Tim OBrien - Dads Maybe Book

Copyright 2019 by Tim OBrien

Photographs provided courtesy of the author.

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: OBrien, Tim, 1946 author.

Title: Dads maybe book / Tim OBrien.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019002551 (print) | LCCN 2019009707 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358116714 (ebook) | ISBN 9780618039708 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: OBrien, Tim, 1946Family. | Authors, American20th centuryBiography. | Fatherhood. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Parenting / Fatherhood. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Military.

Classification: LCC PS3565.B75 (ebook) | LCC PS3565.B75 Z46 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.54 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002551

Cover photograph courtesy of the author

Cover art: E+/Getty Images (denim); iStock/Getty Images (note paper)

Cover design by Michaela Sullivan

Author photograph Timmy OBrien

v1.0919

Excerpts from A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, 1929 by Charles Scribners Sons, renewed 1957 by Ernest Hemingway. Excerpts from Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway, 1932 by Charles Scribners Sons, renewed 1957 by Ernest Hemingway. Two selections from The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Killers 1927 by Charles Scribners Sons and Big Two-Hearted River 1925 by Charles Scribners Sons, renewed 1953 by Ernest Hemingway. Text selection as it appeared in Men at War by Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust. All reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from One Art from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop. 2011 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publishers Note and compilation 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Excerpt from Seaside Golf from Collected Poems by John Betjeman, 1955, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1968, 1970, 1979, 1981, 1982, 2001. Reproduced by permission of John Murray, an imprint of Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.

For Tad, Timmy, and Meredith OBrien

An entry from our babysitters journal, January 8, 2008: You have never lived till you see a two-year-old fall in the toilet.

And there goes Tad, running through a heavy rain on Rue Malar in Paris, clutching a childs umbrella, carefully splashing down in each available puddle. After a time, he lifts the umbrella over Merediths head and says, You are my sunshine, even when its raining.

Dear Timmy,

A little more than a year ago, on June 20, 2003, you dropped into the world, my son, my first and only childa surprise, a gift, an eater of electrical cords, a fertilizer factory, a pain in the ass, and a thrill in the heart.

Heres the truth, Timmy. Boy, oh, boy, do I love you. And, boy, do I wish I could spend the next fifty or sixty years with my lips to your cheek, my eyes warming in yours.

But as you wobble into your sixteenth month, it occurs to me that you may never really know your dad. The actuarial stuff looks grim. Even now, Im what they call an older father, and in ten years, should I have the good luck to turn sixty-eight, Ill almost certainly have trouble keeping up with you. Basketball will be a problem. And twenty years from now... well, its sad, isnt it?

When you begin to know me, you will know an old man.

Sadder yet, thats the very best scenario. Life is fragile. Hearts go still. So now, just in case, I want to tell you about your father, the man I think I am. And by that I mean not just the graying old coot you may vaguely remember, but the guy who shares your name and your blood and half your DNA, the Tim who himself was once a Timmy.

Above all, I am this: I am in love with you. Pinwheeling, bedazzled, aching love. If you know nothing else, know that you were adored by your dad.

In many ways, a man is what he yearns for, and while it may never happen, I yearn to walk a golf course at your side. I yearn for a golden afternoon in late August when you will sink a tough twelve-footer to beat me by a stroke or two. I yearn to shake your hand and say, Nine more holes?

I yearn to tell you, man to man, about my time as a soldier in a faraway war. I want to tell you what I saw and what I did. I yearn to hear you say, Its okay, Dad. All thats over.

So many other things, too. Right now, as I watch you sleep, I imagine scattering good books around the housein the bathrooms, on the kitchen counter, on the floor beside your bedand I imagine being there to see you pick one up and turn that first precious page. I long to see the rapture on your face. (Right now, you eat books.)

I yearn to learn from you. I want to be your teacher, yes, but I also want to be your student. I want to be taught, again and again, what Ive already started to know: that a grown man can find pleasure in the sound of a happy squeal, in the miraculous sound of approaching feet.

I yearn to watch you perform simple acts of kindness and generosity. I yearn to witness your first act of moral courage. I yearn to hear you mutter, however awkwardly, Yeah, yeah, I love you, too, and I yearn to believe you will mean it.

Its hard to accept as I watch you now, so lighthearted and purely good, so ignorant of gravestones, but, Timmy, you are in for a world of hurt and heartache and sin and doubt and frustration and despair. Which is to say you are in for being alive. You will do fine things, I know, but you will also do bad things, because you are wholly human, and I wish I could be there, always, to offer forgiveness.

More than that, I long for the day when you might also forgive me. I waited too long, Timmy. Until the late afternoon of June 20, 2003, I had defined myself, for better and for worse, by the novels and stories I had written. I had sought myself in sentences. I had loved myself only insofar as I loved a chapter or a scene or a scrap of dialogue. This is not to demean my life or my writing. I do hope you will someday read the books and stories; I hope you will find my ghost in those pages, my best self, the man I would wish to be for you. Call it pride, call it love, but I dare to hope that you will commit a line or two to memory, for in the dream-space between those vowels and consonants is the sound of your fathers voice, the kid I once was, the man I now am, the old man I will soon become.

That said, I would trade every syllable of my lifes work for an extra five or ten years with you, whatever the going rate might be. A fathers chief duty is not to instruct or to discipline. A fathers chief duty is to be present. And I yearn to be with you forever, always present, even knowing it cannot and will not happen.

There have been advantages, of course, to becoming a father at my age. I doubt that at twenty-eight or even at thirty-eight I would have fully appreciated, as I do now, the way you toddled over to me this morning and gave me a first unsolicited hug. (You knew I was waiting, didnt you?) I doubt I would have so easily tolerated the din at bedtime, or your stubborn recklessness, or your determination to electrocute yourself, or the mouthfuls of dirt you take from the potted plants in the foyer, or how, just a half hour ago, you hit the delete key as I approached the end of this letter.