When Adam was a very little boy, he and I played one of those bedtime games that always ends in an uproar of giggling and roughhousing and succeeds only in keeping the child awake. “Why do you do that?” Tracy would ask with exasperation. But she knew.
The game was called “Whose Boy Are You?” and the whole thing consisted in my asking the question and Adam responding with the name of any man he could think of—his way of saying, “Anybody’s boy but yours.” He usually began with men we knew from church or the neighborhood and ended with famous men from TV or sports. One night he claimed to be the son of the sportscaster Howard Cosell.
The game was only resolved by more headlocks and uncontrolled giggling until he confessed: he was mine.
In summer we broke in our baseball gloves by soaking them for days with neatsfoot oil and wrapping them in rags. We played “burnout” in a clearing behind the trees in our backyard, a place the children called “The Way Back.” There was nothing more to the game than firing a baseball back and forth for hours on end, and then comparing palms afterward to see whose was redder and more swollen.
On winter evenings it was basketball on the driveway beneath the security lights mounted above the garage. We played the game as a contact sport with a lot of hacking, shoving, and trash-talking, neither of us willing to call it a night. Until Tracy, insisting from the kitchen door: “Rick and Adam, do you want to eat or not? Boys!”
After he grew eight inches in the summer of his fifteenth year, we turned our attention from basketball to tennis. One morning when I came down to breakfast, I found a note from him on the kitchen table. It had always been his way to leave written messages for us around the house. Scratched in his usual backslant, this one riffed on one of his heroes, Muhammad Ali:
I hit like Jimmy,
Dive like Becker.
Your backhand sucks,
Mine is better.
Comebacks like Lendl,
The Passion of Borg,
Play with me
And visit the morgue!
Tracy and Adam did not have to play games like “Whose Boy Are You?” because mothers and sons know the answer to that one. She can put her arms around her little boy, no matter how big, surly, and unshaven, and say, “I love you, Sweetie,” and he will respond in kind without a hint of embarrassment. She isn’t saddled with the male habit of indirection by which love may only be mediated by a thrown ball, a fishing trip, or scuffling while half hugging on the driveway.
When he went away to college, he started taking courses in drama and philosophy and stopped going to church every Sunday. He also befriended homeless people on East Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, learned their names, and went with them to AA meetings at the Methodist church. In effect, he switched from a Sunday morning believer to a Tuesday night seeker who was finding more answers in the church basement than in the sanctuary.
In those years, Adam and I took our competition up a notch from basketball and tennis to religion. He posed the usual questions that perplex all believers but only sophomores are allowed to ask out loud. He peppered his speeches with what he had learned in philosophy class that morning. I stocked my rebuttals with what I could remember from seminary twenty-five years earlier. He wanted to know how Christians can accept the Bible’s worldview in the age of science, and I answered that there are orders of truth, and some are higher than others. Whereupon he accused me of “fideism,” which I had to look up later that evening: “the theory that belief or revelation is superior to reason as a source of truth.”
I remember another session at the Carolina Coffee Shop near campus. We were in his regular booth at the back of the restaurant, where he often studied and one of the waitresses would sit with him and help him with his symbolic logic. He asked me, “Why do you pray when God already knows everything you need?”
I replied, “What’s this you business?”
He looked a little chagrined but did not say “we.” “We” would have softened the question and ruined the debate. “Why do Christians pray when God already knows everything they need?”
“Every creature needs to respond to God, but human beings most of all. It’s our special privilege given to us at creation,” I said, wishing that just once I could talk to my son about religion without sounding like a professor.
He asked me why God allows some people to suffer but not others, and I replied that I didn’t know. He asked his questions respectfully, as a believer, but a believer who has taken a holiday from dogma, tradition, and the authority of his father.
Already when he was in high school we had had our little differences over church attendance. Nothing major. In fact, sometimes we skipped out together and went to a nearby bakery on Ninth Street. One Sunday morning, however, I said to him, “I want to see you in church today.” I was scheduled to preach in Duke Chapel, which was always a big deal to me. He had other plans, but I insisted. Later that morning, when I climbed into the pulpit, I looked down to see him sitting with Tracy and Sarah in the fifth or sixth row. He seemed genuinely pleased to be in church and shot me an encouraging, uncomplicated smile. Everything was perfect except for his outfit. He was wearing my pants, my belt, my shirt, one of my ties, my sport coat, and (I later discovered) my shoes and socks. It was teenaged performance art of the highest caliber. I took it to be his way of saying, You want another you? Okay, you’ve got him.
A young man like Adam leaves home with what he has learned against his will in Sunday school, confirmation class, and acolyte training. In college he faces a fusillade of objections from Hume, Kant, Marx, and Rousseau, whose names rarely come up in confirmation class or the Sunday sermon. The gifts that actually formed and nurtured him—community, sacraments, liturgy, and friendship—don’t count as knowledge on Tuesday and Thursday mornings in the Philosophy of Religion. When I referred to our common life of faith as itself a source of knowledge, he replied almost pityingly, like a child who has noticed that the old man has begun to lose it, “But Dad, that’s not an argument.” This always pleased me because I wanted him to use academic words like “argument” and “fideism,” wanted him to be at home with Hume and Kant, and I wanted him to best me in every contest, even this one.
