Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul II (35 page)

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Authors: Jack Canfield,Mark Victor Hansen,Kimberly Kirberger

BOOK: Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul II
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Page 175
A Father's Wish
It's a wonderful feeling when your father becomes not a god but a man to youwhen he comes down from the mountain and you see he's this man with weaknesses. And you love him as this whole being, not as a figurehead.
Robin Williams
I write this . . .  as a father. Until you have a son of your own, you will never know what that means. You will never know the joy beyond joy, the love beyond feeling that resonates in the heart of a father as he looks upon his son. You will never know the sense of honor that makes a man want to be more than he is and to pass on something good and hopeful into the hands of his son. And you will never know the heartbreak of the fathers who are haunted by the personal demons that keep them from being the men they want their sons to see.
You will only see the man that stands before you, or who has left your life, who exerts a power over youfor good or for illthat will never let go.
It is a great privilege and a great burden to be that man. There is something that must be passed from father to son,

 

Page 176
or it is never passed as clearly. It is a sense of manhood, of self-worth, of responsibility to the world around us.
And yet, how to put it in words? We live in a time when it is hard to speak from the heart. Our lives are smothered by a thousand trivialities, and the poetry of our spirits is silenced by the thoughts and cares of daily affairs. The song that lives in our hearts, the song that we have waited to share, the song of being a man, is silent. We find ourselves full of advice but devoid of belief.
And so, I want to speak to you honestly. I do not have answers. But I do understand the questions. I see you struggling and discovering and striving upward, and I see myself reflected in your eyes and in your days. In some deep and fundamental way, I have been there and I want to share.
I, too, have learned to walk, to run, to fall. I have had a first love. I have known fear and anger and sadness. My heart has been broken and I have known moments when the hand of God seemed to be on my shoulder. I have wept tears of sorrow and tears of joy.
There have been times of darkness when I thought I would never again see light, and there have been times when I wanted to dance and sing and hug every person I met.
I have felt myself emptied into the mystery of the universe, and I have had moments when the smallest slight threw me into a rage.
I have carried others when I barely had the strength to walk myself, and I have left others standing by the side of the road with their hands outstretched for help.
Sometimes I feel I have done more than anyone can ask; other times I feel I am a charlatan and a failure. I carry within me the spark of greatness and the darkness of heartless crimes.
In short, I am a man, as are you.

 

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Although you will walk your own earth and move through your own time, the same sun will rise on you that rose on me, and the same seasons will course across your life as moved across mine. We will always be different, but we will always be the same.
This is my attempt to give you the lessons of my life, so that you can use them in yours. They are not meant to make you into me. It is my greatest joy to watch you become yourself. But time reveals truths, and these truths are greater than either of us. If I can give them a voice in a way that allows me to walk beside you during your days, then I will have done well.
To be your father is the greatest honor I have ever received. It allowed me to touch mystery for a moment, and to see my love made flesh. If I could have but one wish, it would be for you to pass that love along. After all, there is not much more to life than that.
Kent Nerburn

 

Page 178
Heartwood
One autumn evening I sat on the third-base line in Miami's Pro-Player Stadium watching a critical game between the Florida Marlins and the New York Mets. My attention was distracted off and on by a teenage boy and his father who sat one row in front of me. The father was a Mets fan by the look of his cap; his son's had the Marlins' logo.
Something the boy said provoked his father, who began to tease his son about the Marlins. When it became clear the Marlins might lose this game, the boy's responses to his father's jibes became sharp and petulant. Near game's end, the boynow in a mean sulksaid something harsh that spun the man's head around to face his son. In a full-bore adolescent snarl, he stared at his father. His eyes narrowed, his troubled skin flushed. Anger overwhelmed him, ''I hate you, you know that!" He spat the words as though they tasted as bad in his mouth as they sounded once spoken. Then he ran for the shelter of the grandstand. In a moment the man stood and followed the boy.
As I watched them, I sympathized with both father and

 

Page 179
son because I, too, had once turned on the man whose child I was. It was a time when I thought I would never grow up, never be at ease in my own skin, never get it right. It is a time not to be forgotten.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
On a June day, during the summer of my freshman year in high school, I got into an ugly argument with my father. He was a country doctor who had a farm in southern Indiana where he raised Hereford cattle and kept a few horses. That summer he decided to extend the pasture fence along the south field. That's what started the trouble.
We were sitting under a sycamore at the edge of the pasture. My father was thoughtfully whittling at a piece of wood. He pointed to a stand of hemlocks about three hundred yards away and said, "From here to therethat's where we want our fence. Figure 'bout 110 holes. Three feet deep. Won't take forever."
I said in a tight voice, "Why don't we get a power augur?"
"Because power augurs don't learn anything from work. And we want our fence to teach us a thing or two."
What made me mad was the way he said "
we
want
our
fence . . . "
We
had nothing to do with it. The project was
his
. I was just forced labor and I thought that was unfair.
I admired a lot about my dad and I tried to remember those things when I felt mad at him but I got angry easily that summer. One evening as we checked out the cattle, my father's attention fixed on a river birch that grew on the east bank of the farm pond. The tree forked at ground level and was my retreat. I'd get my back up against the dark bark of one trunk and my feet against the other so that I was wedged solid. Then I could look at the sky or read or pretend.
"I remember you scrunchin' into that tree when you were a little kid," my father said. "You don't do that much anymore."

