Post Pajama-Day Stress Disorder

It was nearly time to leave for preschool, and Nick was still in his pajamas. I had made him a good breakfast---with fruit, always with fruit---and he was eating slowly, pouring syrup over his French toast, rubbing his fork around in it, like he had all the time in the world before we had to leave. I told him he had better hurry, that he still had to dress. He looked up at me over a dripping forkful and said it was pajama day.

Pajama Day

Now, you have to understand, I didn’t know Nick as well then as I do now. I knew little boys aren’t always paragons of veracity, not because they mean to do anything wrong, just because the truth doesn’t always fit into their plans, and they haven't yet figured out that in the long run they can get away with more if they tell the truth most of the time and save the tiny distortions (or whoppers, depending on your point of view) for really important escapades. I assumed he just didn’t want to hurry through breakfast or maybe thought it would be larky to go to preschool in his PJs. He was, after all, showing his theatrical tendencies by then.

Like any sensible dad, I made him dress and took him to preschool, a lovely little church school with teachers who all looked like the Virgin Mary. And Yea Verily, it was Pajama Day. All these little towheads running around in fuzzy bear slippers and nightshirts. To Nick’s credit (and this is the way he is to this day), he didn’t say “I told you so,” but I was so ashamed for doubting him, and for the prospect of his being subjected to the ignominy of being over-dressed (a particular shame of mine, having grown up in the very proper South before moving to L.A.), that I rushed home and got his pajamas for him.

I’ve never forgotten that day. No, more than that, I can still feel it. Ridiculous, isn’t it? And it’s not just that day. There was the time Chris had a bike accident on his way home from school. He was riding on the sidewalk and got hit when he crossed an intersection. He didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was my fault. I was the one who’d suggested he use the sidewalk for safety. If I had told him to ride in the street, would the car have seen him? Would he have been safer?

Nick is the child who cured me of spanking. I am embarrassed to admit it, but I swatted my kids once in a while. Nick just wouldn’t put up with it. He was about four when he told me it was wrong to hit someone. The way he looked at me, and the moral clarity of what he said, was withering.

I still remember my mother coming after me with a belt and me jumping up and down like it was game of skip rope. She was the sweetest woman in the world, and I'm sure she didn't crack more than once or twice, when I no doubt richly deserved it, but when I grew up I used to tease her about it. After my gentle but firm scolding by Nick, I realized how cruel I had been to her, how much she must have hurt for that loss of patience in a lifetime of kindness. My grandfather said to me once that some days he lay in bed and regretted every mean thing he had ever done to his children.

There is something about being so completely responsible for a little life that is almost too heavy a burden to bear. Not in the bearing, but in the putting down. When you’re in the middle of the struggle, there’s little time for recrimination. There’s always a new day, a new set of decisions, a new chance to do your best. But when you lay the burden down, when they go off to college, say, you have time to think about it all, and that’s when the second-guessing creeps in. If only…

I’m having a light case of that now. Chris and Nick are just off to college and the aloneness is setting in. Meg and I are busy and happy, but there is no little boy to fix breakfast for; that part of my life, which was so much of it, seems far away. The memories are sharp and clear, but they don’t refresh as often. To be in that life, I have to be in the past, and for some reason it’s hard for me to go back there without wanting to have done it better. It was my job to keep them safe and help them be the best they could, and every failure, even the little ones, comes back to me in memory with the same gravity of a Jemima Puddle Duck dithering away from the nest while the fox eats her eggs.

There is hope, though. I no longer have those feelings about my first three children: Cord, Grant and Ashley. They’re all well into adulthood, in Cord’s and Grant’s cases with families of their own. It has been many years since the last of them went off to college, many years since they started making their own decisions about their lives. At first I wanted to help them decide what jobs to take, that sort of thing, but they wanted to make their own choices, and they did. So began the process of liberation, for both child and parent.

These days, when something bad happens to one of my grown children, I feel empathy, concern, but not guilt. It has been a long time since I thought about whether making them rake pine needles in the back yard was a form of torture banned by the Geneva Conventions, as Grant maintained. A long time since I wondered if my neglect was responsible for the death of their little black and white Dutch rabbit.

So now the waiting begins anew. I have only to be patient. As the years go on, Chris and Nick, strong young men off to make their way in the world, will free me from my melancholy by gently resisting my feeble attempts to guide them. Caring for them as if they were still children is a burden I would gladly take up again, but one I know I must set down and walk away from.

