Tom Rademacher - Raising Ollie : How My Nonbinary Art-Nerd Kid Changed (Nearly) Everything I Know

Also by Tom Rademacher

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

It Wont Be Easy: An Exceedingly Honest (and Slightly Unprofessional) Love Letter to Teaching

Tom Rademacher

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis London

Copyright 2021 by Tom Rademacher

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

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ISBN 978-1-4529-6637-3 (ebook)

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This book, and pretty much everything else I do, is for Ollie.

We are a family of story hoarders. The things we hang on our walls and display on our shelves are pieces of stories, things we couldnt sell if we wanted to and yet would be the first things grabbed if there were a fire.

Theres the small business-cardsized sign that says Cigar and Smoking in the Cognac Room Only Please from the restaurant Becca and I went to on our first big dating anniversary, still both in our teenage years. It was a place full of young people doing something fancy, and older people out for the kind of dinner you go to with a jacket on, maybe, get a steak and a few drinks. We stole the sign as our own little rebellion against the idea of going to a place like this and doing things like anniversary dinners. We were especially quirky hypocrites like that, the kind who did all the normal things ironically and still managed to do all the normal things.

Theres the bright-green painting with purple and blue lines in geometric shapes, not the kind of thing wed be into, except that this one thing is from a road trip to New York, one where our car broke in Pennsylvania and exhaust poured in through the air vents, and we got to a hotel off the highway and I promptly passed out, nearly green from breathing it in, and where Becca took a walk and got lost, but also somewhere in there found someone to come get the car, and the next day we went and talked to him, understanding very little of his thick rural Pennsylvania accent, except that there was a cheap option to just weld a thing that was, you know, not totally legal and wouldnt hold forever, or we could wait a few days for a part and pay four times as much, and seeing as we were crossing the state line that day, off we went in less than an hour.

None of that is even the story.

We got the painting because we got to New York and Becca tracked down a guy who once knew her uncle before he died and he had that painting in his back room, having hung on to it after her uncles death just in case he ever met just the right person who should have it. Thats the story.

There are mini shrines to my dad hidden all over the house. A set of beer glasses over here, this one book on the shelf, the watch on the nightstand, a little engraved pocketknife in the desk drawer.

There are all the typewriters, all with stories. My grandpas shiny black Remington with the extra-long register because he was an engineer who needed to fit blueprints; my great-aunts portable, a light gray Royal that clips firmly inside its own small case, that went with her to Korea and Vietnam where she was stationed as a nurse; my Great-Grandma Maries, an olive green L. C. Smith Secretarial, the typewriter of the first writer I know of in the family, who got married in secret so Great-Grandpa Paul could go fight in World War I and she could stay and keep teaching, because married women werent allowed to, and who wrote poems and fiery letters to the editor and little stories that the paper wouldnt publish until she started writing as P. V. Canthook, a local lumberjack. A binder of all her writing is downstairs, her own hoard of stories about Paul Bunyan that are half fables of the North Woods and half love letters to her husband. Ive inherited those love letters from her, and maybe also an instinct to write them. My first book was a love letter, and this book even more so.

Theres pictures, of course. Nothing professional though. No matching denim whatever and a painted sign that says Love. Instead, we have poorly taken selfies from before cameras had screens: half my face cut off on a water taxi in Sweden, everything from the nose down on both of us in Alaska, dirty and miserable and pretending to be happy that one time we went to Burning Man in the deserts of Nevada. And at our wedding, holding plastic umbrellas because the outdoor ceremony was rained out and we did the whole damn thing in a place that looked like a gymnatorium but let us bring in our own beer.

Our house was full, we thought, of all these little stories that together hold a life of stories together. It was, I mean, it was full, the life and the house.

And then we had Ollie, and everything got somehow more full.

I want to tell you stories, I want to tell you all the stories. But all the stories arent mine, and all the stories arent for you. Theres a bunch of stories, though, many focused on this one, pretty big year for my family that I can share, that Im excited to share. Like most real stories, there arent perfect beginnings or middles or, most especially, endings. There is no clear thesis statement for any year of my life, or for any chapter of this book, but there are stories. Stories do seem to say something when they are told all together.

If Ive ever taken you on a tour of my house, Im sorry. You know that I cant tell you just one of the stories, just part of the stories. I cant tell you about the typewriters without bringing out the story binder, but those dont make real sense without the pictures of Pauls regiment, which are hung by Beccas uncles painting and that portrait of Becca our high school art teacher painted of her as the stepmother in Cinderella as a set piece the summer of her junior year that we hung above our fireplace as a joke and then realized it was perfect. Piece by piece, these stories build our home.

I cant tell you about raising Olive without telling you about my dad, cant tell you about him without explaining how his illness was gasoline poured on the fire of my college-aged anxiety. I cant talk about how funny Olive is without showing you how much fun Ollie and Becca and I all have together, how, second to stories, we are a family of inside jokes and shared laughter. To tell you the story of raising Olive, I have to tell you so many stories.

These stories are satellites, orbiting each other, taking their turns in the center because the physics of stories is like that. There are the stories that started this, the bits of my childhood that have clumped together, large enough to create some kind of gravity. Stories are added from the first lurching attempts at adulthood and lost as the whole mess keeps floating wherever its going through the cold chaos of space.

They are, all these stories now, orbiting and pushing and pushed by the mass in the middle, this thing whose speed and the weight of its importance make it shine, burning with brilliant white light. Its this most important thing Ive ever done, the most important thing Ill ever do, so much that its light is changing, slightly but permanently, every other story that surrounds it. These are the stories, piece by piece, that make this book.