Good Morning Son

I’m writing this across two days. The first draft came on the night of November 10, after your mom and I saw Ben Folds, after I dropped you off at school because I had a snow day, after your ADD med check. I’m writing it too, the next day, during my lunch hour, adding the literary references I didn’t want to waste precious time on the night before.

I started thinking about this a couple days earlier.

Tommy, from the Tommy and Kalli morning show, did his last radio broadcast on Friday, November 7th. I've mentioned how I think of you every time I hear them do Trivia. Your mom and I listen to podcasts or books until I drop her off. I often put the mix on after. When I hear the trivia, I think of all those days I dropped you off at school, all the questions we knew, all the times we didn't call in, all the gift cards to Baxter's we didn't win. It was part of a routine. Then in the afternoon I would park the car and walk to pick you up on the grass in front of the school. We'd walk back to the car together.

I tear up every time I think about it being Tommy's last morning show. Silly, right? “I've never seen such beautiful shirts before,” even here in my classroom the day after I started this, fleshing out the literary references during my lunch hour. Something about the end of it feels like the end of something else too.

I tried to tell your mom, but she was buried in her phone.

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald writes about the green light at the end of Daisy's dock.  It’s a beacon Gatsby has been staring at for years, the physical manifestation of all his longing. After he finally reunites with Daisy and brings her to his mansion, he points out the light to her. But now that she's standing beside him, the narrator observes how the light's immense symbolic power instantly collapses:

 'If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay,' said Gatsby. 'You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock'.

Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

It also matters that she doesn't even know what it is. 

The thing that meant everything to him is just a light to her.

The morning show was like that green light for me. 

You're getting older anyway. I suppose as long as I heard those morning shows, I could dream of dropping you off again. Dropping you off just like I did, picking you up just like I did. But you're not quite that little kid anymore. 

It's a moment lost, a moment, that for a time, I could dream of regaining. As long as the show was on, that dream felt alive somehow.  We could talk about the nature of Judy Jones in “Winter Dreams” too, but we won’t. The important thing is that it’s something I'll never put my hands on ever again. Not in the same way, anyhow.

Maybe Fitzgerald hits closer at what I'm feeling, when, later in the novel, after Daisy fails to live up to Gatsby's impossible expectations, after she can't simply erase five years of marriage and return to Louisville to marry him as if no time had passed, when Gatsby is left struggling to accept reality. 

Nick tries to console him:

 'I feel far away from her,' he said. 'It's hard to make her understand.' ... 'And she doesn't understand,' he said. 'She used to be able to understand. We'd sit for hours——'

He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.

 'I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't repeat the past.'

 'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!' He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. 'I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before,' he said, nodding determinately. 'She'll see.'

Gatsby's incredulous reply, "Why of course you can!", reveals his desperate belief that time can be undone, that a perfect moment can be restored.

You can't repeat the past. 

It's just out of your hand.

It's impossible to grasp.

But still, I appreciate the rare days I get to drop you off. It's even better if it's a good morning, but even bad mornings are a gift.

Today was a blessing. November 10th, three days after Tommy's last show, I had a snow day. You got ready while I sat with your sister in my lap. She watched Sarah and Duck and ate a brownie. I brushed her teeth. You lay on the couch in the cozy corner. We left on time, but it wasn't really on time—we got stuck on Springfield at Matis for five lights. Things were moving slowly and carefully. By the time we got to your school, plenty of kids were still getting dropped off.

I got to pick you up from school too. That was originally going to be Mom. I was supposed to be at work. But I got to do it by myself. Mom met us at your doctor's appointment. We were early, and rather than make us wait forty-five minutes, they squeezed us in right away. 

I had planned to test out some novels with you, novels we might read when it’s our turn to read together again. 

Things moved to fast.

The doctor asked you questions about the efficacy of your ADD medication. I got to boast that your MAP scores had improved. You've been in the top 20% for a long while, but now you're inching closer to the top 10%.

Your mom and I saw Ben Folds later that night.  He played “Still Fighting It”.

I think it’s probably a tear jerker for any parent. 

A classic track about the speed at which your childhood moves relative to my experience, a dad sitting down with his adolescent son at a diner, thinking both about his birth, “how I picked you up, and everything changed,” and also imagining sitting down with him twenty years in the future “to have a few beers.” 