Who's Your Daddy?

John Boehner…apparently.

He even reminds me of my father. The same blue eyes. The same love of golf and the tan that goes with it. The same smoking habit. The same urge to break out the austerity lecture. Every time I see John Boehner on television, I feel he’s about to tell me to go to my room.

Conventional Wisdom

Like Speaker Boehner, my father was a sharp dresser who liked a good party. Socially and politically his tastes ran more to Mad Men than Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. I can’t say he was never an idealist, but by the time I got to know him he was pretty conservative.

Looking back, I’d have to say that he was a libertarian. Which is not to say he was ungenerous. He didn’t charge patients who couldn’t pay. We got a lot of hams and homemade preserves for the babies he delivered. He was happy to press a twenty-dollar bill into the hand of a man who needed help, but he resented paying taxes to enable the government to do the same. I wish he were still alive so we could revisit our old debate, the central debate in the country today: how much government should we have, and what should it do?

The American Dream is an accident of birth. Those not born into circumstances that offer a chance to take root and grow are likely to dry up and be blown against the back fence with the rest of the litter. John Boehner grew up sweeping out his father’s bar. He knows how to work. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe he has lost sight of the fact that he had a chance to work at all. His life might have been quite different if his father had been a daily patron of that bar instead of the owner.

In the years when the young John Boehner was learning to read and write and my father was building his medical practice, John Kenneth Galbraith was writing The Affluent Society. In work as relevant today, Galbraith noted in 1958 that much of our economic thinking was still governed by what he called Conventional Wisdom (he coined the term), notions that arise out of very different economic times but persist because of the interest of the establishment in preserving the status quo.

One such bit of Conventional Wisdom was that government, long the province of rapacious kings, was not to be trusted. Government was at best a necessary evil, at worst “a malign tendency against which an alert community must exercise eternal vigilance.”

This suspicion of government persists. And yet, as much as we may long for a simpler time of hobos asking for handouts at the back door, many of the complex problems facing us today can only be dealt with by a central body through which we act collectively. Just as we would not expect private citizens to build roads and dams and schools, we cannot rely on social Darwinism---the survival of the fittest---to build a civil society that addresses the needs of all of its members.

Government is our bastard child, but like it or not, we have come to depend on it to do much more than keep us safe. We look to it to provide the nexus, the honeycomb, if you will, in which we can work and thrive.

How, then, should we deal with our public servants? Does it make sense to condemn and belittle them? Any parent knows the answer to that. Any businessman or woman knows that to motivate performance one must set goals and provide the resources needed to realize of those goals.

In the case of government, this means choosing how much we want to help our fellow citizens. We can be humane or we can be heartless, but we must choose. When we stop participating in that choice, we risk losing not only our moral compass but our liberty.

And after we have chosen, who should pay for the things government is to provide? The answer to that is so simple it seems hardly to need expression: those who can afford to. If we are trying to help the less fortunate, it doesn’t make sense to tax them. The government coffers must be filled by those who have money to spare. They may not like it, but they are the only practical source. If we let them convince us that it is not fair for them to pay more, the only choice is to cut back on our goals.

Our democracy permits us to play Robin Hood. We can tax the rich to aid the poor. Some argue that this is un-American. Nothing could be further from the truth. This country was founded by settlers who looked after one another. That is how they survived in this wild new land. What would be un-American would be now to abandon our heritage of generosity and selflessness just because the people who need our help today don’t all look and dress the same as we do. The poor are part of us as much as any Jamestown colonist. They came on the same ship of hope.

In my boyhood days of sneaking out the bedroom window to carouse at night, it never occurred to me that the window might be locked when I came back home. My parents made an investment in me, because they loved me, of course, but also because that was what a parent did. Those of us with money and political power are the parents now. It is up to us to find a way to help our children, all of them. It is up to us to see that no one is locked out of the bedroom.

The Pride of War

The rebels in Libya are in retreat again. Qaddafi’s tanks are bearing down on them. A boy of seventeen has come to fight with the rebels. He has only a knife. When asked how he will fight a tank with a knife, he looks heavenward and says Allah will show him the way. The reporter asks him if his mother knows he is there. She does, he says, smiling. She is proud of him.

