Turn Around Bright Eyes (10 page)

When I try to imagine what their secret is, this is the image that comes to my mind: Sometimes we go out to dinner, just the three of us. I sit in the backseat. A song will come on the radio—Elvis, Neil Diamond, something like that. My parents will be up front singing along. And I have to ask myself, what year is this? It could be 1974, it could be 1996, it could be some other time.

HOW CAN I EXPLAIN MY
dad? Let me put it this way. I have never seen the movie
Jaws
.

And I’m not afraid of sharks. If anything, I’m a shark fan. They’re cool, right? I watch them regularly on Animal Planet, and whenever Jessica Alba makes a movie where she plays a shark wrangler. I once favorably reviewed a Great White album for
Spin
magazine. “Barracuda” will always be my third-favorite Heart song. I have nothing against sharks at all. My soft-on-sharks credentials are solid.

But I’ve never seen
Jaws
and it’s because of something my dad told me one day. I was in fourth grade when this movie came out, and I wasn’t a fan of scary movies, so I declined to go see it.
Jaws
was the first movie I can remember that people went to see repeatedly—although
Star Wars
, a couple of years later, would solidify that trend. It was kind of a status thing to brag about how many times you’d seen
Jaws
, which after all was a PG movie with a sex scene. Hardly any kid I knew
didn’t
see it. (And our fourth-grade art teacher, Miss Slodden, was said to be an extra in one of the scenes where people in swimsuits are running out of the water in mortal terror.) Most of my friends went to see
Jaws
multiple times, but I kept saying no over and over. I was embarrassed by this, because it seemed childish.

One Saturday around noon, when the cartoons were done, even
Fat Albert
, and the third bowl of Boo Berry had turned to a glob of fuchsia slush, a couple of friends called to invite me to
Jaws
, which they’d already seen four times. I said no thanks. I hung up the phone in the kitchen, while my dad was sitting with a cup of Taster’s Choice. I told him about the invitation and how I declined. He said, “You know, I’m really proud of you for not letting anyone push you into doing something you don’t want to do.”

And then . . . well, that’s what I always wonder about. It’s the kind of thing those of us who aren’t parents can only guess.
Then
what? What
did
my dad think after saying that? Was it something he planned to say, or did it just slip out? Did my dad even remember saying it ten minutes later? Did he think, “Hey, I just gave my son a major compliment here, one he’ll remember the rest of his life. Now I can rest on my parenting laurels and spend the rest of my weekend on the couch watching Steve Grogan pass to Sam ‘Bam’ Cunningham”? Or did he think, “Maybe I should have pushed him to go see the shark movie and confront his fear? What kind of a creampuff am I raising here?” Did he think, “Uh-oh, I overpraised, I gave him too big a compliment. I gave up some leverage. I have failed as a dad. Is my only son destined to grow up as a spineless ninny who chickens out of everything and blames his parents?” It wasn’t rare for my dad to give his children compliments—in fact it was extremely common. So maybe he wasn’t even that impressed with himself. Maybe he was already thinking, “Any Cheerios left?”

That’s something I always wonder. What was that moment like for him?

I could ask, but my dad’s too much of a natural-born diplomat for that, and besides, he’s a lawyer. You can’t ask my dad a question like that about the past. First, he’d ask me how I remember it, and as soon as I told him, he’d claim he remembered it the same way. Then a week later he’d tell
me
the story as if he just remembered it, except he’d change
Jaws
to
The Towering Inferno
or something.

I could ask my friends who are dads, but it would seem like I was implicitly dropping a hint or critiquing their parenting style, so I can’t ask them, either. So I still have no idea. What did my dad think after he said that, and did he realize he was making a big impression on me?

