GIRL WITH THE GREY SWEATSHIRT

On a recent autumn day, as I worked to get the last few outdoor chores done before we were plunged into another Maine winter, I was scraping old dry caulk from the window frame in the door that leads to the back yard when my 23-year-old daughter Amanda darted past me on some errand.

My daughter is a living stream of consciousness who never seems to stop moving or thinking or being clever; she is an energized bit of cheery momentum, like a butterfly, but with a better sense of direction.

Seeing the open window as she whisked by, she seized the opportunity to be spontaneously entertaining, stepped behind the paneless frame, blurted out, “Cool, it’s like a portrait,” turned toward me and struck a deep and thoughtful pose. I had an el-cheapo point-and-shoot camera in the next room, so I said, “Don’t move,” dropped my putty knife, ran over and grabbed the camera, ran back to Amanda (turning the camera on as I dodged cats), stopped, composed both myself and the image, took the shot, and that was it. Amanda disappeared in a puff of laughter and enthusiasm; I shoved the camera in my back pocket, reached down and took up my putty knife, and began scraping anew. The whole drama took about 30 seconds, and I forgot all about the photo until the next day.

When I saw the image, I was astonished. The glossy black frame of the door ajar at just the perfect angle, here gleaming with silver highlights, there black as night. The golden-orange edge of the raw wood on the inside where the old glass used to be. My daughter from the waist up, suddenly filling the empty window, confident, mature, and a bit mysterious. And all of these serendipitous components bathed in a perfect autumn light filtering down through the October maples.

“Shades of a work by Jan Van Eyck,” a friend remarked upon seeing it, conjuring up the penetrating shadow-and-light portraits of the great Netherlandish painter of the 15th century; although my first thought came from a bit further east and two centuries later, in the work of the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, who, had he wrought this work in pigments instead of pixels, would have surely titled it “Girl with a grey sweatshirt.”

Late that night, lying in my bed and staring up at my ceiling, I began thinking about my two children. Astonished as I was by Amanda’s quick portrait, I was even more astonished by the kind of people my grown son and daughter had become. Gracious, intelligent, cheerful, optimistic, kind, funny, confident, faithful…and so the list of superlatives went on. Not perfect, of course, but delightful and admirable, and my two closest friends.

How did I manage to fledge such wondrous creatures? I wondered. Then, realizing that I was holding my wife’s hand, and that the past 31 years of parenthood had certainly been a team effort, I quickly corrected myself. I did not do this alone, I whispered into the quiet darkness. And lying there amazed and thankful, the continuing presence of the grace of God washed over me, and I corrected myself yet again. We did not do this alone.

* * *

THE DOCK GLIDES OUT TO MEET US

In a misty drizzle the color of an old man’s beard, the boat skims north up the lake, the two-stroke outboard straining, the aluminum hull skipping across a light chop and banging like a wind chime made from old metal garbage can lids.

I’m young and small, hunched into a ball in the bow, the hood of my yellow raincoat pulled down over my forehead, damp knees knocking, sneakers resting on the jumbled pile of anchor chain, wet hands gripping the worn edge of the old wooden seat. When I pick my face up into the wind, the droplets pinprick my cheeks and I clench my eyes and duck back down. Looking backward, out of the wind, I smile as I watch my father sitting tall and resolute on the stern seat, his left hand gripping the outboard’s tiller, staring straight ahead as if this were the sunniest of summer days. Turning back down again into my damp, cramped, huddled little world, the raindrops sliding down my hood and splashing all around me, I think that my father must be the biggest, strongest, bravest man in the world.

A mile farther on, having never dared to look again into the stinging mist, I feel the boat tip and turn to port as we enter the shelter of the dark cove. The whine of the outboard drops in octaves, lower and lower, to a murmur, then coughs twice and the world goes silent, save for the sizzle of the mist peppering the lake — the sound of bacon frying far off.

Looking up, I see our cabin tucked under the fragrant boughs of the balsams, and the needled path that leads from the dripping ferns down to the dock. For a moment it seems as if my father, our boat, and me, are all fixed in place, and that the cabin and the trees and the path and the ferns and the dock are all gliding toward us across the black skin of the lake. When you’re six, it seems as if such things can be so.