I couldn’t help wondering how I would feel if he were my son. Would I be proud that he was going off to die? Would I think his death a necessary step along the way to freedom from tyranny? Instinctively, I think not. Losing a son who is still a boy would be too great a price. But if I were there, if I had lived under that oppression, I think I would feel that boy’s same desperate and reckless passion. I think I would fight. I might even be proud to have my son, even one so young and naive, fight with me. With knives, if that’s all we had.

The interview with that boy warrior was aired on PBS, in a segment in which a man and a woman, both intellectuals, debated whether the United States should arm the Libyan rebels. The man said yes. He said Qaddafi would kill them all otherwise. He said that with such a man there was no chance of a negotiated resolution. Pacifists, he said, think wolves are vegetarians.

The woman was no pacifist. She was from Liberia, where Charles Taylor ruled so ruthlessly. She knew tyranny. But she argued that it was one thing to seek NATO air strikes to protect civilians, and another to give arms to the civilians we are trying to protect. To children. There are uprisings in many Arab countries now. Will we send arms to them? She believes that something closer to a peaceful overthrow of a dictator is possible, a kind of strangulation. We should freeze his assets. Cut off his funding. Without money he could not last.

Both speakers made their cases well. Both were passionate and pragmatic. I don’t have a strong feeling about which one was right in this particular situation, but I do know that child soldiers are not the way forward. We have seen that in other countries in Africa in the past. Are seeing it still. We saw it in China with Mao’s Red Guard. Hitler’s Youth. When children fight the battles of their fathers, the damage is not just to them and those they kill, the greater damage is to the soul of civilization.

War, if it must be fought at all, is for adults.

Fictional Me

Ancient light from the big bang

I like to write about families, especially fathers and sons, so this blog about my relationships with my five kids is fun for me. I like to make up stories too, and they also tend to be about families.

Families are our universes. They start with our own personal big bang and expand as we grow until that moment when the gravity of our beginning halts the outward rush and we begin to draw back toward the nucleus of our origin.

Fiction lets us explore not only what was but what might have been. There is a sensual seductiveness to walking in the dark without fear of lasting peril. I want to get back to that.

I plan to post short fiction as separate pages on this blog. The first is called “Lover’s Moon.” You can see the tab for it at the top of the blog.

Thanks to Google’s Blogger my writing can be in the cloud. That is likely as close as I’ll ever get to heaven.

The Wedding Bed

Pretty Little Jane Foot from Canton

My grandparents, Jane and Philip Davidson, were twenty when they married. They were in school at Ole Miss. William Faulkner was a classmate. He called my grandmother “Pretty little Jane Foot from Canton.”

I don’t think my grandfather liked Faulkner very much. Faulkner was older and cut a dashing figure in his uniform from the Royal British Flying Corps. He wrote poems for the school yearbook with lines like “Your face still beckons like a lonely star.” His bit of flirting with my grandmother was no doubt the reason my grandfather, a modest man, took boyish pride in telling how he beat out Faulkner for membership in Scribblers, the Ole Miss writing society. We see how all that worked out: my grandfather got pretty little Jane Foot from Canton and William Faulkner got a pretty fair writing career.

With the woodworking skills he learned from his father and some rough walnut boards, my grandfather make a bed as a wedding present for my grandmother. He planed the wood smooth and stained it and in the footboard added a wistful panel of lacy cane. I think about that bed now and then and the family it started and wonder what was in my grandfather’s mind as he made it. Well, I know that part, the pretty little Jane Foot part, but I wonder if he was thinking about the children they would have and what it would mean to be a father.

According to my mother, all my grandfather had to do to reduce her to quivering obedience was give her “the look.” Her brother required a more direct approach. He used to tell the story (with some pride, I thought) of coming home drunk one night in high school and opening the front door quietly and the next thing he remembered was looking up from flat on his back on the floor, rubbing his jaw and watching my grandfather’s bathrobe flapping down the hallway. Even though my grandfather spent his life as a teacher, as a father he was apparently a man of few words.

I don’t recall “the look.” No doubt he aimed it in my direction many times, but I had been inoculated against subtle forms of persuasion by a father who liked to be absolutely sure I understood his point; indeed, there were times when I wished my dad would just deck me rather than go on for another minute with one of his interminable lectures.

One thing about my grandfather I do remember is that it was hard to get him to give advice, even when I asked for it. I used to think he didn’t want to be responsible for sending me in one direction or another, but now I think he just wanted my choices to be my own.

