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
And then it becomes November 22, 2018.
My son Timmy has grown into a tall, basketball-loving fifteen-year-old. He has a brother, Tad, who is thirteen, and both have a father who, at age seventy-two, is at last approaching the end of this book of love letters to his children, along with a few anecdotes and some tentative words of advice.
I began writing back in 2003, stopped for a while, then resumed near the end of 2004. My intent was to leave behind little word-gifts for Timmy and his yet-to-be-born brother Tad, who had been conceived but was still waiting in the wings. The idea was to dash off a few short messages in a bottle that my kids might find tucked away in a dusty file cabinet long after my death. I was fifty-eight back then, not yet an old man, but the mathematics of mortality were already forbidding. It struck me that by the time the boys reached middle school, their father would almost certainly be mistaken for a grandfather, or maybe a grandfather’s elder brother. And I was correct about this. In the years between 2005 and 2019, Walmart cashiers and IHOP waitresses would receive my pissed-off glares, my sullen wags of the head, as I informed them that, no, those two boys were my own personal kids. There was nothing funny about it. There was nothing cute.
Reality is reality.
And so, late in 2004, near the end of October, I resolved to give Timmy and Tad what I have often wished my own father had given me—some scraps of paper signed “Love, Dad.” Maybe also a word of counsel. Maybe a sentence or two about some long-ago Christmas Eve. My father had always been a mystery to me, and he remains a mystery, and with this in mind, I wanted to offer Timmy and Tad a few scattered glimpses of their own dad, a man they might never really encounter. There was no literary impulse involved. There were no thoughts about making a book. My audience—if there would ever be an audience—was two little boys and no one else.
In 2004, Timmy was barely a toddler, and his brother Tad was little more than a pinprick of protein awaiting the light. But even so, for the next fifteen years, I talked to them on paper as if they were adults, imagining what they might want to hear from a father who was no longer among the living. I told the boys stories about their youth, and about my youth. I talked to them about books I had loved, writers I had admired, a war I had visited, a woman named Meredith who would become their mother. Along the way, I offered a few pointers about this and that. I admonished them to think for themselves, warned them against hypocrisy, and lectured them about the soul-throttling dangers of absolutism. I conducted home schooling classes. I wrote to the boys—no doubt in way too much detail—about my fascination with the battles of Lexington and Concord, and how, in a great many ways, my own war in Vietnam struck me as eerily similar. Over and over, I told them how very proud I was of their Rubik’s Cube speed-solving, their hula-hooping, their report cards, their unicycling, and especially their acts of kindness and human decency. I reminded them of funny things they had said and done. I reminded them of sad things, too—one concussion, two broken legs, my mother’s death. I applauded their first intelligible utterances. I used the stories of Ernest Hemingway as a window through which they might glimpse the things that have preoccupied me for more than fifty years—making sentences, making stories. I rhapsodized about my lifelong love for magic, a hobby that later led me to try my hand at performing the sorts of illusions found inside books. And so on.
I did not write to the boys often. Sometimes months would pass between the opening and concluding words of a single sentence. (Twice, an entire year passed.) Eventually, in late 2014, Tad proposed the idea of a maybe book. Meredith overheard. “You don’t have to commit to an actual book,” my wife said. “Just a maybe book. What you’ve written about fatherhood might mean something to other parents.”
“Or their kids,” said Tad.
The result is Tad’s maybe book.
Like the life I have lived, and probably like anyone’s life, these pages suffer from irreparable disunity. The book skips around in time, mostly because time has skipped around on me. It skips around in content, because my life’s contents have skipped around on me—terror to grief to rage to broken love to despair to elation to late-night conversations with eternity. In a novel or in a story, the illusion of order can be imposed on a human life. But in a book that remains essentially a compilation of love letters to my sons, the imposition of order would be an artificial disgrace and, worse yet, deceitful. My kids are real kids, I am a real father, and chaotic messiness has been the humbling theme of our time together.
Tad, thank you for the book’s title.
Timmy, thank you for your sternly revisionist views in regard to my faulty memory: “Dad, it didn’t actually happen that way.”
“How did it happen?”
“I don’t remember. But not that way.”
Timmy is just over two months old, nine weeks to be exact, and he won’t stop crying. He seems to hate his brand-new world and all things in it, including his crib and his rattle and his