Dad’s Maybe Book. Tim O’Brien

probably homeless, though not certainly, for his appearance and carriage had none of the beaten-down destitution of life on the streets. His clothing seemed clean; he was close-shaven; he wore a new-looking cap with the words “Vietnam Veteran” imprinted on it.

      Timmy yelled at Meredith to stop the car, but it was rush hour and stopping wasn’t possible. Timmy looked over his shoulder as the crying man receded, and then Timmy himself was crying. He cried all the way home. He cried again at the dinner table. It was more than crying—it was unstoppable, quivering, somebody-has-died wailing. He got out of his chair and lay on the floor and bawled.

      Early the next morning, before the sun had risen, I found my son sitting on a kitchen countertop, where he had just finished packing a brown paper bag with little gifts for the crying man on 15th Street. Timmy had packed a yo-yo, a sandwich, a granola bar, a photograph of himself, some fishing line, an apple, and a copy of one of my books. For several weeks afterward, riding to and from school, the boy searched the streets and sidewalks of Austin, but in the end, as anyone might guess, he never again saw the crying man on 15th Street. The sandwich grew moldy. The apple rotted. The granola bar was consumed by Timmy’s brother.

      No one in our family has forgotten this episode. Certainly, Timmy hasn’t.

      A year or so after the incident, for his English class, he began writing a poem called “My 15th Street Friend,” which is reprinted later in these pages. Though the poem isn’t bad for a nine-year-old, its literary merits and defects are not what caused me to look at my son in a new way. Rather, I was surprised—even amazed—that he had been carrying the hurt inside him for more than a year, that he had cared enough to still care, and that I had so wildly underestimated my own child. I would’ve guessed he might write about Minecraft, or about basketball, or about numerous other interests that appeared to consume him day after day. Not only had he not mentioned his 15th Street friend in many months, but virtually everything else in his life had seemed utterly transitory, here then gone. One moment he’d be clicking a Rubik’s Cube, the next moment he’d be watching NBA highlights, the next moment he’d be wrestling with his brother. Until the day he began writing the poem, I’d taken it for granted that his compassion was as short-lived and perfunctory as my own.

      As an adult, humbled by my own failures and deficiencies, I have come to expect the worst of myself, almost never the best, and Timmy’s compassion for a suffering stranger reminded me of my own pitiful mediocrity: how I donate a few bucks to the United Way but then avoid the eyes of the homeless. I may feel saddened, but I don’t cry. Nor do many others. Nor, I guess, do you.

      Now, after the passage of several years, what strikes me is the realization that an eight-year-old kid had become a better person that I am, able to feel what I do not. What had years ago been painful to me, seizing me by the throat, has now become little more than nervous embarrassment. What had once been empathy has become what Kafka calls the “frozen sea” of mankind’s heart. If a person’s humanity is measured by quality of feeling, my inner sea had frozen miles deep. This may be part of growing up, or part of living in an imperfect world, but it is no less depressing and no less despicable.

      Timmy’s poem, and the incident that generated it, made me want to take Kafka’s ax to the frozen sea inside me, and maybe that explains, at least in part, why this maybe book is being written in the first place. I want to hammer away at the ice. I want to yell I love you, I love you, with every stroke on this keyboard.