According to the 1920 Ole Miss Yearbook:
"Davidson is fast, gets down under punts
well, and can be depended upon to either
spill the interference or get the man himself"

As a father, I’ve turned out to be a tormented mix of my father and my grandfather. I can’t kick the urge, learned at my father’s knee, to pontificate at length, but in my heart I know my children have to make their own life choices. This leads to alternating bouts of bossiness and guilt. I try to lay off, but I just don’t seem to be able to. Ultimately, all my children have solved the problem by going off to college. I miss them when they go away, but I have to admit that I don’t miss that bossy side of me. They get a break from me, and I get a break from myself.

I wish my grandfather (and my father for that matter) was still alive so I could ask him what he thought of Tiger Moms. My father was a Tiger Dad, but when he roared, I couldn’t always tell what to do to keep from getting mauled, other than get out of the tiger habitat. This led to my being anywhere but home a lot of the time. In that way, I suppose my father’s approach ended up having the same effect as I imagine my grandfather’s would have: I was left to figure out for myself what I wanted to do with my life.

For me, that was a good thing. I don’t know how well I would have fared following a course someone else charted for me. Rebellion in one or another of its many forms comes to most of us sooner or later. Perhaps it is better to get it out of the way before too much time is wasted going in the wrong direction; or before losing sight altogether of who you are.

Things haven’t changed that much since my grandfather made that bed for pretty little Jane Foot from Canton. Boys still woo girls, wantonly oblivious to what they are getting into, and the men those boys become still muddle through as fathers. In my grandfather’s time gender roles were clearer, but I don’t know that that made understanding fatherhood any easier. From a lofty perch of patriarchy, it may well have been harder to be a father, to indulge those urges to be close to your children when other men were going off to work or war and keeping a stiff upper lip.

When my grandfather died, I found his wedding bed stowed in the back of his garage. It was dusty but sound. I waxed it and bought a new mattress and put it in a vacation home that we occasionally rent to others. I like to imagine that the beautiful old walnut is still working its romantic magic.

With each new generation, we men make our wedding beds. Soon enough we wander around in the wilderness that grows up around them, but as we lovingly fit the boards together for the first time, we are puffed up with pride and vitality and hope. There is no better symbol of what it is to be a man.

Call Home, Signed Officer Beam

Meg and I were at the wedding of our nephew, Tyler, a couple of nights ago. Meg was wearing a cute skirt and boots and pearls. I love weddings. They’re romantic. And there’s always champagne. I like to pretend Meg is a bridesmaid and I’m a dashing party crasher. I don’t think I’ve ever confessed that particular fantasy to her, but I’m sure she wouldn’t be surprised. She’s always the cutest bridesmaid, by the way.

We were past the toasts, which were particularly sweet, and into the first dances when I went upstairs to call our son Nick. Meg came with me. We roamed around the old mansion where the wedding reception was being held and left another message for him, the umpteenth in the last five days, and looked in our cell-phone contacts to see if we had a phone number for any of his friends at the University of Michigan, where he is a freshman. We didn’t. Let’s hang around up here for a while, I suggested, where the cell reception is good. Surely he’ll call soon.

Here’s the thing about Nick. He’s one the world’s best sons, but he’s not a worrier. Only a worrier can understand another worrier. And here’s the thing about Meg and me. We’re not worriers either, not too bad for parents, anyway, but once the worm or anxiety works its way into us, the virus spreads fast. It’s high fever and intensive care before you know it. Both for us and the one we’re worrying about.

Nick, in his kind of fantasy, a Medieval
armor shop in Prague

So, naturally, we called the University of Michigan hospital. No Nicholas Clayton, they said. Well, that was good news, anyway, unless of course the ambulance just hadn’t arrived yet.

The University of Michigan is big on treating undergraduates like adults. They won’t even let parents call in to change emergency contact numbers. The kids have to do it. We had dropped our land line a few weeks earlier. We had asked Nick to list our cell numbers for emergencies, but, as I said, he’s not a worrier. When we called campus security, they said that the land line was still the emergency number.

Campus security wouldn’t let us change the emergency number either, but even though I was trying to sound cool and worldly, they must have heard the quaver in my voice when I asked for the third time how anyone would even know how to reach us if our little boy was hurt, or worse. They agreed to send someone over to his room in the dorm. It was midnight there by then.