The gunwale of the boat and the side of the dock now merge, sliding on parallel tracks just an inch apart, ever slowing until the last possible moment when my father reaches out, the brass catch in his wet fingers, and clips the brass ring with a crisp, metallic click. Seconds later, we hear the click come back to us, softer now as it echoes off the grey silhouette of the far shore.

The boat rocks hard as my father jumps up onto the dock and I hear his footsteps on the damp wood and then I see his boots pointing at me, and a moment later I feel his big hands in my armpits, lifting me from my seat, swooping me through the air, planting me firmly on the dock, steadying me while I catch my balance, and then letting me go. “We made it, Pete,” he says.

Forty-five years later, on the same lake and in the same boat, the same father and son motor north toward the same cabin in the same gray drizzle, the hull making the same aluminum slaps against the light chop. My father is in the bow now, hunched under his raincoat and watching the drops fall from his hood and splash about his feet. My left hand is on the tiller and I’m staring straight ahead into the stinging mist, not because I’m big or strong or brave, but because when you have to get up the lake in the rain, that’s just what you do. Dad looks back at me, and smiles. He seems suddenly old and small.

Soon I bank the boat to port and throttle the motor down, then down some more, then I let it die in coughs and we drift in toward the dock. It’s smooth here in the dark cove and the air hangs with the sweetness of the north woods and the dock glides out to meet us. Just before the ferns brush the bow, I reach out and clip the old brass ring, and the same metallic click bounces softly back to us from the same distant shore.

I jump up onto the dock and walk along the damp boards toward the bow of the boat, then I turn and crouch and reach down under my father’s arms and lift him as he works to stand. I guide him as he steps carefully up onto the seat, and then up onto the dock. It’s slippery and I don’t want him to fall. I steady him for a few moments while he catches his balance, then I let him go. “We made it, Dad,” I say.

(Author’s Note: My dad died last year on Christmas morning, and I miss him terribly.)

* * *

I SEE MY FATHER RUNNING

I’m running.

It’s August and it’s the Berkshires and I’m having the time of my life thinking only of jumping into that deep blue swimming pool so I run as fast as my nine year-old legs can carry me through the lobby of the resort and then I turn and race through the restaurant where I see far off my cousins jumping and splashing so I pump my little arms up and down and dream of the perfect cannonball and I never see the sliding glass door.

I fly past a waitress and she sees the tragedy a moment before it happens and she screams and drops a tray of wine glasses and in that tiny instant I wonder why she would do that on such a nice day.

I hear glass shatter.

Feel glass shatter.

And I’m blown backward.

The images from that day are like snapshots taken with a camera flash—glints and fragments; disjointed, disconnected, hot burning moments where nothing moves and everything happens all at once.

I see my bare feet in a sea of shining slivers.

Shards hanging like glinting daggers above me from the busted plate glass door.

Crimson, dripping.

Me, dripping.

Into the dark red carpet the drops disappear. Maybe they aren’t real. Maybe this isn’t happening. I just want to go swimming.

I hear shouts.

“Don’t move!”

The sound of shoes, of crunching. Feel hands on me. Many voices, talking, calling out.

Then I’m sitting on some steps and I see white towels and I feel them being pressed all over me and they’re all turning bright red.

More crimson drops disappear into crimson carpeting.

In the distance I hear a rotary phone being dialed quickly—zzzzip, clickety, clickety, zzzzip, clickety clickety clickety….

A car horn blows in the parking lot. Then more horns. Then all the horns on all the cars. The horns scream out the alarm to my father who is across the valley hiking on an old ski slope, enjoying this late summer day.

Then I feel my Mom’s voice at the back of my neck; her breath warm, soothing.

As I sit, dripping and oozing.

Sure, confident, and calm, she holds what’s left of my ear to the side of my head with yet another white towel.

“You. Are. Okay.”

She whispers each word by itself, each with its own ending period, as if by sheer force of punctuation she can make her sliced-up little boy whole again.

