protect the others, which we did with silence, as if to talk about things would pick the scabs and exacerbate the pain and delay the healing. This may seem stupid, or old-fashioned, or callous, or excessively Midwestern, or psychologically illiterate, or emotionally unsophisticated. But they loved me, and I loved them. Not to speak was a kind of speaking, at least in our family, and sometimes it was more powerful speaking than speaking itself.
Surely, though, my parents had to wonder what was eating at me as I considered dropping out of grad school. Surely they were frightened by the prospect. And surely they felt exactly the same helplessness, exactly the same terrified pride, that I feel today as Timmy and Tad begin to move away from what I want toward what they want.
Back in second grade, almost two years ago, Timmy had joined a unicycle club that met in his school gymnasium three or four afternoons a week. The club had been founded by an inspired, forward-thinking teacher, Jimmy “Pedals” Agnew, whose dream it was to empower young children with the challenge of mastering an extremely difficult but wholly noncompetitive athletic endeavor. There would be no winners and no losers. There would be no scores and no time clock. There would be no first-stringers and no second-stringers. There would be no 1-A and no 6-A. There would be no getting cut from the team. There would be no water boys and no cheerleaders. There would be no pep rallies. There would be no exclusion. There would be no favoritism by virtue of height or strength or speed or other such common standards of physicality. Instead, as Jimmy gently explained to his second-graders, they were in for a long, frustrating, and repetitive lesson in perseverance, lots of spills along the way, day after day of remounting the unicycle and trying again and then trying once more.
Frustrating was the correct word. Repetitive was also the correct word.
More than fourteen months elapsed before Timmy was able to ride at all, and even then Meredith and I would scamper along beside him, each of us holding one of his hands for balance. Many times, I lost hope. While other kids began pedaling around the gym—some of them simultaneously dribbling basketballs—Timmy spent his time sprawled on the floor or pinned helplessly to a wall. I worried about what appeared to be motor dysfunction. I worried about epilepsy. And yet the idea of the unicycle had somehow seized Timmy’s imagination. It was what he wanted, not what I wanted. He wouldn’t quit. He accepted the scraped knees and the Band-Aids and the sting of iodine. Slowly at first, and then as if awakened by thunder, Meredith and I noticed something emerging in our son that a novelist might call “character.” Not so long ago we’d been the parents of an unformed, carefree, almost generalized little boy, but now there was a new and emerging Timmyness, a core of being that seemed to forecast what he would become in the years ahead—an earnest, determined, and intensely focused human being. He had ambition. He had an unsettling hardness in his eyes. He’d mutter to himself, pick himself up, and try again. Both Meredith and I sensed that we were now in the presence of this unfamiliar future Timmy, a Timmy who will one day shed the diminutive name, shed his childhood, shed his parents, and make his way forward without us.
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