Galen had been dropping hints for months, but that spring he abandoned subtlety for a more direct approach. Every request Katherine and I made of him he took as an opportunity to advance his cause. If I asked him to walk the dog, he’d say, “If I walk her, can I have a phone?”
If I asked him to make his bed: “It’s made already. Does that mean I can get a phone?”
If I asked him to hang up his jacket: “Hey, Dad! Did you see that my jacket has a pocket that’s the perfect size for a phone?”
“The thing is,” I finally said, “I’m not sure you need it. You hardly talk on the phone as it is.” I couldn’t honestly recall a single occasion when Galen had engaged in a telephone conversation with another person, with inquiries regarding his interlocutor’s general state of well-being followed by a discussion of anything constituting a subject. Whenever his friends called, he grunted out a few whats and huhs before handing the phone to Katherine or me to confer with the other kid’s parent. Even when his grandparents called—which they preferred to do via FaceTime so they could see as well as hear the kids—Galen mostly made goofy faces at the screen while my mom or mother-in-law repeated, “Are you there, honey? Can you hear me?”
Hayden, for what it’s worth, was an even worse conversationalist. He said neither hello nor goodbye. If he answered the phone, all you heard was the cessation of ringing followed by the eerie feeling you were no longer alone. When it was time to hang up, he’d simply walk away, leaving you blabbering into the void.
Galen had anticipated my doubts and prepared a rejoinder. “I don’t talk on the phone because I don’t have a phone,” he said. “If I had one, I’d talk more.”
“Who are you so desperate to call anyway?” I stared at him sideways for a few moments before the obvious struck me. “Is there a girl you like?”
“Not a girl,” he blushed. “My friends.” Now that the snow had melted, groups of sixth-grade boys had begun roaming the neighborhood, showing up in packs at one another’s houses or gathering in the park to loiter beneath the picnic pavilion. Galen had stumbled across a group one afternoon while riding his bike home from Max’s. He asked why he wasn’t on the call list and was told, with a shrug, that no one had his number. Because, duh, he didn’t have a number.
“Please, can I get a phone?” he begged, his hands clasped near his chin.
I was sympathetic to the plight of his social life. Junior high was when organized playdates were shucked off in favor of hanging out, whether at a house or the park or in a parking lot. I could recall the sinking feeling of being left out. Regardless of how it happened, whether your so-called friends had deliberately sought to exclude you or had gone door-to-door trying to track you down, the leaving out was the same. I accepted that the boys would need cell phones eventually. I’d just been reluctant to take the final step.
A recent magazine assignment had given me cause to read several studies tying excessive cell phone use to increased rates of insomnia, depression, anxiety, and weakened cognitive functions, especially among teenagers. Sexting and cyberbullying, both of which occurred among adolescents with alarming frequency, could cause lasting psychological and social damage. A kid texting behind the wheel of a car might as well be drunk. Give a kid a cell phone and you give him a traveling porthole to the electronic jungle. Not only do they walk around with easy access to all the temptations and dangers of cyberspace, but wherever they go online, they leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs that could be stolen or used in some way against them. Our home computer had suffered a nasty virus attack last winter after Hayden had tried to download a game from a dubious website, and it spooked me to think of all the nefarious things Galen might stumble across once he carried the Internet in his pocket. Or of the things that might stumble across him.
The perils of the Net, however, weren’t my primary worry. My Tuesday and Thursday classes ran just shy of two hours. For as long as I’d been teaching at the college, I’d maintained a habit of taking a ten-minute break at the halfway point to give the students a chance to stretch their legs and use the restroom, maybe dash to the campus center for a drink and a snack. The year I started, most students had cell phones, but very few had smartphones. They texted, but they didn’t text that much, nor did they use every free second to check Facebook and Twitter. As a result, they often spent the breaks talking—to one another but also to me. In this way, I learned about music they were listening to and books they were reading, about their concerns regarding larger, more consequential topics. The environment. The state of American politics. Their hopes and anxieties about the future. Lulled by the informal nature of the chatter and freed from the constraints of the lecture, the students often voiced their opinions in bracingly honest terms. Even the mousey oboist in the forest green turtleneck who assiduously avoided eye contact with me during class for fear of being called on could be coaxed out of her shell. On several occasions, this interstitial conversation became so engrossing that I’d swept my notes aside and let the conversation continue for the duration of the class. But now every student had a smartphone. Flip phones (according to them) were only for construction workers, security guards, and old people. Whenever I gave the class a break, my students’ faces immediately plunged to their laps where their phones had been sitting since class began. And those empty ten minutes, once the crucible of so much pleasurable talk, largely passed in silence.