I’m being carried now. Voices shouting. Doors held open. Sliding into the car. I’m a gooey, slippery mess. But no one cares. There are so many towels.

Driving very fast.

Mom holds my left earlobe in her lap, wrapped in a tissue with an ice cube.

Then I’m lying on a stainless table.

Fluorescent lights buzz.

A big white sheet is pulled over me and holes are cut into it with scissors. A hole goes over each laceration—a patchwork of windows to see and stitch through. I stare out as if through Swiss cheese.

I’m at a tiny country clinic and the doctor is a kind lady and she talks to me so gently as she arranges her tools.

“I hear you have pet snakes!” she says, feigning great enthusiasm.

Numbing pricks of Novocain, then needle and thread—pulling me back together.

Quiet now. Very warm. No more shouting. No more pain. Just dull numbness. And I’m falling asleep, dreaming of the perfect cannonball.

Needle and thread. Pulling me back together.

I. Am. Okay.

Over forty-five years have passed since that terrible day. The fear and pain have long receded and I rarely think of the wine glasses and the towels and the shouts and the crimson drops. But sometimes, in the shower or at the beach, I catch a glimpse of white, rubbery scar tissue, and the images come flying back. But, like frames clipped from a film, they have no motion—they’re just slices of time and try as I might I can’t run them together. I can’t play the movie. Except for one scene—a sequence that, oddly, I never saw.

I am sitting on those steps, being held together by strangers, looking down and watching my own life leak onto the floor. And out of sight beyond the dripping shards, on that hill far across the stretching valley, sprinting through the tall grass as fast as his legs can carry him, arms pumping and racing toward the blaring car horns, I see my father running.

* * *

A BARN, TWO BOATS, AND A BOY

When we bought this old farm it came with the barn I always wanted. A huge, 180-year-old, lumbering, cavernous building with a great yawning maw in front, and lofts, crannies, and nooks inside. It was delicious; the perfect place for big projects and huge animals and loads of stuff.

And stuff it we did, especially my son, who collects big things. Some people collect baseball cards, Jeremiah collects boats and trailers.

Jeremiah bought a house not long ago, with a four-car garage, and I began gently urging him to consider moving some of his stuff out of the barn. I would drop subtle hints, such as, “When are you going to drag all your junk out of my barn and put it in your barn?”

Well, he came over the other day for the express purpose of dealing with some of his stuff. But I realized I was in trouble when he pulled in towing yet another trailer.

“I thought the idea was to move stuff out,” I said. “Don’t worry, Dad,” he said, laughing. So I worried.

The goal for the day, it turned out, was to hoist up Jeremiah’s houseboat, pull out the trailer that it sat on (which was in backwards, not sure how that happened), put a new trailer under it, (not backwards), lower the boat down onto the new trailer, pull it out of the barn, then yank out the boat and trailer that was behind it, then put the houseboat back in, then put the third trailer back in (not backwards). Simple, like playing chess using winches, pulleys, and a four-wheel drive truck.

And so the day went, the two of us clambering about, hooking chain-falls to chestnut timbers high overhead, rigging fat nylon straps, tensioning come-a-longs, swapping trailer hitch balls, moving ladders, laughing, looking for lost tools, and shouting things back and forth like, “You got three inches on this side,” and “Bring her a little my way. Whoa, stop! I mean a little your way,” and “Up, up, up, okay, good, now down” and “I need a little more not so much.”

In the middle of hoisting the houseboat up, we found ourselves both underneath the looming hull, its one-ton bulk swinging ever so gently over our heads from creaking beams. “I don’t think we should both be under here,” Jeremiah said. Then he quickly crawled out.

In the early afternoon, I was trying to pry off a recalcitrant two-by-four and wanted more leverage. “I need that blue-handled screwdriver,” I shouted from the beneath the bowels of the houseboat. Jeremiah, quickly skidded a framing hammer to me across the barn floor. Which is what I’d wanted, of course.