Officer Beam called back fifteen minutes later and said she had knocked on the door and, receiving no response, had used a passkey to go in. No one was there, but a fan was blowing. Toward which bed, his or his roommate’s? I wanted to ask. She noted that it was mid-term week and a lot of kids were at the library studying, showing charming optimism about likely student choices at midnight on a Saturday night. She said she left a note for Nick to call us, and added that a couple of boys had seen him in the morning the day before. I thanked her without pointing out that yesterday morning was a long time ago, approximately ten texts, emails and voice mails, and a sighting then was perfectly consistent with his being buried under a snow bank, or still in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. After I hung up, I wondered briefly whether AT&T could re-connect our land line that night.

We debated staying there in the secluded library we had found until Nick got the note and called us. I debated with myself driving to the airport and taking the next flight to Michigan. Instead, we called him again and left another message on his voice mail and went back downstairs to the party.

Weddings are all about giddy happiness. We were pretty far past giddy happiness at that point. There was no way back. We thanked our hosts and drove home.

On Facebook (Nick’s such a good boy that he even let us be his friends on Facebook), I saw Nick had friended someone three hours earlier. Hey, I said to Meg, he was oaky three hours ago. Of course, that still left plenty of time for a long ambulance ride. I chatted him from gmail. “Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick,” was the gist of my message.

Mirabile Dictu, he replied. “sorry, been kind of busy.”

Now that I knew he wasn’t dead, I briefly considered rectifying that problem. I chatted back, affecting a casual tone: “No worries, we sent the campus police.” He didn’t reply.

We talked to him the next day. It was the same old wonderful Nick, full of what he was doing at school, talking about his computer science mid-terms and how the campus bus had gotten stuck in the snow and he’d had to walk the rest of the way to Glee Club rehearsal down the dark icy street (a convenience for the ambulance that would pick him up after he slipped and cracked his noggin). He sounded great.

That was the next day, as I said, but that night, when we finally got that brief chat message from him, when the worry fell off us like a soggy cloak, it left us feeling relieved, of course, but also somehow vulnerable and exposed. It was too late to go back to bridesmaid fantasies. The skirt and boots had been replaced by flannel pajamas. I’ve got to tell Nick about that. I think it would help him understand the importance of staying in touch. He’s not a worrier, but, like his dad, he loves fantasy games and romantic comedies.

Coming Home

You know about baby Emperor Penguins, right? While they are still in the egg, their dads tuck them into a pouch between their feet to protect them from the howling cold while mom goes hunting. Not some quick dip in the ocean, but a terrible trek over sixty miles of ice to get to the sea. By the time she returns, months have passed. Poor old dad has had nothing to eat. The baby has been born, and he’s hungry too. Mom takes over, feeding the chick and tucking him into her pouch, while dad goes out for fish and chips. If he makes it back alive, he and mom work together for months more to protect and feed their baby.

After all that, what does junior do? As soon as he is able, he ditches his parents to hang with his homies. Ungrateful? Maybe. But by then his folks are probably relieved to have a little time to themselves. As Mark Twain (I think) said:  By the time a boy reaches eighteen and goes off to college, his parents are ready for him to go.

Here’s my question: Do you think that penguin son ever comes back home? Does he see his parents again? When he grows up, does he know them? Do they know him?

Are we the only species in which children return home when their parents are old and dying to hold their hands and ask for (and offer) forgiveness? Why do we do that? Is it for the other that we make that emotional journey, or for ourselves?

And what about the time in between? After we get over our fierce need for independence, and the pushing away of parents as young adults that so often goes with that, how does one be a grown-up son? Or a father to a grown-up daughter?

My own father died when I was twenty-eight. One of my great regrets (besides sadness for him) is that I didn’t get to know him as an adult. Our relationship had just started to change, to mature, and then he was gone. I don’t know how I would have seen him as I got older, or how he would have seen me. I don't know what we would have said to one another. Some days I think I might write a novel about an imagined adult relationship with him.

My daughter, Ashley, came up from Los Angeles to visit Meg and me in Santa Barbara recently. Ashley is a grown woman now. She and her older brothers are all older than I think of myself as being. I have Chris and Nick, who are still in college, to offer me the illusion that I am still a young man, no older than my own father was when I went off to college. I know how to relate to kids in college. When they get past twenty-eight, I’m making it up as I go.

The pool shark and me

During her visit, Ash and I played pool. She’s good. She gets on hot streaks and runs six or eight balls in a row. Then, spurred on, I might get lucky and do the same. We compete without competing, in that way I have always played games with my children. A little friendly trash talk, but no blood.

