What Was He Really Like?
In the interim, I knew the headlines but not the gritty contents of his life. The intimate day to day rhythms and heartbeats that distinguish your child from all others on the planet were missing. His study habits, his eating preferences. Was he easy to awaken in the morning? For bonding purposes, the kind of data that even mindless parents cant help but accumulate about their children was absent from my life. He never knew his grandparents on his fathers side. In my life, this vital page in being a parent was blank. In the same way that a mother who has just lost a child seems only to encounter young families walking down the street, all I seemed to notice through the 1990s were parents, but especially fathers, dropping off their children or picking them up from school in the family SUV. Birthdays and holidays slipped by the same way someone wearing brown shoes walks past you increasingly unnoticed. The telephone calls marking them sometimes were less than one sentence in duration. You never forget the dates or the hours. But running to stay abreast of developments became exasperating because if the resistance. It was like rapping your knuckles on a brick wall. Never a sound. You keep rapping. The silence refuses to end. But you never stop rapping.
Meeting, Finally
One afternoon in early autumn there was a stark, tentative telephone call. The tone was inquisitive, exploratory. We spoke for 30 minutes. No fireworks, no emotional flamboyance, even if both of us may be given to such flourishes. How about dinner next Thursday? Okay. Will I recognize you? How have you changed? In the tradition of two people meeting for a blind date, we would rendezvous in a restaurant of my acquaintance. I was nervous all day. Dont be tentative, my wife said before I left home. When he walks in hug him, show him and tell him that you love him. Like modeling gloves, being demonstrative is the first cousin of impossibility. How many times my father and I have bid farewell at the airport always clumsily. The first time you walked onto the dance floor with your seventh-grade dance partner, did you know where to put your hands, either one of them? Neither did Pop or I. At the restaurant, which is not so large, I took a table near the door, to hail my son when he entered. Did I think he would not recognize me? What I really was unsure about was whether he would come to dinner.
Would Family History Repeat?
A month earlier, I had made a dinner date with my youngest, and equally estranged, son. I would pick him up at his mothers house, it was agreed. Another nervous day. He wasnt there. His mother shrugged. Said she did not know where he was. The passenger seat was empty when I drove away, maybe the 25th or 30th time this has happened with the same son. Some fathers never learn. Back at the restaurant, my son wheeled in, punctually, as, I learned, is one of his paramount values. I wanted to run over and hug him. But I couldnt. I didnt. He took a seat near the window. To a casual diner, we could have been two businessmen constructing the foundation for a deal. Never nervous normally, I was nervous. He was my son and I was his father again. It was like walking down the street and discovering a hundred gold bars under crispy leaves. I was too thrilled we were across the table from each other for the first time in years to remember, even across this short bridge of time, what we talked about.
Postscript
Near the end of dinner, I tiptoed across steaming hot rocks. Long ago, I learned to deflate my grand expectations. I nearly gulped, then forged through. How about dinner next Thursday? Sure, he said. I wanted to leap to the ceiling. Instead, as if I were an uncle from another land whom he had not seen in years, I said something memorably articulate, unlikely to be found in anyones tome of Quotations for Favorite Occasions. Okay, I managed. Yippee did not seem cool. Then I walked him to his car, which I never had seen. We have met every week for dinner for the last 8 or 9 or 10 weeks. At the 9 p.m. hour in my life, the son I once knew has miraculously returned in full flower. Whip-smart, well-read, witty, handsome, he has regained his father, and I have found love.