Later, when it came time to move the new trailer in, we both spotted the same problem at the same time and had one of those conversations that only fathers and sons who have grown up together can have; the kind with almost no nouns. The dialog went something like, “Oh, boy,” “Yeah, huh,” “We should have,” “Yup,” “So, umm,” “How about,” “And if we,” “Then,” “Sure, that could work,” “I’ll get a wrench.”

By the end of the day, we were covered with dust and grime, had greasy smears on our pants, splinters in our hands, and dried barn swallow poop in our hair—but the big job was finished and Jeremiah was ecstatic. “Gosh, Dad, we got so much done. Thanks a lot,” he said.

In the evening, long after my son had gone, I went back to close the big barn door. Looking in from the road, things didn’t look much different. The barn was still chocked full of mostly the same stuff and the houseboat and trailers were still right where they had been that morning. The only difference was that some things faced forward now, instead of backward.

Life is like that. You look back through the big door at the end of each day and things seem pretty much the same. The same stuff in the same places—rearranged perhaps, but still there. You shuffle everyday problems around like chess pieces, towing one problem out, and then pulling another one in.

Of course, the difference on this day was that I had spent it with my beloved son. He works as a marine engineer, fifteen hundred miles away on a drillship in the middle of the ocean, and I only get to see him every few weeks. But on this Saturday we’d been together, just the two of us, scrambling around like when we were little and he was still home and we had some fantastic project percolating away in the barn. It was joyous.

Just before Jeremiah packed up to head to his house after our big day, he went into the other room to say goodbye to his mom. I found his wallet on the kitchen counter and I dashed off a quick note on the torn-off corner of an envelope and tucked it deep inside: “You’re the son I always wanted.”

* * *

THE RED KNIFE

The man and the little boy looked down through the glass display case and saw row upon gleaming row of shimmering stainless-steel spectacle. On purple velvet rested knives of every imagination. Huge knives. Modest knives. Specialty knives. Knives with ivory handles. Knives for skinning, for whittling, for cutting rope. Knives for the sheath and knives for the pocket. And one stood out from the rest, tiny and red, its little blade scalloped and keen.

“That’s the one I’d want,” whispered the man, his hand on his boy’s shoulder. “Can you imagine having such a wondrous thing?”

“Yes,” the boy said, softly, his eyes never leaving the glimmering edge.

On a white tag tied to the handle with white string was the staggering price: twenty-five dollars.

The boy looked up, determined. “I’m going to save up for it, Dad,” he said.

For the next several weeks the boy scurried about in his off-time, bent on industry: mowing grass, helping his father build a shed, running errands for his mom, watching his baby sister; rushing from job to job, his pockets jingling with quarters and dimes, each night his jar slowly filling.

“What can I do today?” the bright lad would ask each Saturday morning, and then he would take his marching orders and hurry off to his tools and his toil. Always happy. Living in the dream of things wished for.

After a while, the man forgot about the knife. His work was hard and his days were long and filled with the troubles of industry and the troubles of others. He came home each night weary and quiet, bearing the invisible load of the hours on his shoulders, and fell asleep in a chair. In the next room, his little boy stacked quarters four-high and dimes in piles of ten.

One hot day the man came home from work early. He climbed slowly out of his old car and into the blazing afternoon. It was so hot he could smell the sun. And as he walked slowly and wearily toward the house and his chair and his nap before supper, his boy came running from the back yard, skipping and leaping and calling his name.

“Dad!” the boy yelled. “I did it!”

And the boy ran up to the man and said, “Hold out your hands,” and the man dropped his briefcase in the dust and held out his cupped hands and the boy gently laid in them the perfect small red knife.

“Oh, son,” the man said, the heaviness of the day magically lifting. “You did it.” And he turned the knife over in his hands and opened and closed its ambitious little blade and marveled at its craftsmanship. And then he marveled at the boy in front of him, craftsmanship of another kind, now happily wringing his little hands and rising up and down on his little toes as if about to fly away in a cloud of giggles and smiles.

“I am so proud of you,” the man said, folding the knife carefully and holding it out gently for his son.

