On Children and Being There

May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young
--Bob Dylan
"Forever Young" 
As sung with Robbie Robertson and The Band, 
In The "Last Waltz" The Best Version EVER

In the winter of my senior year of high school, when I was 17, I traveled with my wrestling team to a high school in Poolesville, at the far reaches of Montgomery County, Maryland, 35 miles distant from my father’s office in downtown, Washington, D.C., near the White House.

The match was not particularly significant, although it is always focuses the mind when you look across the mat at a boy who is hungering to pin you. I stood at mat’s edge, with my coach, and looked across, but somehow, caught a glimpse of my father, pacing around in the hallway outside the gym.

This momentarily disoriented me. I did not expect to see him there, but it was definitely him, in his raincoat, pacing around.  I had wrestled varsity for three years and he had never come to a match, never, to my memory, asked about any match. He had seen me play football once, baseball once but there he was, and he must have had to leave work two hours early to make it there, driving along those back country roads at that time.

When I looked up, after the match, ninety seconds later, he was nowhere to be seen.

My father was not unusual, in those days, in not being present for high school games. Most high school sports, apart from football and basketball, were played out on Friday afternoons and working parents did not often make them. He did come to the Saturday morning swimming meets, along with the rest of the community, because there was a social aspect to those. Age group swimming was a festival at community pools.

But, for my father, athletics were not of much interest. My brother and I saw him run only once in our lives and we were both astonished to learn he even could run. We knew he played something called “handball” when he was young in New York City, but we had only the minimum in the way of sports equipment at home. He did not fish or hunt or play golf.

 He sat and read, is what he did.

That night, at dinner, I asked him if he had been at the match.

He looked embarrassed and said, “Yes. You didn’t have much of a challenge today.”

That was it. That was the entire discussion.

My mother, across the table, kept her head down. I could see she was smiling, though. She probably had gone to work on him. Your son’s final season. You’ve never even seen him wrestle. If he wrestles in college, you will likely never go to New England to see him there.

My own son, my younger son, started wrestling at age 7 and his last match was 10 years later. I had spent every weekend from November through March in sweaty, tumultuous gymnasiums with him, from Friday night until Sunday nights. I had seen him suffer crushing defeats and soaring, exhilarating victories. We suffered through wrestling together. We had got up at 4 in the morning to drive to distant tournaments and we drove as far away as West Virginia and Pennsylvania. I was always there—until his final tournament, which I missed because I was on call and it was in Allentown, Pennsylvania, three hours away.  I was at all his practices for little league baseball and I was there for most of his games. We played football and lacrosse together. Whenever it rained or snowed both boys and I played football in the mud and I had to put them in garbage bags for the car ride home and we had to hose them down outside before their mother would allow them in the house.

I was not unusual in this. Most of the kids in those days had to put up with their fathers hanging around. My brother told me I really ought to find some friends my own age. 

My wife did the same for our older son, driving him to kayaking races as far away as New Hampshire, gone for the entire weekend.

Dropping off my younger son at college in Nashville, Tennessee, ten hours by car from our home, I got back to my car and, inexplicably, burst into tears, which startled my wife, who said, “I don’t know what you’re crying about: You’ll have all your weekends free now.”

She was right. It was liberating, when he left home, in a sense. We were empty nesters.  I suddenly had all sorts of time on my hands. Weekends were entirely free.

Now both sons are 4 hours away, by car, in New York City and we see them at discrete intervals, in meticulously planned weekend visits, with dinners every night and walks through museums and parks, but they have their own lives now and we are interlopers, swooping in, bribing them with restaurant meals for time with them. One is married, one has a girlfriend. They have lives apart from us.

When they travel, to Thailand, Peru, England, we do not accompany them, although my wife constantly volunteers for this duty. She gets no takers.

When I lived in New York, my father occasionally visited and stayed in my apartment, while I was across the street at the hospital. He liked my apartment. It had good books. He loved walking around New York City, soaking up the energy.  But our contact was limited, mostly because I was working, but also because our contact had always been limited. We had discussions and dinners, but we never went camping or hiking or did anything, apart from the rare road trip on a holiday to see grandparents, which kept us together for more than an hour.

Now, I see friends who go visit their kids in Australia, China, Europe and they hang out, I guess. They have spent time with their kids as they grew up, and they know what to do with that time now.

I guess we are lucky. We are modern parents.