Shaq O’Neal to mount a unicycle.
Decades ago, after the publication of my first book, I called my mom and dad to ask how they’d feel if I were to drop out of graduate school and devote myself to becoming a novelist.
“You’ll regret it,” my mother said. “For sure.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Harvard is Harvard,” said my father. His voice seemed to me uncommonly ardent, a little desperate, as if I were contemplating suicide or bank robbery or both at once. “Listen to me. The world is full of people who think they can be writers. I’m one of them. Look how it turned out. Don’t do it.”
“All right, thanks,” I said, and then I did drop out.
Not immediately: I waited a couple of years. And yet in the midst of that phone call—somewhere between “Listen to me” and “Don’t do it”—there was a finality that slammed down on me with the full weight of the future. I remember hanging up the phone. I remember staring down at my hands. I remember how free I felt, how light and happy, and yet a moment later I was struck by a dizzying and unmistakable surge of terror. I knew what was coming. I would be exchanging security for jeopardy, forfeiting a Harvard degree for a degree in advanced uncertainty. The consequences, whether good or bad, would be with me forever.
Almost certainly what my mother and father had wanted for me was what every parent wants for a child, which above all else is safety. Graduate school was safe; writing novels and stories was not. And now, as a parent myself, I understand the ferocity of that protective instinct. Back during my “Row, Row” days, and over the perilous years afterward, the safety of Timmy and Tad had consumed me, and although I’m far from qualified as a biologist, I’d be surprised if our human DNA were not threaded with a gene or two that chemically wires us to be hypervigilant when it comes to the well-being of our offspring. It is this guardian instinct, I’m almost sure, that makes me worry about lacrosse sticks and soccer balls—a deep-seated, almost reptilian fear that my sons will be at risk in what can be a ruthlessly competitive world. And not just physically at risk. Emotionally, too. Who wants an unhappy kid?
The problem with this sort of thinking, pretty obviously, is that it has the sound of half-baked determinism, a survival-of-the-fittest rigidity that is at odds with the gentling subtleties of modern-day psychology. Even to my own ear, these concerns have the ring of something illiberal and Darwinian, not to mention way too Texan. I should be content with hula hoops. I should let the kids define themselves, each according to his special talents. And no doubt I should celebrate Tad’s soccer ball sharing and Timmy’s peculiar midfield balancing ballet. I realize all that. Yet when I stroll down high school hallways, as I often do on my travels, there is no mistaking the fact that athletics matter a great deal: the letter jackets, the rah-rah posters, the parent booster clubs, the no-expense-spared gyms and stadiums and locker rooms. And like it or not, ignore it or not, these high school kingdoms are often ruled more by popularity than by probity, more by charm than by charity, and not infrequently more by brawn than by brains.
For boys—and now for girls as well—athleticism remains an important coin of the realm, and like my own parents, I am sometimes drawn to impose my own yearnings on Tad and Timmy. How do I stop wishing that they might someday score a goal or two? How do I stop wishing for a moment of deftness or speed or strength or competitive spirit? How could I stop wishing for some plain old competence?
It isn’t that I care about sports—I don’t. What I do care about, probably too much, is the happiness and security of my sons, and now, as I sit writing these lines, I envision their coming teenage years and all the stresses that can add up to real pain for a kid. Right now, I suppose, their unaggressive antics seem cute; right now, it’s okay—or almost okay—that people chuckle and wag their heads. But in a few years Timmy’s and Tad’s dogged pacifism may be viewed as considerably less than cute by their coaches and teammates. Chuckles might hurt. Failure might hurt even more. One thing can lead to another: self-esteem problems, a sense of not belonging, humiliation, ridicule, second-class citizenship, and abject defeat in the teenage hierarchy wars.
All this, I realize, could easily be dismissed as a father’s obsessive hand-wringing. But cliques do exist. Kids can be cruel. Every day in this country, 160,000 children skip school because of bullying. The whole popularity imperative is an old and clichéd story, almost a funny story, unless of course you happen to be that unpopular bozo who can’t hit a baseball or catch a football, in which case you own the cliché. It’s all yours and it isn’t pleasant.
Tad and Timmy aren’t in that boat yet. They’re young. They’re still finding their way. They have plenty of time, and so, for now, all I can do is hope for the best. And who knows? Kids develop at different rates, in different ways, and maybe the boys will turn out to be terrific athletes. Maybe prom kings. Maybe Friday-night heroes. In fact, in a decade or two, they may well become headliners at Cirque du Soleil, a couple of sequined superstars, a tightrope-riding unicyclist and a stripping hula-hooper.
In the decades since that phone conversation with my mom and dad, I’ve often tried to rearrange things in my head. I’ll imagine my mother saying, “Of course, do whatever’s right,” and later my father will come on and listen to me for a while and finally say, “Well, I messed up my own dream. I was too lazy, too scared, too something, and I don’t want you to end up like me. Harvard’s just a fancy word. Go write your books. I’ll pretend I’m you.”
It didn’t happen that way. But as the years passed I began to feel as if it almost did happen, or as if it could have happened, because my parents were decent and thoughtful people, and because they wanted to protect me from the consequences of failure. Somewhere near the surface of their thoughts, I’m nearly certain, both understood that I was seeking not their permission but a kind of liberation, not their happy hallelujahs but an acknowledgment, however reluctant, that I was ready to weigh the risks all on my own. And of course they were right: the risks were real. I’d be giving up a great deal. By that point I’d completed my Harvard course work, passed my oral exams, and was only a year or so away from a doctorate. Still, I’d known from the start that graduate school amounted to little more than a convenient hideout after Vietnam, a place to put my head together, and my thoughts and ambitions were in no way academic. For more than three years I’d been trooping from class to class, a bit dazed, a bit surprised to find myself alive. I wasn’t unhappy, exactly. I’m not quite sure what I was. Bewildered, maybe. Disconnected. I remember thinking how civilized it all seemed, the campus and everyone on it, so peaceful and abstract and decorous, so weirdly theoretical in comparison to the boonies of Quang Ngai. I was also aware that the war had done things to me that could not be undone. Partly, I guess, I was full of anger. There was guilt, too, and lots of it. I had betrayed my conscience—my own heart and my own head—by going to a war I considered unjust. I had participated in the killing, and I had done so out of moral cowardice. There were no other words for it. I had been afraid of ridicule and embarrassment. I had been afraid of displeasing others, including my parents and my hometown and my country, and when you do things you believe are wrong because you are afraid not to do them, you cannot call it anything but what it is, and the correct word is cowardice. I needed to confront these things. By daylight I was fine, but at night I was not fine. When I couldn’t sleep, which was almost always, I’d get out of bed, sit at my desk, and try to dump the terrible shit on pieces of paper—mortar rounds exploding all around me, a young girl lying dead in a dry rice paddy, her face half gone, one of my buddies telling me to lay off the pity and suck it up and act like a soldier and stop whining about a dead gook.
I’d scribble these things down and go back to bed, and in the morning I’d head for my 9 a.m. class in statistics.
My
