He’s seven now, my son, but he was four when I was going through this, and I still didn’t know anything about being a father. I mean, I didn’t even know simple stuff. Stuff like you can’t expect four-year-old kids to tell you what they’re thinking. And stuff like they’re unique individuals with their own thoughts and desires. And stuff like the more you try to force them to be who you want them to be, the more you wind up pushing them away.
I remember this one time I took a vacation day so we could make a trip to one of those railroad museums that seem to dot the country. I think just about every state has one, usually located in some weed-choked old train yard. Anyone who’s ever had or ever been a little boy has more than likely visited one and seen their rusty collection of old engines and train cars.
This one had some extra attractions, including a gigantic model railroad display, with lights and switches that the kids could operate by pushing buttons all around the track, a couple of giant train sheds supposedly housing antique rail cars, and outdoor train rides in these dopey-looking open carriages pulled by miniature locomotives. For me, it was nothing special—certainly not worth the forty-five bucks it cost to get the three of us in the place, nor the twelve-fifty more every time we turned around and wanted to do something. For my son, however, it was like he died and went to heaven, and he went completely apeshit with excitement the whole time we were there.
Now, at this time things were starting to get uncomfortably busy for me at work. We’d already lost one of the department heads, and I was struggling to do both her job and mine while looking for a replacement. So, instead of spending a relaxing day with my family, like a dork I was checking my voicemail every ten minutes and worrying that someone important would find out I was gone and start raising hell. And every time I looked up from the cell phone, it seemed, I would catch my son doing something odd or stupid.
Jacob—that’s his name—has this nervous habit. Every time he gets excited about something he starts jumping up and down and flapping his hands like a scrawny, half-grown bird trying to take its first flight. It was kind of cute the first few times he did it, but he still does it even today, and I sometimes wonder if he’ll be doing it when he’s a teenager—getting ready to go to prom, perhaps—or even as an adult, waiting at the altar for his bride to come down the aisle. It sounds silly, I know, but he does it so frequently, and in so much disregard for the number of times that I’ve asked, demanded, or begged that he stop doing it, that I have very little trouble imagining him doing it fifteen years from now in his rented tuxedo and overshined shoes.
I think this trip to the train museum was the first time I’d seen him do it in public. We were inside the pre-fabricated building where the model train exhibit was kept. I was on the phone, and had gone off to an ill-frequented area—a poorly lit and evidently forgotten place where the state’s history of railroading was shown through a series of hand-built and dusty old dioramas—to listen and respond to a long and rambling message from one of my board members. When I returned to the train exhibit I saw my wife, Jenny, and Jacob, standing amidst a sea of other young boys and their parents around the display, strollers parked like a circle of besieged wagons around the perimeter, and Jacob jumping up and down like a salmon trying to get upstream before all the good mating partners were taken.
Now, I’ve got to be honest. That’s what I’m here for, right? At first I didn’t recognize him. I guess my mind was still back in the office, and I remember wondering in my ignorance who the retarded kid was that couldn’t stand still while the rest of the boys simply watched in thunderstruck admiration. And then, of course, I realized who it was, and I felt such an intense feeling of shame and anxiety that tears actually came to my eyes. Shame that I would think such a dismissive thought about my own son, but more so anxiety over the paranoid worry that maybe there really was something wrong with him—if not retarded, then hyperactive or autistic or something. Anything that would keep him from being accepted into normal society and living a full life.
First I composed myself, and then I went over and put my arm around my wife’s shoulders.
“Everything all right?” she asked me, referring to the phone call I had just been on.
“Uh huh,” I said weakly, thinking more about Jacob than anything going on back in the office. He was my son, but so unlike me in so many ways. So unlike anything I wanted him to be. He was still jumping up and down in place, hands still flapping on the ends of his wrists like flags on a windy day, oblivious to everything except the source of his joy. His eyes followed the moving train cars, and noticed neither my return nor the stares he was beginning to draw from some of the other fathers. “He sure likes trains, doesn’t he?”
“He sure does,” Jenny said, her lips initially smiling, but then turning into a frown when she saw how serious I was. “Alan, don’t. Just let him be.”