When I’d started at the college, Galen was still in diapers, still drinking from a sippy cup, by all available metrics still a baby. A decade later, he was only a few years younger than my freshmen, many of whom had siblings younger than Hayden. My boys and my students both belonged to a generation that psychologist Jean Twenge has labeled the iGen: a group that has only ever known a constant state of connectivity, who has no memory of a time before the Internet or even the smartphone, a generation for whom “The roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot [have] all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web.” Having witnessed Galen’s absorption into video games a few years earlier, which he only ever played offline, I feared that a phone would draw him down a far deeper rabbit hole and sever the last threads that joined us together.
Nevertheless, a phone had become more necessary. We’d dumped our landline several years back, and now that Galen was twelve, he and Hayden both walked home from school several days a week. They’d become, in the parlance of guilty parenting, “latchkey kids.” With the boys coming home from two different schools to an empty house lacking a landline, we needed a way for them to reach us. “I’d feel better,” Katherine said one afternoon, “knowing I could get ahold of them. I could remind Galen to turn on the lights and unload the dishwasher.”
Galen sensed he was on the verge. “Oh, please, oh, please,” he said. “I’ll turn on every light in the house. I’ll unload the dishwasher every day.”
I said we could look. I didn’t make any promises, even if Katherine had more or less told me it was time to pull the trigger.
The salesman showed us a nice, entry-level device and told me I could set up the plan to exclude data. Galen would be able to surf the Net on Wi-Fi, but away from home or school or Starbucks, the phone would only be good for talk and text. Galen cradled the Samsung like Luke Skywalker wielding a lightsaber for the first time—that is, like a young man on the cusp of his heroic destiny. “I like this one,” he said.
I asked the salesman to give us a minute. I pulled Galen aside, into the corner by the Keurig machine. Cars zipped by on the other side of the window and a shaggy-haired teenager in Bozo-red shoes pedaled a bike along the sidewalk, a mere foot from the traffic, his eyes glued to the phone in his palm. I bounced my finger against the glass. “That can never happen,” I said, pointing at the texting cyclist.
“It won’t,” Galen swore.
“We need to agree on a few rules,” I said. I used my fingers to count them off. Number one, Mom and Dad got to see all his texts. Nothing would be erased without permission. Number two, no texting during dinner. Number three, the phone stayed in the kitchen at night, not in his bedroom.
“Okay,” Galen said.
Since I had some leverage, as well as two more fingers, I decided to add a few sweeteners. “Number four, you’ll walk the dog without giving me any grief, and number five, you’ll take care of me when I’m an old man. I want a room in your house, my own TV, and three hot meals per day.”
Galen pressed his left hand to his heart and stuck out his right for me to shake. When the time comes, I plan to use this book as proof of our arrangement.
Within the hour, the phone had been purchased, configured, sheathed in plastic casing, and charged enough for Galen to send out his first text. whats up max, he typed.
The text came from a number that had not existed before that afternoon, but somehow Max recognized the sender. Or perhaps Max was as eager to receive a text as Galen was to send one, and didn’t care who it was from. Hardly a minute later came the reply: the ceiling.
hey I got a phone
u suck bunnies
u suck rabbits
This is Max’s Mom. What kind of texting is this? Enough of this nonsense!
A few days later, we were in the kitchen when Galen’s phone began to ring. He’d hardly let go of the phone since he’d come home with it, and so he had it in his hand when it trilled into action. Galen stared down at his upturned palm as though it contained a ticking bomb. His face twitched between bewilderment and dismay. “What do I do?” he asked.
“Go ahead and answer it,” I said.
“Uh, hell-lo?” he said, the phone to his ear for the first time. His eyebrows were almost touching.
I could hear the voice on the other end. It was the cell phone company calling to ask if he was satisfied with his service.
“I guess,” Galen said, as if he’d never heard a dumber question. Upon hanging up, his thumbs shot to the keyboard. OMG SO AWK! he texted.
If these first exchanges were any indication of what Galen’s texts and calls would look like, I figured he wouldn’t likely get into too much trouble, at least not right away. I did, however, remind him about using appropriate language and being polite on the phone. And I encouraged him to text in complete sentences, with commas and periods and proper capitalization. Many of my students were so accustomed to text speak that “LOL” and “BTW” often showed up in their papers.
“No one texts in complete sentences,” Katherine said. “Don’t be such a prig.”