Routine becomes memory. We go through the motions and suddenly realize that time has moved, that the child isn’t the same, and maybe neither are you, though I'd like to believe I'm a fixed point. When he sings “Everybody knows it hurts to grow up,” it’s not sentimental. 

Those drives to school, those mornings that felt endless until they weren’t. Every drop-off, every pickup, was a goodbye in slow motion.

Rehearsal.

You and your sister were at the Schmidts'. It was ten by the time we were headed home. I'm typing notes for this down before I forget things. You've already fallen asleep to How It's Made. I'll finish this another day, after I look up the literary passages I'm only alluding to in the rough draft you'll never see.

But now, Monday night again, I'm going to go snuggle up with you. There's only so much more time. I can't bring back those mornings, but I can hold onto these.

Tomorrow we'll go see Predator: Badlands.

 In Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a character notices a hairline fracture in the plaster above his bed. Over days it lengthens until the ceiling gives way. It foreshadows the angel’s arrival at the end of Millennium Approaches. It's a visible breach between the earthly and the divine.

That’s what the ceiling outside our upstairs bathroom looked like when we rushed to the hospital to wait for you to be born. While we were gone, Grandpa Schmidt knocked it down. Years later he and your mom put up drywall, removed the old boob lights she hated, and left it half-finished—bare bulbs, missing trim, gaps in the paneling. This summer your mom and I finally (mostly) finished it.

I’m still embarrassed by the state of our house in Champaign. 

So many projects are half-completed or waiting to be started. My parents’ house always felt immaculate by comparison in hindsight. I still remember how out of place a hole in the wall felt at the Vos house or my cousin Josh’s. Though I do remember when my parents had the kitchen floor replaced. It took years before the baseboards went in. Work my dad intended to do himself. He bought machines to cut the wood, and eventually he used them. The house was finished and sold, but on a much longer timeline than he intended, decades. The Jaguar, dismantled in 1989, has sat so long he can no longer see well enough to fix it.

We had big plans for this summer. T-shirts, masks, Elden Ring cosplay—things we meant to do together. I also planned to release new Daz projects, the first in years. None of it got done. We came up short across the board. Mom planned to walk laps in the pool, finish the retaining wall in the back yard. We didn’t bike once. We didn’t teach you to tie your shoes. 

There just wasn’t enough time.

What we did manage: we ran nearly every day. We went to the pool, where you often made a friend for the trip. I told you not to stack big rocks. I thought you’d break your foot, and once you almost did. You took D&D and Fiber Arts at Parkland. You gamed online, so much gaming online. We argued about the value of real people.

We went to the movies. Superman twice, Fantastic Four, Jurassic Park in recliners, Elio, and a rerelease of Shin Godzilla. That was a special surprise, we even went to AMC for it.

I don’t know what you’ll remember. 

Movies don’t feel like memories, maybe just me shushing you. But it was something we did together.  And if you do remember that, the shushing, know that I’m torn on it.  You seem to have the urge to talk through a whole movie or show sometimes.  And I see you using those experiences as an opportunity to make connections and be heard.  I see you reaching out.  I value the conversations we have.  I also sometimes want to actually experience the thing that we’re watching.  You’d think the more important thing would be obvious.  Hindsight is 20/20.

We traveled this summer. The Smoky Mountains, Indianapolis, Kansas City for a wedding, we went to St. Louis for the Magic House. You wanted to stop at a cave, so we did. We panned for rocks. In the Smokies, we took it slower than the year before, when we packed in one or two big excursions every day. Some days we just stayed at the cabin or the pool. 

You made another friend there, for the day, a guy who talked an awful lot about frame rates and flavors of gummy candies.

You saw Hatfields and McCoys with Mom and came back with a toy gun and a wearable blanket you still use. Roz might have enjoyed the show, but the seventy, one hundred dollar meal ticket would have been wasted on her.  So you got to go see it with your mom.  I would have liked to have done it with you, but it didn’t seem right to propose a trip that would have stuck someone else with the responsibility of watching Rosie.  So I took that bullet and you got to see the show.  I asked a lot about the food.  All you can eat BBQ seemed pretty appealing.  Your mom and I fancy ourselves intellectuals.  You don’t get enough opportunities to sit back and enjoy things that lack subtext.