After pool, we scrapped paint off window glass. Meg and I had just had some touch-up painting done, and the painters had gotten paint on the glass of the French doors. Ashley and I share a little obsessive streak; to us messy paint is a festering wound that demands attention. She got out a razor blade and started scraping. For variety, she went around the house and spotted places where the new paint did not blend well into the old and I feathered it in.

It made me think about the things we share with our children as they grow up. We know each other well, of course, our habits and eccentricities; we can still annoy the heck out of one another with little conscious effort. But there is a comfort in being around someone who is so like you, who is literally part of you. Shared experiences and shared genes. For better or worse, there is no one more like you.

The windows came out looking great, naturally. Like her dad, Ashley is a perfectionist, an opportunist of sorts, stopping along life’s path to reach down and pick up exquisitely formed stones from among the gravel. We shared time together over other simple tasks that meant nothing and, at the same time, meant everything. We talked about our lives, what we were doing, what we were happy about and what we wished were better, but it was the time we spent quietly in familiar ritual that felt the most like love.

I wonder whether grown-up penguin sons stand next to their dads while they shelter their own young, whether adult penguin daughters trudge across the frozen tundra with their moms to plunge together into the icy water to fish. Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether they know each other. They share habits and instincts passed along from one generation to the next, and there is comfort in that for any parent and child.

Snowbound

Nick was six weeks old when we moved to Baltimore. Barely out of intensive care. Even though he was full-term, his lungs wouldn’t work at first. The delivery room nurse put a little knit cap on his head and laid him in Meg’s arms. Meg smiled a kind of elated and exhausted smile and pulled her son’s face close to hers; after a moment her mouth tightened the way it had with the first pains of labor and she looked up at me and said, “Something is wrong.” Nick was panting the way I imagine a humming bird might, tiny desperate gasps not big enough to be called gulps. For ten days we watched him through the plastic sides of an incubator, not even able to hold him.

When he came home, the doctors said he was fine, but Meg and I weren’t so fine. We spent long nights sitting by his bassinet, listening to him breathe. We thought we might delay our planned move across country, but as the days went by, we settled down and decided our baby was all right after all, that it was safe to leave the doctors who had saved him.

We both wanted to leave Los Angeles. We didn’t like the earthquakes and riots, that was part of it, but the real reason was that we didn’t like the way we were living, which had nothing to do with L.A., nothing to do with anything but our own choices. We were both working all the time. Nick’s brother Chris was two and a half, and our nanny was the one living the life we wanted for ourselves: living in our house, raising our child, driving him to the supermarket in the new car we bought just for that purpose, so he would be safe. We were keeping him safe, but he was growing up without us.

Dreaming Log

We bought a farm in the Baltimore hunt country, a hundred and sixty acres of woods and streams and fields, with horse corrals and a stable and a stone house that was a little too modern for the bucolic setting, like a 7-Eleven blown away from its strip mall. We planned to build our dream house up on a hilltop, near where a big log lay across a riding trail. We sat up there on that log, with Chris climbing on it like it was the back of a big dragon, and we looked out over the valley, our valley, and made promises to each other and to our sons about the things we would do, and the things we would not. Dreaming Log, we called it.

Near the stable there was a workshop with an old wood stove. On cold mornings, Meg would split firewood for the stove and light it before she drove Chris to pre-school. The workshop would be warm when she got back, and with Nick sleeping nearby she would sit down to write. She wrote her first novel there, not only on that farm, but set there, with our new surroundings and foxhunting friends as characters. It’s a wonderful story.

The first winter’s snow took us by surprise. After a big storm, it was easy to imagine that we were alone in the world, reclaimed by nature. The county would eventually plow the little lane that led down into our hollow, but it was another quarter mile up a rutted gravel driveway to our house, and we didn’t have a plow, didn’t even have a tractor at that point. We just hadn’t thought about all that.

The first snow

We sat by the fire and read stories to the children and took them out into drifts that were as tall as Christopher. After a while we would hear a clattery diesel engine and look out the front window and see our neighbor, who must have been near seventy, driving his old blue Ford tractor up and down our driveway, plowing us out. His name was Humpy, or that’s what everybody called him. It was a nickname he’d picked up at Princeton, the same place he’d probably gotten the ratty old sweaters he wore. I don’t know what I was expecting out there in the hinterlands, but Humpy’s combination of country generosity and courtly charm and wit was a delightful surprise.