I do know this. I still have never seen
Jaws
. When my dad gives you a compliment for doing something, it very much makes you want to keep doing it. When my dad smiles, which is often, it makes you want to repeat whatever you were saying or doing that made him smile. I thought a lot about what my dad said, so I treated it like a decision I had made and was sticking to, even after I started liking scary movies. I saw
Jaws 2
in the theater, having been assured it was about one-third as scary as
The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training
. I read the
Jaws
paperback, or at least the opening sex scene. I had a college buddy with the nickname “Mako.” I enjoyed the Dickie Goodman novelty record “Mr. Jaws.” I loved the Bob Hope parody special
Joys
, starring Vincent Price and Freddie Prinze. It’s not like I don’t get the joke if somebody says, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

But not seeing that stupid movie everybody else in the country has seen is just a habit I perpetuate, simply because of something my dad spent five seconds telling me thirty-five years ago. In a way, that’s scarier than any shark could be.

I WAS WELL INTO ADOLESCENCE
before I realized that other boys did not necessarily have dads like mine. The summer after freshman year of college, one of my roommates came to visit (we listened to Live Aid on the radio) and when I was off to drive him to the train station home, my dad gave him a hug goodbye. My friend broke down in the car and cried all the way to the Amtrak station—he told me he’d never hugged his
own
dad.

The older I got, the more stories like that I heard, and the more bewildering my dad seemed. How did he get this way? Did he decide to be this way, or did it just happen to him? As I grew up I began to appreciate how strange my dad was, yet it’s still something I’m still learning about, and it’s still something I feel like I’ve barely begun to figure out. His kindness is not something I could ask him about, because it’s not something he would ever acknowledge or admit. Like my mom says, he has a short memory.

When I was a Cub Scout, I entered the annual Pinewood Derby contest, which involved carving a race car out of a little block of wood. I had no idea how to carve, sand, saw, or use any kind of tools whatsoever—I’m the kind of guy whose knowledge of how to build or fix things runs dry after “righty tighty lefty loosey.” So I just kind of scraped the edges off the side of the car and painted it this awesome shade of purple.

The evening of the race, I got a look at the other kids’ cars, which were sleek little Stingrays and Mustangs and Corvettes with historically accurate detailing. I got a vague sense that I was punching above my weight, automotively speaking. When they put all our little wooden cars on the slide track to see them race to the bottom, mine did not reach the finish line. In fact, it didn’t budge—I didn’t realize I was supposed to sand the
bottom
of the car, so the plastic wheels on my model didn’t even touch the track. It just kind of sat there, quivering. The race was over in thirty seconds and my car hadn’t even left the starting gate.

Yet the Cub Scout troop masters gave me a purple ribbon anyway. First they handed out the trophies for first, second, and third place, as well as various ribbons for exceptional woodwork. Then they announced I had won the ribbon for a previously unmentioned category: “Best Homemade Car.” It was obvious they just made up that award, and I had the vague sense they were making fun of me, but I was glad to accept the ribbon anyway.

On the drive home, when I asked my dad what “Best Homemade Car” meant, he just laughed. “It means you were the only kid who did the car himself. Most of those kids weren’t even allowed to
touch
their cars.”

My dad’s a good sport, always up for an adventure, letting his kids talk our easily-talked-into-things dad into things. When I started reading books, he’d bring me books like
Tom Sawyer
, and when I started singing along to the radio, he brought me records like “American Pie.” When he was forty, working in a bank, he decided to go to law school at night, but he still coached my sisters’ basketball teams. (How did he do that? It’d be pointless to ask him. Maybe he doesn’t even know.)

He eventually quit his day job and started practicing law on his own when he was fifty. He has worked hard to make his life happen, but he doesn’t acknowledge any stress or strain about it at all. He has never worried about whether things will work out. He’s easy. He likes his habits—listening to the radio, drinking coffee, pronouncing the word
California
wrong (he calls it “Califonia.” Why? Nobody knows), calling blue jeans “dungies,” and speaking in his unreconstructed accent. When he was in the army, he went to Mass once and gave the responses in Latin, like everybody did back then. When the service was over, the chaplain asked, “So what part of Boston are you from?” That’s right: My dad’s Boston accent could make a man wince even when my dad was speaking Latin.