At Dollywood, it poured when we arrived, poured, the rain returned again mid-day. We stuck it out and rode some fantastic coasters, maybe one of the smoothest we’d ever experienced. Mom and I took turns with you and Roz. We ended the night on a raft ride with geysers. We joked the last geyser might go off anywhere—even back at the cabin or at home.  There was a long fireworks and drone show.  Queen played.  You’ve got an eclectic taste in music and they’re on that list.  I imagine Good Omen’s played a role. 

At that wedding in Kansas City, the girls kept requesting K-Pop Demon Hunters songs. It had been your sister’s big thing this summer, though you’d watch it too. We saw it first together. I compared its demon king to Darkseid and Anti-Life. You said I see Darkseid everywhere, and I do. Strip away Kirby and K-Pop, and both tell the same story: a voice insisting you are nothing but your wound, that peace comes only through erasure of the self. Both stage the same fight with despair disguised as truth.

Know that I am often aware that I am the voice of anti-life, that I am the snake in the garden, what is rotten in the state of Denmark. 

This isn’t lost on me. 

My truth is not always the right truth.

Courtney Hemker had me reading The Joy Luck Club. One passage:

“O! Hwai dungsyi”—You bad little thing—said the woman, teasing her baby granddaughter. “Is Buddha teaching you to laugh for no reason?” As the baby continued to gurgle, the woman felt a deep wish stirring in her heart.

“Even if I could live forever,” she said to the baby, “I still don’t know which way I would teach you. I was once so free and innocent. I too laughed for no reason.

“But later I threw away my foolish innocence to protect myself. And then I taught my daughter, your mother, to shed her innocence so she would not be hurt as well.

“Hwai dungsyi, was this kind of thinking wrong? If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too? If I see someone has a suspicious nose, have I not smelled the same bad things?”

The baby laughed, listening to her grandmother’s laments.

“O! O! You say you are laughing because you have already lived forever, over and over again? You say you are Syi Wang Mu, Queen Mother of the Western Skies, now come back to give me the answer! Good, good, I am listening.”

“Thank you, Little Queen. Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.”

I don’t know if we’ll ever move. You and your sister talk about it. At some point I’ll need to reckon with the choice to keep you in Champaign schools when first grade stayed remote. I don’t know how to do that without making my shame into your story, stripping innocence and hope at once. I think I’m hoping that the story will change before I have to record it.

When I talk to you about friendships, it often comes out wrong. My fear turns into frustration, and frustration turns into words that shame you.

I don’t want that to be what you remember.

I had close friends through elementary school. We rode bikes, played Transformers, role-played in real life the way you’ve done on Fortnite. We sat around drawing, spent afternoons gaming. We went to the comic store and read what we bought. We collected trading cards. Then I went to high school. Those friendships didn’t carry over. I had my track and cross-country team. But the kids I’d grown up with, they changed, and I had already arrived at myself. One just moved away. I had periods of connection, but I also felt a lot of loneliness then, before eventually finding close friends again in college. Later came marriage and kids. Now, if I’m honest, I usually have one close co-worker and that’s about it. I see your mom with her group of friends. I see myself with students and colleagues. You see this too, whether you think about it or not.

I am the model for your solitude.

I look back at photos of myself—kindergarten through college—and I remember those friendships as some of the happiest times in my life. You have online friends, people you talk to and play with. You’ve made “friends for the day” at the pool or at a cave. You form connections quickly. But you haven’t yet had the kind of sustained friendships that last years, that move with you through school, that make you feel at home in a place. I miss that for you, because I know what it meant to me.

I also want to be clear, I respect where you are. You’ve found comfort with solitude decades earlier than I did. It took me years to learn how to be alone, to realize I often prefer it. You already know that.

You’ve already built worlds of your own, found joy in your interests, and carved out an identity that’s yours.

As I show  you photos from my life—before I was the person I am today, when I had need—I wish that you be able to see them the way I see them: the faces of the friends who made those years bright.

I am proud of the person you are becoming. If solitude is what makes you happy, I will try to accept that. It is ultimately what made me happy.  I just suppose that I know that I have something to compare it to? I made an informed decision? Just as I did when I ultimately rejected religion?

I also worry about my fault in the matter. 

When you were in Kindergarten we chose to keep you in Champaign schools. At Kenwood, nearly 40% of students met state goals in reading and 30% in math. Among white kids, closer to 50%. Your own scores often put you in the top 20%. I don’t know that you always feel smart, but you are.