Back then Jenny always took things more easily than I did, especially wherever Jacob was concerned. We were both somewhat irrational about being parents—she wanting Jacob to remain a little boy forever and me wanting him to grow up too fast—and, initially, she managed to get into fewer confrontations with him than I did. Now, she was trying to steer me away from another one.
“Jacob, buddy,” I said, as kindly as I could. “Do you want to go see the big trains?”
Jacob gave no indication he had even heard me, still jumping in place like he was being punished in boot camp. I remember one year at Christmas he jumped so much and for so long we had to wring the sweat out of his clothes before washing them.
“Jacob,” I said again, a little more sternly. “Let’s go see the big trains.”
Still nothing. I looked around nervously and caught the eye of another father, a short and bald guy in an “I Love Trains” t-shirt and a pair of plaid shorts. For a moment he had a sour and disapproving look on his face, but then he turned away the way strangers are supposed to when they’re caught staring. I disengaged my arm from around Jenny’s shoulders and clasped Jacob’s arm as gently as I could. It kept him from jumping to the heights he had been before but he still fought against me like a fish pulling on my line.
“Ow, Daddy! You’re hurting me!”
This was something else Jacob does with a fair amount of regularity—complaining that he is being injured when he is not. Just like he used to complain the bath water was too hot when I was in it up to both elbows, or still that I’m yelling too loud when I’m not even raising my voice. Back then, Jenny thought he was just sensitive—and she probably still does. I always suspected he was deliberately manipulating every situation to his own advantage, not like some master strategist, but more like a semi-intelligent ape acting mostly on instinct. I thought he was using the only tools he had at his disposal—his tears and his shrill voice—to combat the obstacles keeping him from fulfilling his primal desires. Turns out we were both wrong.
Aware of the eyes upon us and not wanting him to cause a scene by throwing a tantrum in public, I let him go and he went back to full-on jumping, laughing and gurgling in the back of his throat every time a train swept by. Like I hadn’t even interrupted him. Like I was no longer of any concern.
We eventually got him out of there by bribing him with an ice cream treat. Like most new parents we had learned through some difficult trial and error that nothing else has the allure of something sweet on the tongue, and Jacob was an absolute fiend for ice cream.
Later, I did take him out into the train yard to see the old engines and train cars they had on display. I don’t know why I wanted him to see them so badly. I had never been there before so I didn’t know what to expect, but I had seen the tremendous train sheds when we first arrived, and thought they had to have something interesting stashed away inside them. Jenny was tired by then and didn’t want to walk all the way out there, so she started looking at the multi-colored junk in the gift shop, and that was just fine with me.
Ever since I had first attempted to use the “big trains” as a lure to get Jacob out of the public eye, I had somehow fixated on the idea that exploring the train sheds together would be a perfect opportunity for Jacob and me to build some memories. You know, like he would always remember the time his father took him to see the old steam locomotive. Like something out of a picture book—oiled and shiny in the slanted light of the afternoon sun. I remember even entertaining the idea that maybe he would someday bring his own son here and pass the special memory on to another generation.
Well, the sheds didn’t have any steam engines, only a few old and dirty diesels and a dozen or so decrepit train cars from the golden days of cross-country passenger rail service—dining cars, Pullman porters, observation cars—that kind of thing. None of them had been maintained at all. They were all fading paint, cracked housings, and dirty windows on the outside and torn upholstery, exposed wires, and smelly carpet on the inside. The place resembled a graveyard much more than a museum, and I’m not sure we were even supposed to be there. The ends of the sheds were open to the elements, and there weren’t any signs or ropes to keep us out or off the cars, but they were so broken down and full of safety hazards I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to open themselves up to that kind of liability. Despite all the money I saw people shelling out, I remember thinking the museum owners must not have been clearing enough profit to get any decent lawyers to advise them.