MY DAD WAS NEVER MUCH
of a disciplinarian. He never told us
not
to do anything, because he figured, why put ideas into our heads? It was infuriating, like being in jail. So we never did
anything
. We had no idea what we were missing, really.

And we had absolutely no idea that my dad had been a bit of a hell-raiser in his youth at St. Gregory’s. We never heard any of these stories, because my aunt, who knew them all, lived in the convent as a Carmelite nun, with a vow of silence. Until I was seventeen, I’d only seen her during visiting hours at the convent, in full habit, talking through a screen like in old prison movies. After twenty-five years as a Carmelite, she changed vocations and became a Dominican, which meant she could now do counseling for hospital patients and wore groovy white pantsuits instead of a habit. She also came to visit more, and told us stories of my dad’s wild youth. We were appalled to learn how much trouble we had missed out on; maybe the secret of parenting is having your big sister take a vow of silence.

He gave us permission to take a day off from school whenever we wanted, with the result that none of us ever took a day off from school. His way of parenting my sisters and me was to compliment us for things we weren’t even doing, but his compliments made us want to start doing them. If he was annoyed by my impatience, he would compliment me on my patience. Somehow that would instinctively make me strive to be more patient. Why? I don’t know. Things that come so torturously to me are a breeze for him.

My dad assumes the best in people. It can be maddening. He voted for Gerald Ford for president in 1976, even though he was a Democrat. Why? Because 1) he felt bad for Ford, 2) he knew Massachusetts was going Democrat anyway, and 3) he didn’t want Ford to be completely humiliated in the popular vote. He still thinks Ford did the right thing by pardoning Nixon. We argue about this every couple of years. My dad says it was important for Ford to pardon everybody and put all that trouble behind us. When I point out that this is not what happened—Nixon was the
only
Watergate conspirator who got pardoned, and the others went to jail for him, while he got a mansion out in Southern California with a fat pension and a valet—my dad counters, “But that doesn’t make sense.”

That’s how my dad sees the world. He is kind to people because to him it just makes sense. That doesn’t make sense at all.

He always had confidence in me, so when he taught me things, like driving in the rain or tying a tie, he assumed I would get them right. He’s always amused when I don’t. The night he taught me to shave, I wish I’d asked more questions. I didn’t know this traditional father-son interaction was happening until he came home from work one night with a bunch of shaving supplies. He’d rehearsed for our lesson, but I hadn’t, and I’m still not sure I learned the right technique. Shaving is a daily task that I manage to get wrong every single day. There’s a spot on my right jaw that I never reach on the first pass, forcing me to reshave my jaw three or four times. I wish I’d asked my dad when I was sixteen whether this was a family trait, or a standard shaving glitch, or just me. But the main thing my dad wanted to emphasize is that shaving isn’t a “do it all at once” task—it’s a “do it every day” task. His shaving credo, which he repeated at least three times, was “Whatever you don’t get today, you’ll get tomorrow.”

I am a “do it all at once” kind of guy. I am not a “do it today, then start over from scratch and do it again tomorrow” kind of guy. I get flustered at tasks I am unable to complete, which is almost all of them. Things like grief and love and mourning. Things like being a husband, or being a son. The hard work of life that doesn’t get done, because there’s always more of it to do—I have trouble wrapping my head around these things. Whenever I was overwhelmed by the job of mourning, I recalled the words of the comedian Stephen Wright, who boasted, “I walked my dog all at once. I took him to Argentina and back, then I told him, ‘You’re done.’” I wish.

Dogs do not accept this logic, which is one of the reasons humans seem to need dogs around, just to remind us that nothing works this way, unfortunately. You have to walk that dog every day, with no mileage credit for what you did yesterday. Work doesn’t get finished, and neither does play. You start over every day, and what you don’t shave off today will be waiting tomorrow, until you run out of tomorrows and leave behind more work for others to do. You fight the sensation of getting overwhelmed by the repetition of things. You build up some momentum but you don’t get a climax. You don’t even know if you’ve done your day’s work right, because nothing’s ever really done. That’s very disconcerting to me.