We kept you there for the opportunities it seemed to promise. I didn’t have to leave teaching. I didn’t have to become an artist. I thought I was making the right choice for you. I tell myself I was making the choice for you, for your mom too so that she wouldn’t be the one leaving her job.  I imagine that we couldn’t just have warehoused you like others were warehoused. I tell myself that moving you to Oakwood would have meant a school where fewer than 25%—sometimes fewer than 10%—met state expectations. But you wouldn’t have lost nearly your entire first grade year. Your social development might not have been interrupted.

We prioritized education over well-being. We prioritized a school that was racially diverse, accepting of gender nonconformity, progressive in its values.

Another of the books I read this past year was The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It was one your mother read long ago and enjoyed. Kundera sets Nietzsche’s eternal return as the source of weight: if every act had to be lived again and again, it would bind us with heaviness. But our lives are once-only—einmal ist keinmal—and that is lightness, unbearable precisely because there is no return, no way to test the alternative. That’s what I think about with keeping you in Champaign: I can’t know what Oakwood would have given or taken. The choice exists once, and its meaning is fixed by the story I make of it afterward.

I still think about making the jump, before it’s too late.  You are our son.  You will be clever. You are our son.  Should we have prioritized the places where we know we are not strong?

When I look at houses online in Vermillion County, I search for sheds before I correct myself. The big ones, the kind that I used to build homecoming floats in. I still imagine a future where my parents live with us, my dad with his tools, the boat, the Corvette, the Jaguar. But he can’t see anymore. None of that’s possible. I’m shopping for a future that doesn’t exist. I never learned what he had to teach. There won’t be a time now when we work on those things together.

We maybe have one memory where I diagnosed something he would not have been able to diagnose and he did the real work.  That’s all that we have.  He wanted a son that worked on cars with him, that would sail with him.  

He got me. 

There’s a character in the book, we're back to Unbearable lightness again, that I identify with a lot. Franz, his fidelity isn’t to people so much as to ideas—to love, to causes, to the vision of himself as noble. Even in marriage, he’s loyal not to his wife but to the idea of woman. He’s faithful to the story he needs to tell about himself, not to the people he shares his life with.

I recognize the same instinct in myself. I value my idea of truth so much, but am I not dishonest? An overcommitment to imagined meanings? It’s in the letters I write you, in the way I teach, in the way I keep circling our choices. Franz wants to be remembered as good and committed; I want the same. That’s the shape my anxieties take when I think about fatherhood.

I don’t worry about whether I love you. I worry about whether you’ll remember how I love you—whether the hours and energy, the small choices and sacrifices, will add up to a story you can carry forward. These letters are my hedge against disappearance. A fidelity to the version of myself I hope you’ll one day understand—not the one who lost touch with his own old friends, or burned bridges, or disappeared from family photos,who maybe never truly loved anyone more than he loved himself, but the one who stayed with you, who watched.

I can only hope the meanings I shape around your life are more right than wrong. That might not even be the best way to think about it.  

Maybe the story just needs to do more good than harm.

We're going on a bear hunt

You're eleven. Elementary school is winding down. From time to time, I picture you—slim, small, and light on my shoulders, that faux hawk haircut standing tall.

I'm typing this on my phone while you fall asleep in your bed. You asked to fall asleep alone. I had been meaning to suggest it for the summer, in some ways long overdue.

You were the kid who made us sit for hours waiting for you to fall asleep, only for you to reach through the crib bars to boop my nose. You were the kid who took up sleepwalking not long after we built you a loft bed. You were the boy for whom we replaced that loft, just this year, with a simple steel frame so we could snuggle you just a bit longer.

We read some Mort.  We watched Full Metal Alchemist.  I peaked back in at 10:18 and you were asleep.

Across the room, where I am, there's a photo of you, bleary-eyed, holding your infant sister. I suspect you knew even then just how much the world had changed.

Maybe one of your mom’s last letters to you, so many years ago now, was when you stopped nursing.

"We’re going on a bear hunt."

This summer, your sister will be just a year shy of how old you were when we had her and upended everything.

It was Alex’s birthday yesterday. He got a new bike—one of his first rides since he cracked his skull.

You and I tossed a football. I'm no great talent at these things either, but it's worth doing.

Tomorrow Roz will spend the night at my parents.  

Maybe we'll find something to do.