Like Meg, I had just left the law, in my case to try my hand as a private equity investor. Baltimore was the headquarters of a company my partner and I bought, a chain of over a hundred bowling alleys. I had come to Baltimore to look after our investment, which wasn’t doing as well as we had planned. In those days it was easy to borrow a lot of money to buy a business, and we had.

Our strategy to pay off the debt was to return bowling to its glory days, to make regular customers again of all those folks who said, “Oh, yeah, we used to love to bowl.” I know what you’re thinking: this story, at least the part about bowling becoming the hot new thing, is going to end badly; if you are, then you’re smarter than I was.

My office was in a little Victorian building next to an artists’ co-op, about halfway between our farm and the company’s headquarters. That was much closer than the CEO I had brought in wanted me. He wished I had stayed in L.A., even told me so. He was a lot like me in that way, in his need for independence, which is part of the reason I hired him in the first place, I guess.

I stayed away as much as I could. I tried, really. I went up to New York to cajole our creditors. I crunched numbers alone in my little office. When I needed to meet with the management team, I asked them to come to me so I wouldn’t be invading my CEO’s corporate space. I was a being a good coach, I thought.

I was obviously delusional about how hard I was pushing. I can’t stand to fail, and for most of my life I have been able to avoid failing by just pushing harder. My CEO told me after I took him and his wife to dinner one night, and talked about the business nonstop, that it was the most miserable evening his wife had ever had. And I thought I’d been charming.

One day not many weeks later he came to my little pastoral office and metaphorically tossed the keys to the company on my desk. I scooped them up and moved over to the company headquarters and took the reins in my own hands.

We were tingling with hope in those days. The business hadn’t responded, but it would. We knew it would. The alternative was just unthinkable. We brought in a new marketing team. We redecorated the bowling centers. We bought fancy new automatic scoring machines and cleaned up the snack bars and put in good pizza. All the employees wore crisp uniforms. We were going to be the Disneyland of bowling.

I traveled around the country giving cheerleading speeches, passing out awards for great customer service, calling our customers “guests,” renaming our employees “guest hosts.” We hired a lot of new employees that year. They were our acolytes, our true believers.

Farmhand Chris

Running the business took me away from home a lot, as much as when I was practicing law, but it was different this time, I told myself. When we got things going, I’d be able to slow down and keep those promises I’d made on Dreaming Log.

Our hunt-country neighbors all turned out to be like Humpy: urbane gentry without an ounce of affectation. Our farm was part of a series of connected farms that the hunt crowd rode over, so we hadn’t been there more than a couple of days, the moving truck still in the driveway, when a wonderful woman of seventy or so rode up on her horse and gave us a jar of homemade jam. She was the master of the hounds (the first woman), and she was calling on us to ask if the hunt could continue to ride over our property. She patted her horse, which was stamping anxiously, and said that we shouldn't worry about the foxes, that they never actually caught a fox.

Those men in tattered sweaters and corduroy coats with elbow patches, those women whose families had lived there for generations, became our friends. Instantly, it seemed, in a way that is hard to explain. They knew what my business was, and they knew it was struggling, but they hardly ever asked about it. They were much more interested in Meg’s writing. Potluck dinners with them at their stonewalled hunt club with its creaking, slanted floors and the hounds baying in the kennels out back kept me sane as I did my best impression of Robert E. Lee at the end of the Civil War, urging the troops onward even as I began to see that the war was lost.

There was no Internet in those days, so I had the weekly sales figures from the bowling alleys phoned into headquarters and compiled and brought out to my mailbox about ten on Friday nights. Meg and I would be driving home from dinner with our new friends, warmed by their camaraderie, chatting happily, and we would turn onto the dark, canopied road that wound its way to our farm and fall into silence, each with our own private hope or terror.

At the top of the driveway our mailbox leaned back on its bent post, so that you could just reach it through the window without getting out of the car. I would roll down the window and the cold air would seep into the car as I routed around in the oversized mailbox and right there, in the light from inside the car, read the numbers. Meg never said a word. She just waited in silence. Only later did she tell me how horrible that anticipation was. The numbers were not better. They were never better.

