The Things We Keep

The house was quiet, which was unusual. For years it had been filled with music, children, dogs, arguments, laughter, and appliances threatening retirement. Now the refrigerator hummed to itself while I stood in the bedroom holding a cardboard box marked KEEP.

I had no idea what belonged in it.

At fifty-seven, I owned enough possessions to furnish three respectable homes or one deeply confused museum. There were guitars, photographs, books, recordings, obsolete computers, and cables whose original purposes had been forgotten by civilization.

I picked up a photograph of my daughters.

That settled the first question.

Keep.

They were younger in the picture, standing close together, smiling at someone just outside the frame. Probably me. There had been a time when they believed their father could fix anything. I had encouraged this misconception, partly out of love and partly because I believed it myself.

I sat on the bed.

A man eventually discovers that his life has become a story he would never believe if somebody else told it. Mine involved rock bands, marriage, fatherhood, funerals, faith, lawyers, hospitals, jail cells, and a motorcycle named Liberty.

The motorcycle was probably the least complicated relationship.

Once I imagined becoming a famous musician. Later, a successful businessman. Then a writer. Somewhere along the way I became a father, the only occupation that ever mattered, although I approached it like everything else: enthusiastically, imperfectly, and with a dangerous confidence in my ability to improvise.

My daughters deserved better than some of those improvisations.

That was difficult to admit.

I had spent years explaining myself. Explaining decisions, defending intentions, arguing about what happened and why. Explanations had become a second occupation, though nobody offered benefits or paid vacation.

Now I wanted something different.

I wanted to understand.

Outside, afternoon sunlight crossed the driveway. Somewhere people were buying groceries, attending football games, falling in love, and conducting perfectly ordinary lives. I envied them. Ordinary had become an exotic destination, one for which I apparently lacked the proper documents.

On the dresser sat a Bible, a guitar pick, and unopened mail: salvation, music, and consequences, arranged in no particular order.

I opened the Bible but did not read. Instead I remembered my mother, whose voice I could still hear in certain rooms. I remembered the woman I had married, the children we raised, the dinners and Christmas mornings that once seemed permanent. Death had changed the shape of our family. My choices had changed it again.

For a long time I believed faith meant having answers. Age suggested a less convenient possibility: perhaps faith began when the answers stopped working.

I could not repair everything.

That hurt more than any accusation.

For years I had confused winning arguments with solving problems. I had mistaken being heard for being understood, and stubbornness for courage. I possessed stubbornness in industrial quantities.

But courage, I was beginning to suspect, might require something quieter.

An apology without a speech afterward.

A promise kept when nobody was watching.

The discipline to leave a ringing telephone unanswered when answering would only make matters worse.

I looked again at the photograph. There were things I wanted to tell my daughters, things that might take a lifetime to explain. Perhaps the first thing was simple enough: I loved them. I always had. But love, however sincere, did not excuse every mistake made in its name.

I placed the photograph carefully inside the box.

Under a pile of recording equipment I found a notebook, its pages blank except for a date written years earlier. I brushed dust from the cover and uncapped a pen.

For once, I wasn’t preparing a defense, composing an argument, or asking anyone to take my side. The house remained quiet. I could hear a bird calling outside the window. Nothing was fixed. Nothing was finished.

I wrote two letters.

JC.

I did not know whether anyone would read what followed. For the first time in years, that seemed beside the point.

Then I turned the page.