 

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Amazed, I heard myself say, "What the hell do you care!" And ran to the barn, let myself into the tack room, sat on a nail keg and tried very hard not to cry. It wasn't long before he opened the door. He sat opposite me on the old stool he always used. Although I was staring at my tightly folded hands, I could feel him looking at me. Finally, I met his gaze.
"It's not a good idea to doctor your own family," he said, "but I guess I need to do that for you right now." He focused on me. "Let's see. You feel strange in your own body. Like it doesn't work just like it always has. You're a little slow. You think no one else is like you. And you think that I live in dim-wit land. You think I'm too hard on you, and you wonder how you got into a family dull as we are.''
I was astonished. I didn't understand how he knew my most treacherous night thoughts.
"The thing of it is, your body is changing. You've got a lot more male hormone in your blood. And, Son, let me tell you, there is not a grown man in this world who could handle what that does to you when you're fourteen. But you have to learn to deal with it. It's what's making your muscles grow and your hair, and it's making your voice change. It will make you a grown man before you know it. At least you'll
look
like one.
Being
one is a different thing. Right now you think you can't. Right now you think you're a very misunderstood guy."
He was right. For the past few months I had begun to think no one really knew a thing about me. I felt irritable and restless and sad for no reason. So because I couldn't talk about it, I began to feel really isolated. I wasn't a boy anymore and I wasn't a man. I was nowhere.
"So," my dad said after awhile, "One of the things that'll help you is work. Hard work."
As soon as he said it I suspected this help-me thing was

 

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a ploy to get me to spend my summer doing things around the place. But there was no way around my father. When he said something, he meant it. That was that.
I began that summer by digging post holes by hand across the north meadow where a new fence was going to go. I did that all morning, every day. I slammed that digger into the ground until I had tough calluses on my hands. But I noticed one day as I was coming out of the shower that my shoulders looked bigger somehow. I hated the work, but still the anger I felt went slamming into the earth and somehow made me feel better.
One Saturday morning I helped my father patch the barn roof. We worked in silence for a long time. Then he suddenly looked directly at me and almost reading my thoughts, said, "You
aren't
alone, you know."
I looked up at him, squatting near me with the handle of the tar bucket in his hand. "Think about this. If you drew a line from your feet down the side of our barn to the earth and followed it along any which way you pleased, it would touch every living thing there is in the world. That's what the earth does. It connects us all. Every living thing. So you're never alone. No one is."
I started to argue with that idea in my mind, but the notion of being connected to all the life there was in the world made me feel so good that I let my thoughts quiet down and said nothing.
That summer I gradually began to pay attention to doing chores well. I began to take a more serious interest in the farm and ever so slowly I began to feel I could somehow get through this rotten time. My body got bigger, I got hair on my face and elsewhere, and my feet grew a whole size. Maybe there was hope.
Near the end of that summer, I went down to the pond to sit in my tree. It was kind of a last visit to the world of my boyhood.

 

Page 182
But I no longer fit in the fork of the tree and had to scuttle up almost eight feet high in order to get space enough for my body. As I stretched out I could feel the trunk that my feet pressed against was weak. I could push it away easily with my legs. I began to push at it harder until, at last, the trunk gave and slowly fell to the ground, raising dust from the weeds. Then I walked back to the barn, got the chain saw and cut up my tree for firewood.
The day I finished the work on my father's fence, I saw him sitting on an outcropping of granite in the south pasture. His elbows were on his knees, his hands clasped between them. His ruin of a Stetson was pushed back on his head. As I walked toward him, I knew he was thinking.
I sat down beside him on the flat rock. "You thinking about how long this grass is going to hold out without some rain?"
"Yep," he said. "How long you think we got?"
"Another week. Easy."
He turned and looked me deep in the eyes, the way he did when he wanted to be sure he'd gotten the real gist of what you were asking him. Of course, I wasn't really talking about the state of the pasture as much as I was trying to find out if my opinion mattered to him. After what seemed to me a very long time he said, "Could be. You could be right." Then he said, "You did a fine job on our fence. Custom work. Custom."
"Thanks," I said. I felt almost overwhelmed by the force of his approval. I smiled what I am sure was the biggest smile of my life.
"You know," he said, "you're going to turn out to be one hell of a man. But just because you're getting all grown up doesn't mean you have to leave behind everything you liked when you were a boy."
I knew he was thinking about why I had cut down my tree. I looked at his lined face. He seemed much older to

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