After two years I took the train to New York in the late fall and turned the company over to our creditors. It was theirs by right. We couldn’t repay their loans. It would only have hurt the business to fight about it. I felt like Judas, but not for the reason you might think, not for failing my equity partners. The ones I felt I had truly betrayed were all those employees, new and old, who believed that together we could do something special. It was like telling my children I had to leave them, that from now on they would have to fend for themselves.

At home I had videotapes I had made for our employees, our guest hosts, talking about of our plans, telling them they would be the key to our greatness. That night, as a new snowfall returned the valley to beautiful and brutal silence, I watched those tapes one after another. Even then, with the shock of events still so fresh, they had the quality of old newsreels from another time, the last records of a lost people.

I moved a desk into the workshop, not the cozy loft where Meg was writing, but a cavernous open space where the previous owner, an architect who for his senior thesis had designed our 7-Eleven house in the style of Marcel Breuer, had made wooden handles to help take off riding boots. I hung my old law office pictures over the desk and set up a copier and fax machine and sat there and stared at them.

There was a lot of snow that winter. We had a few cows that we had bought from our neighbor early on. We’d been letting other landowners make hay on our pastures, for which they left us a dozen or so of the huge round bales, and we’d gotten the cows to feed the hay to in winter and to graze on the pastures in summer. We’d bought a tractor too. Meg liked to mow fields with it. She said sitting up there, going back and forth over the land, was a great way to work out scenes for her book.

That Christmas she bought me a hay spike attachment for the tractor. I speared the big bales and drove them out to the cows where they milled about in a swale near a covered shed that protected them from rain and snow.

The twins

Courtesy of our neighbor’s bull, our little herd included six calves. Two were twins. You never saw anything so adorable. I had been idiotically naive about how they would be born, but nature had looked after them. I remember seeing the first calf on the hillside in the spring of that year and worrying that he would be trampled by the herd. I went out and picked him up (he was a heavy little sucker) and started off with him to a fenced corral.

Apart from buying a chain of bowling alleys and thinking I could turn it into Disneyland, picking up that calf and walking off with it was probably one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. His mother was none too happy. There I was, tottering down the hillside, struggling with fifty pounds of squirming calf, with his mother, all one thousand pounds of her, right behind me. I could feel her hot breath on my neck, but I was used to the hot breath of creditors by then, so a miffed mama cow didn’t seem like that big a threat.

Whooo, cows

Our boys were three and five that winter. After each new snowfall, Nick would go out to the fence line with me and we would open a bag of grain, catnip for cows, and he would call the cows. “Whoooo, cows.” I should have known then that he was bound for the stage. What joy and exuberance.

I spent a lot of time taking hay out to the cows that winter. I would go out to my office-in-exile and turn on a space heater and make a list of things I might like to do next, and after not too long I would get up and go feed the cows. I couldn’t seem to concentrate. I think I may have a little attention deficit disorder, but when I was working it just kept me hopping from one project to another; without all those things to be busy about, I couldn’t sit still. I almost couldn’t think.

The snow didn’t melt. It drifted up against the workshop windows, so that it looked like if I nodded off while daydreaming I might wake to find myself entombed. I thought about my father; my workshop space had the cold austerity of his hospital room, where I had spent two weeks as he lay dying all those years ago. I wondered what he would have thought of all this. I was just starting out practicing law when he died. I struggled at first, but I got a nice bonus at the end of my third year, the year my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. He would go to the old-fashioned soda counter at the local drugstore and eat chocolate sundaes to try to keep weight on. The druggist told me at my father’s funeral that my bonus had hit my father hard, because he knew then that I would never come back home.

All my working life I had put work ahead of family. Not deliberately, but in that thoughtless, rationalizing way so many of us have: let me just get through this busy time and we’ll do something fun together. The busy times had all run together, but now they had stopped. I was dizzy with the lack of motion, lurching around on sea legs. I was both terrified and grateful to be back on dry land.

I read to the boys at night, and when it was time to turn out the light, with Chris protesting “I’m not tired”---always his last words at night---I sat on their beds and sang to them and told them stories. There was a little board named Piney who wanted to be part of a house but was too small, who got his wish when a little boy made him into a birdhouse. An outcast duck named Mally became a hero by saving a little mud hen from the jaws of a snapping turtle.

I know, I know, but my little boys loved them. Meg said that sometimes she would stand in the hallway out of sight, with the snow plied around the house and our valley dark and quiet, as if there were no other world, and she would listen to me telling stories to our children. She said it was like visiting our lives from the outside.