But, of course, Jacob didn’t care about any of this. As soon as he saw the train cars huddled together in the gloom of the abandoned shed and realized what they were—honest to goodness, bonafide, real train cars—he wanted to go on them, and me, his father—the adult—was too wrapped up in the idea of trying to create some honest to goodness, bonafide, real father and son bonding to worry about the likelihood of lacerations, bacterial infections, or rabies shots.
Jacob laughed when I lifted him up into the first car and we started exploring, moving from one train car to the next by hopping hand-in-hand across the two feet of empty space that separated them. Every step was a new adventure for Jacob. He loved hiding behind the musty drapes in the sleeping car, running down the narrow service corridors in the kitchen car, and climbing over the backs of the passenger seats, one after the other for the length of the coach. He wanted to go everywhere I couldn’t fit, giggling and grinning back at me like some kind of fairy creature, proud to show me what he and his little body could do, testing his limits but never straying too far from my approving gaze. We were the only ones there—another sign that we probably shouldn’t have been doing what we were doing—and for a while everything else seemed to fade away and the world was just me and my son.
When Jacob got tired we took a rest in one of the dining cars and I sat him at one of the booths behind an old Formica table that was bolted to the floor. It had one of those wavy metal edges on it—like they have at some twenty-four hour diners—and it was broken in a couple of places, and the tabletop itself was chipped and stained about six different shades of green. But Jacob was happy as hell, his big ears flushed red and his smile practically cracking his face open like he was some kind of jack-o-lantern with the front teeth missing from its grin.
“Daddy,” he asked me. “Can we go for a ride on this train?”
“No,” I told him, laughing in the back of my throat. “Not on this train, buddy.”
“Why not, Daddy?”
“Because this train doesn’t run any more, Jacob. It’s old.”
Jacob looked around, his eyes wide and full of wonder, and in a strange moment of clarity for me I knew he wasn’t seeing things the way I saw them. He couldn’t have been. I mean, think about it. What did he know? He was four. He’d never been on a train before and, as far as he could tell, this might be the way all of them looked. He had no idea that the carpet beneath his dangling feet wasn’t supposed to be moldy, or that the padding in the torn cushion he sat on wasn’t supposed to be shredded by some nest-building rodent that had long since died or moved on. There was a kind of glassy fascination in his eyes, like everything around him was pure and beautiful.
Looking at him and knowing he was completely blind to the grim reality, I found myself torn in half with conflicting emotions. Some small part of me could actually feel the joy he felt—could feel it perhaps because it radiated off him so intensely—and, as sappy as it sounds, it filled my sick old heart with love and pride, and I felt like together Jacob and I could conquer the world. But most of me was too encrusted with well-worn cynicism to be entirely seduced by Jacob’s fantasy. We weren’t really surrounded by anything pure or beautiful, after all, just by things old and used up and forgotten like we’re all destined to be some day.
I don’t know. Jenny jokes in her semi-serious way that I have a habit of throwing myself off the cliffs of happiness, always finding the jagged rocks of despair more alluring, and this was probably one of those times. I guess I was still caught up in my worry that Jacob would grow up into some kind of misfit that I over-interpreted what was happening. The anxiety I had felt before returned, but this time it felt more like panic, and I was overwhelmed by how much there was for Jacob to learn and how far away he seemed from learning it. He was so clueless there on that broken down train car, clueless and happy the way the disabled sometimes are, I didn’t think he could ever adjust to a world that was moving so quickly around him. I was suddenly convinced it would someday crush him, this big and scary world he would never fully understand, and I, his father, would not be able to help him or stop it from happening.
His wayward eyes returned to me, his face still very much that of a toddler and glowing with the rapture only they can possess. “Daddy? How fast can this train go?”
I thought about his question for a moment. “Not fast enough,” I remember telling him, thinking more about the race no one or nothing ever wins, the one against time, and as he looked at me in his untutored confusion, I pledged to myself then and there that I would help him. God damn right I would—I needed to, or he wasn’t going to make it. At the time I was utterly convinced that Jacob needed to be more normal, that he needed to be more like everybody else, and that I could somehow make that happen through some strange alchemy of role modeling, incentives and coercion.
I know. You don’t have to look at me like that. Like I said before, I didn’t know a thing about being a father.
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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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