mighty human endeavor, and to sit here and think I might be able to accomplish it alone, with no previous success to my credit (indeed, failures too numerous to catalog), a tube of glue, a few pickup sticks, and a dollop of spit, is nothing short of hubris. And hubris, the Greeks tell us, will see you dead. The robed chorus chanting your name until, in the last act, they bury and forget you.
I lower my window, suddenly needing to smell the ocean, to know where the hell I am. But the ocean is not to be located. What I get instead, crossing the 101, is the vehicular exhaust of other capsuled, weary dreamers shooting up and down the coast, their passage sounding to my estranged ears like blood rushing through a tunnel.
Five minutes later, I pull into my driveway and cut the engine.
“Work tomorrow,” I say. “Might as well turn in early.”
Sam doesn’t respond. We enter the house and I go to the kitchen for a glass of water. I can feel a headache coming on. When I come out, he’s already in his room with the door closed. I sit down on a chair facing the TV. But I don’t turn the set on, or drink the water, or do anything but think about the fact that, as my son so clearly registered—though admirably didn’t say aloud to a third party—I have never really seen him play ball. For three years, while he was between the ages of seven and a half and ten and a half, we occasionally played catch together on my rented lawn in Box Corner. Which at the time meant a lot to me; I won’t say it didn’t. My sense of things then was of an extended warm-up between two teammates old and young, the sweet early innings of what would eventually become a long, meaningful game stretching through the afternoon hours and into the starlit evening of our lives. A game whose memory we would both always cherish.
Of course, for many reasons, things did not turn out that way.
RUTH
W HEN THE CALL COMES , late afternoon on a Friday in May, she is sitting at the upright piano in her living room, a mug of steaming green tea on a coaster, playing a song that Sam loved as a baby, before he ever had language. Her memory not so much the proverbial sieve as an increasingly rusty grater, shredding little shards and slivers from the original whole. Sometimes you can tell where a piece came from, but often not. Giggling at dust in a sunbeam? A suddenly curled fist? A squeak like a rubbed balloon? Sam’s infant joy might have shown in anything. In lieu of being certain, she can just sit here and play the song, an American classic older than her grandparents, that gives rise, for her, to nostalgic images of wheat fields and haystacks, clean rivers and log fires. All of which, without lyrics to accompany the notes, maybe makes no sense, yet isn’t meaningless. It doesn’t matter that she never grew up with any of these iconic things herself. A loss of memory she can live with, but not a loss of feeling.
She plays three successive chords and breathes. She plays three more. She begins to hum, remembering her baby in her own way.
The cordless phone rings, and she reaches for it.
On the line, an official-sounding man introduces himself as Sam’s dean.
Correction. What he actually says
Neither of us speaks. Sam tries out a couple of my CDs, dismisses them with grimaces as geriatric bluegrass crap, and punches off the stereo. We make our way in silence through the night-shadowed, seemingly abandoned town, as if it isn’t the right town but someother. My son beside me yet miles distant, I have little choice at this moment but to acknowledge that I might be lacking some of the necessary tools for what I hope to do in the here and now. To build a solid, lasting bridge between two people, let alone a father and son with a history like ours, is a mighty human endeavor, and to sit here and think I might be able to accomplish it alone, with no previous success to my credit (indeed, failures too numerous to catalog), a tube of glue, a few pickup sticks, and a dollop of spit, is nothing short of hubris. And hubris, the Greeks tell us, will see you dead. The robed chorus chanting your name until, in the last act, they bury and forget you.
I lower my window, suddenly needing to smell the ocean, to know where the hell I am. But the ocean is not to be located. What I get instead, crossing the 101, is the vehicular exhaust of other capsuled, weary dreamers shooting up and down the coast, their passage sounding to my estranged ears like blood rushing through a tunnel.
Five minutes later, I pull into my driveway and cut the engine.
“Work tomorrow,” I say. “Might as well turn in early.”
Sam doesn’t respond. We enter the house and I go to the kitchen for a glass of water. I can feel a headache coming on. When I come out, he’s already in his room with the door closed. I sit down on a chair facing the TV. But I don’t turn the set on, or drink the water, or do anything but think about the fact that, as my son so clearly registered—though admirably didn’t say aloud to a third party—I have never really seen him play ball. For three years, while he was between the ages of seven and a half and ten and a half, we occasionally played catch together on my rented lawn in Box Corner. Which at the time meant a lot to me; I won’t say it didn’t. My sense of things then was of an extended warm-up between two teammates old and young, the sweet early innings of what would eventually become a long, meaningful game stretching through the afternoon hours and into the starlit evening of our lives. A game whose memory we would both always cherish.
Of course, for many reasons, things did not turn out that way.
RUTH
W HEN THE CALL COMES , late afternoon on a Friday in May, she is sitting at the upright piano in her living room, a mug of steaming green tea on a coaster, playing a song that Sam loved as a baby, before he ever had language. Her memory not so much the proverbial sieve as an increasingly rusty grater, shredding little shards and slivers from the original whole. Sometimes you can tell where a piece came from, but often not. Giggling at dust in a sunbeam? A suddenly curled fist? A squeak like a rubbed balloon? Sam’s infant joy might have shown in anything. In lieu of being certain, she can just sit here and play the song, an American classic older than her grandparents, that gives rise, for her, to nostalgic images of wheat fields and haystacks, clean rivers and log fires. All of which, without lyrics to accompany the notes, maybe makes no sense, yet isn’t meaningless. It doesn’t matter that she never grew up with any of these iconic things herself. A loss of memory she can live with, but not a loss of feeling.
She plays three successive chords and breathes. She plays three more. She begins to hum, remembering her baby in her own way.
The cordless phone rings, and she reaches for it.
On the line, an official-sounding man introduces himself as Sam’s dean.
Correction. What he actually says
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