DAD’S MAYBE BOOK
Tim O’Brien

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

Copyright © Tim O’Brien 2019

Cover photograph © Tim O’Brien

Joseph O’Neill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Information on previously published material appears here.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008372453

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008372477

Version: 2019-09-27

Dedication

For Tad, Timmy, and Meredith O’Brien

Epigraph

An entry from our babysitter’s 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 child’s umbrella, carefully splashing down in each available puddle. After a time, he lifts the umbrella over Meredith’s head and says, “You are my sunshine, even when it’s raining.”

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

1. A Letter to My Son

2. A Maybe Book (I)

3. Row, Row

4. Skin

5. Trusting Story

6. First Words

7. Home School

8. The Best of Times

9. Highballs

10. Spelling Lesson

11. Home School

12. Hygiene

13. The Magic Show (I)

14. Abashment

15. Sushi

16. Pride (I)

17. Balance

18. Child’s Play

19. Telling Tales (I)

20. Telling Tales (II)

21. Pride (II)

22. What If?

23. Home School

24. Home School

25. The Old Testament

26. Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (I)

27. The Language of Little Boys

28. Home School

29. Turkey Capital of the World

30. Pride (III)

31. Pacifism

32. Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (II)

33. Home School

34. Home School

35. Easier Homework

36. Timmy’s Bedroom Door

37. Lip Kissing

38. The King of Slippery

39. Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (III)

40. Timmy’s Gamble

41. Dulce et Decorum Est

42. Pride (IV)

43. War Buddies

44. A Maybe Book (II)

45. The Magic Show (II)

46. Practical Magic

47. An Immodest and Altogether Earnest Proposal

48. The Golden Viking

49. Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (IV)

50. Getting Cut

51. Home School

52. Home School

53. The Debating Society

54. Sushi, Sushi, Sushi

55. Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (V)

56. Into the Volcano

57. And into the Stew Pot

58. Lesson Plans

59. Tad’s Literary Advice

60. One Last Lesson Plan

Notes on Sources

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Tim O’Brien

About the Publisher

1

A Letter to My Son

Dear Timmy,

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

Here’s 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, I’m what they call an “older father,” and in ten years, should I have the good luck to turn sixty-eight, I’ll almost certainly have trouble keeping up with you. Basketball will be a problem. And twenty years from now … well, it’s sad, isn’t it?

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

Sadder yet, that’s 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, “It’s okay, Dad. All that’s over.”

So many other things, too. Right now, as I watch you sleep, I imagine scattering good books around the house—in the bathrooms, on the kitchen counter, on the floor beside your bed—and 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 I’ve 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.

It’s 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 father’s 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 life’s work for an extra five or ten years with you, whatever the going rate might be. A father’s chief duty is not to instruct or to discipline. A father’s 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, didn’t 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.

You had awakened from your Shakespearian slumber. You were on my lap, squirming, and then you whacked the keyboard and let out a delighted squeal when I muttered a nasty word or two.

I’ve rewritten what I can remember. And now you are on my lap again, my spectacular Timmy. I’m using your fingers to type these words.

I love you,

Dad

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