During his third year in college, Adam played drums in a rock band, got an earring and a buzz-cut, acquired a twice-wrecked BMW, earned a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, taught a self-defense class for women, and wrote a detective novel—all when he wasn’t “busy studying.”
The training hall became a way of life for him. Tae Kwon Do mirrors the unity of mind and body by means of meditation and the choreography of Olympic-style sparring. Adam called it “fighting,” as in “I have a big fight this weekend.” Tae Kwon Do also provides an arena in which fear is allowed to be present and the student is permitted to fail. Using his lean frame and height advantage, he won the North Carolina Open by beating the best red belt in the state. Later he fought and lost a credible fight against a future Olympic medalist. It seemed to me that he courted the fear of fighting as much as the fight itself: both were something to be endured and overcome. In one of his many letters he wrote, “I have a tourney coming up Saturday in Raleigh. I am trying not to care whether I win or lose, as long as I do my best. So far—this is NOT WORKING AT ALL.”
By the time he got his black belt, he could do a hundred push-ups, endless sit-ups, and run the stairs of his apartment building for hours. With his new haircut and washboard abs, he might have been a skinhead or a leatherneck. He sent us funny, staged photos of himself purportedly studying, a stack of books arranged in the background, but he was clearly misplaced in a library. But for now, his letters seemed to say, my element is the fight.
When he did sit down to study, he was often distracted by his novel, a murder mystery set in Chapel Hill. It begins with this sentence: “It was almost ten thirty a.m. as he sat on the edge of his bed, staring at his boots and wishing he had gotten more sleep.” Its main character exhales “blue pencils of smoke” from his Viceroy cigarette, and so on.
The novel was fine. Even the fighting was fine. It was the rock band that was the problem.
Adam was sharing an off-campus apartment with the leader of the band, a drug-dabbling introvert named Jeff. He was susceptible to mellow types like Jeff, who call you “man” and share your taste in Nirvana and Pearl Jam and can’t be bothered with details.
“I want you to have friends, Adam. I think everybody needs friends,” I said. “God knows, there must be twenty-five thousand options in Chapel Hill, but is this one capable of being a true friend to you?”
“What you really mean is, ‘Is this guy a Dukie? Is he a preppie?’ You are not the only one who has a deep understanding of people. I think I know people, too. Friends mean a lot to me. You have ‘colleagues,’ I have friends. Please, don’t tell me you choose your friends by going down a list of values and checking them off. My friends want to be with me. That’s what it’s all about.”
This was a conversation we had at the dumpster near his apartment. It was a neutral location where we met on a regular basis to talk. Sometimes I delivered cookies from his mother or made cash drops, like a bagman.
A few months later, we had another conversation in which each of us adopted a very different, less combative tone. He called me at my office.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Yeah, man.”
“I can’t do this anymore.”
“Jeff.”
“Right. I can’t keep up with this guy. He’s into drugs, and he has dopeheads in the apartment. The place is a wreck from last night. It’s the last straw. I can’t live like this. I just can’t.”
I said, “What if I showed up tomorrow morning with a U-Haul, say, eight-thirty? Would that be okay? Is a truck okay? We can put you up at home and figure out the next step from there. What do you think?”
He didn’t hesitate to reply, “I’ll be waiting for you tomorrow at eight-thirty.”
And he was. Standing in the doorway, peering down the stairway toward the parking lot with a resolute look on his face. He was wearing a Carolina sweatshirt and a pair of faded jeans. Behind the open door, the apartment was strewn with bottles and junk. A floor lamp was splayed across a coffee table; the beds were covered with clothes and open suitcases.
I had never seen Adam so upset. “I told him you were coming,” he said, as if he simply could not comprehend why anyone wouldn’t spruce up the place for his roommate’s dad. He nearly ground his teeth as he said it.
We had the truck loaded by ten o’clock and by ten-thirty we were out of there, sitting in a diner on the bypass between Chapel Hill and Durham, devouring a breakfast of pancakes, bacon, eggs, grits, and coffee. The stress and urgency of the move had lifted, and it was simply Saturday morning, and Saturday’s feast was steaming between us. We shared it in a narrow booth with our elbows on the table and our knees practically touching.
That day it felt as if an old game, or series of games, had finally come to an end. He stayed with Tracy and me for the rest of the spring term until he found his own apartment and returned for his senior year. We lived together as friends.
By this time Sarah was about to graduate from Georgetown and begin a one-year internship in South Africa, where, during the last dangerous days of apartheid, she would teach in a Catholic school in a homeland north of Pietersburg. She would live in a low wooden building bordered by purple jacaranda and the graves of priests and nuns. She would travel alone in the country on crowded buses and wait in the cities at the notorious taxi stands.
Our children were finished with splashing in the tidal pools of Nags Head, making snow angels in the backyard, and pretending to be other, more interesting children. They were finished with being children altogether, and we were feeling finished with our job of launching and protecting them. They would each go away, one to be challenged and molded in Africa, another to find his bearings eight miles from home in Chapel Hill.