The house was quiet, which was unusual. For years it had been full of music, children, arguments, laughter, and appliances openly 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. Guitars. Photographs. Books. Recordings. Obsolete computers. Cables whose original purposes had been forgotten by civilization. I suspect a few of them were never connected to anything at all. They simply arrived, like relatives at a funeral, and stayed.
Sorting your belongings is like interviewing former versions of yourself, including several who really should have thrown things away. Keep. Donate. Sell. Discard. Simple, until something carries a memory. Then it all goes in KEEP, and KEEP becomes four boxes, and you are right back where you started, except now with boxes.
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 somebody just outside the frame. Probably me. There was a time when they believed their father could fix anything. I encouraged this misunderstanding, partly out of love and partly because I believed it myself. I have since been corrected by events.
I have a son and two daughters. Their names stay outside these pages. Being loved by a writer should not require giving up your privacy. That is already a steep enough price for having me at Thanksgiving.
I sat down on the bed. A man eventually discovers that his life has become a story he would never believe if someone else told it to him. Mine involves rock bands, marriage, fatherhood, funerals, faith, lawyers, hospitals, jail cells, and a motorcycle named Liberty. The motorcycle is probably the least complicated relationship. It only asks for gas and the occasional apology after a pothole.
Once I imagined becoming a famous musician. Later, a successful businessman. Then a writer. Somewhere in there I became a father, the only job that ever really mattered, though I approached it like everything else: enthusiastically, imperfectly, and with a dangerous confidence in my ability to improvise. Improvising works beautifully on a guitar solo. It is less reliable with permission slips and curfews.
My children deserved better than some of those improvisations. That is hard to type. It was harder to admit.
I remember performing music with my older daughter. We were making something together, listening and following, finding each other inside a song. For that little stretch of time, the music belonged to both of us. I do not know how she remembers it. Her memory is hers. Mine makes time feel generous and terribly quick at once. A song can come back. An afternoon cannot.
People tell you to treasure the years when your children are small. You agree while hunting for a missing shoe. Then the years leave, and you would give almost anything for one more ordinary afternoon, including the shoe. I knew children grew up. I had grown up myself, according to official records. Still, nothing prepares you for how suddenly the future gets its own shoes and somewhere else to be.
Here, the humor takes its hat off for a minute.
Their mother died. My mother died too. Those losses deserve more room than a paragraph, and they will get it someday. For now I will just say this: a person can be gone and still shape everything that comes after. I still hear my mother’s voice in certain rooms. I imagine I always will.
I miss my children. Months of separation have given that sentence a weight no clever paragraph can lift. I love them. I wish some things had gone differently. I could have been a better father. I cannot write their feelings for them, and I cannot invent the reply I hope to hear. Love sometimes means waiting, without treating somebody else’s timing as an obstacle to get around.
For years I explained myself. I explained decisions, defended intentions, and argued about what happened and why. Explaining became a second occupation, though nobody offered benefits or paid vacation. I am particularly gifted at it. I can explain an explanation and suggest three possible titles. Becoming dependable, it turns out, requires an entirely different skill set.
Now I want something different. I want to understand. I confused winning arguments with solving problems. I mistook being heard for being understood, and stubbornness for courage. I have stubbornness in industrial quantities. If it were a crop, Alabama would put me on a license plate.
Courage, I am beginning to suspect, is quieter than I thought. An apology without a speech afterward. A promise kept when nobody is watching. The discipline to let a ringing telephone ring when answering would only make things worse. Patience, consistency, steadier choices. My children deserve more than an improved author biography.
On the dresser sat a Bible, a guitar pick, and a stack of unopened mail. Salvation, music, and consequences, arranged in no particular order. That is about as accurate a self-portrait as I have ever made.
For a long time I believed faith meant having answers. Age has suggested something less convenient. Maybe faith begins when the answers stop working. I could not repair everything. That hurt worse than any accusation anyone ever made against me, and I have collected a few.
I put the photograph carefully in the box. Under a pile of recording gear I found a notebook, blank except for a date written years ago. I brushed off the cover and uncapped a pen. For once I was not preparing a defense or asking anyone to take my side. Nothing was fixed. Nothing was finished. I wrote two letters at the top of the page. JC. Then I turned the page.
“Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.”
Psalm 127:3 (KJV)
— JC
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