But the boy didn’t take the knife. He put his hands behind his back. Looked down and scuffed at the dry brown earth. Wiped his dirt-smudged cheek against his shoulder. Then he looked up and squinted into the blazing sun, his baseball cap on a little crooked.

“I got it for you, Dad,” the boy said. Then he turned and ran off to climb a tree.

The man stood in his driveway holding the tiny gift in his trembling hands, his briefcase lying flopped over beside him in the dust of the burning day. And his tears fell through his fingers.

Almost twenty years later the man tried to put down on paper the story of the little boy and the gleaming knife and the weeks of toil and the blinding sun and the weariness of a dusty afternoon, and he toiled hopelessly with nothing but words to describe how it felt to hold the love of his little son in his hands. And his eyes welled again as he remembered, and his hands trembled and his vision blurred, and he leaned in close and strained to see the words as he typed.

And his tears fell through his fingers

* * *

ENCOURAGEMENT IN A CAN OF LATEX

I have a teenage daughter.

Amanda came to us in the usual way, all pink and wiggling, and within moments she held our hearts fast in her tiny fingers.

I wrapped her up in a blanket and brought her close.

“You can do anything, little one,” I whispered.

She was six minutes old.

Fast-forward fifteen years and she’s proving me right. Smart, assertive, charming, witty, tenacious—she’s got the world by the tail.

Ask Mandy what she’s going to be when she grows up and she says, “Whatever.” But it’s not the typical, flippant remark of a teenager, accompanied by the eye roll and toss of the hand. She really means it. Limits? What limits?

About a year ago, Mandy caught me into my office. “Dad, I want to paint my room.” A reasonable request, I thought, so I said, “Sure, sweetie, go for it.” But she wasn’t done. “I want to paint words on the ceiling, too.” I looked at her for a good long time, sizing up the situation, trying to figure out if this was one of those times when I should put my foot down, or let her go. I let her go.

The scheme was shades of purple, blue, and sea spray. Very aquatic. When you walked into her new room you felt like if you held your breath you might get a chance to swim with dolphins.

“Don’t you feel like you’re sleeping underwater,” I asked.

“Yeah, isn’t it cool,” she said.

And there, across the sloping ceiling, from wall to wall, were her words. Big, rounded, sweeping letters—bold pronouncements: Friendship, Passion, Optimism, Curiosity, Laughter, Love, Creativity, Hope, Loyalty, and Confidence.

Vibrant, colorful caterpillars strutted across the tops of some of the letters while huge, flamboyant butterflies flitted around near the walls. The symbolism was not lost on me.

“Gosh, Mandy, you’re amazing,” I said, pulling her in close.

Then, just three weeks ago, she said she wanted to paint her room again.

“Oh, but Mandy, what about your words?” I asked, trailing off into sadness.

Now she gave me the eye-roll. “Oh Dad, you’re such a sap. I can get more words, you know.”

So off she went with a fresh gallon of creativity, this time in flat white.

She appeared an hour or so later, sleeves rolled up, hair pulled back and held in place with a purple elastic, white splotches in accidental places, holding the brush with one hand cupped under the leaky end. There was no smile.

“Dad,” she said, bristling. “I just can’t get rid of my confidence.”

Sure enough, the white paint just wouldn’t cover it—that big, bold word kept oozing back to the surface. So I helped her and we put on another coat. And another. I tried going over the word with a stain-killing white primer, then another finish coat. “That ought to do it,” I proclaimed. Nope.

In the end, over the course of several days, we put over a dozen coats on that ceiling. On the last night, as Mandy prepared for bed, it finally looked like we’d won the battle. White. Everywhere, white. A clean, fresh start.

“What are you going to paint on the new ceiling, Mandy? I asked.

“Not really sure yet,” she said. “But it’s going to be great!”

When I came home from work the next day, there my daughter stood. Hands on her hips, toe tapping, shaking her head, and scowling.

“It’s back, Dad. My confidence is back. Ugh!”

I put my hands on her shoulders and looked deeply into those determined eyes. “Daughter, life is full of troubles. Persistent confidence is just something you’re going to have to live with.”

___________________

And there are about 50 more of these, looking backward as a son and forward as a dad…