“Isn’t it my job as an English professor to uphold the standards of the language?”
“Yes,” she said. “Your job. Work and parenting aren’t the same.” She looked sternly at me, anticipating my argument. “Get over yourself.”
Which was, the more I thought about it, the real trick to fatherhood, and to parenthood in general. You have to get over yourself. Parenthood might be characterized as an unending series of interlinked worries, dominoes in an endless spiral. Some of those worries are real, but most are pretty banal and are more about protecting our ideas of our children, the visions of parenthood we conjured before we had actual children to parent. For all the solemn vows we make that our kids will never taste sugar or play violent games or wear clothes made in sweatshops, at some point we have to come to terms with the fact that they, like us, are citizens of a world that’s beyond our control, a world far too exciting and glittering and clamorous to keep at bay. If we do our jobs well, our kids will not only grow up, they’ll grow out—away from us, into lives defined by the secrets they keep from their parents. Where we stop, they begin. They have to get over us in order to grow.
In April, a conference took me to Los Angeles, and once the festivities wrapped up I caught the Pacific Surfliner down to Irvine, where my dad picked me up. Driving past the manicured eucalyptus-lined office parks; up and over Laguna Canyon, resplendent after a year of good rain; and down toward the ocean, my elbow propped on the open windowsill of the white Toyota truck Dad bought my freshman year of college more than twenty years ago, I had the strange sensation that I’d gone back in time. I was no longer forty, no longer married or a father; I was nineteen, with hair bleached white by sun and chlorine, a kid contemplating the path of his future. Climbing the hill from Main Beach and moving along the coast toward home, my thoughts scurried ahead to a day not long after I’d met Katherine. After a day spent hiking in the Wasatch Mountains, east of Salt Lake City, we sat together on the floor of our friend Matt’s apartment, beers in hand and our shins glittered with dust, studying the gigantic map of the United States tacked to the wall. Matt was finishing his degree in geography, and his map, collaged with Post-it notes, was as intricate as it was expansive: six feet by eight, webbed with rivers and highways, dotted with towns too small to appear on most other maps. If I let my eyes go slack, the chaotic tangle of colored lines resembled a Pollock painting. As I moved closer to examine what the lines connected, the map’s layers grew so deep and varied they appeared three-dimensional.
Katherine, I remembered, wore khaki shorts and the T-shirt I’d brought her from Hawaii—black with a yellow hibiscus, a shirt she still wears. We’d only been together a few months, but already I felt a momentous hum, an engine running inside my chest, whenever we shared a room. I was at the end of my master’s degree and would soon begin work on my doctorate. Utah was supposed to have been a two-year leave of absence from Southern California, after which I’d be returning, posthaste, to a city near, and if at all possible on, the ocean. After two years in the mountains, I still saw the Pacific in my dreams, still heard the waves crashing over the sand and rocks, and so clung to the notion that I was destined—ordained, even—to make my life near it. Now I’d signed on for a much longer haul and was in love to boot, and though I was young and idealistic and naive, I also understood what I was up against. Anyone who’s come within sniffing distance of a graduate program in English knows the market for academic positions has been bleak for decades, with hundreds of candidates—all with advanced degrees, publications, and extensive university teaching experience—vying for any available job. Even if I succeeded, I could wind up in a far-flung corner of the country, or worse, the empty middle, a prospect that terrified me.
“Here are the states where I’d consider living,” I said. I ran my palm up the Pacific coast: California, Oregon, Washington. “These are the golden three,” I said. I moved to the other coast. The states along the Atlantic Ocean north of the Carolinas were also possibilities if I could live in one of the cities, for example New York or Boston. Technically speaking, both cities abutted the ocean. Certain portions of the mountains, like, say, Colorado and Montana, would be okay, maybe. The Southeast was a definite no with the unlikely exception of a school on a beach. The Midwest was its own special kind of no. I stretched out my arms until I hugged the land between Nebraska and Pennsylvania. “This land is not my land,” I said, laying it on. “This section of the country I hereby declare the Hell No Zone.’”
Matt lay sprawled on the futon, his arm crooked behind his head and a bottle of Corona propped on his chest. He lifted a long finger and pointed at the map. “I grew up in Wisconsin,” he said. “It’s nice there. Cold as hell, but nice.”
I took a step back and appraised the state a second time, for my friend’s sake. Equilateral to Michigan, Wisconsin appeared vaguely hand-shaped, though more like a catcher’s mitt than a glove. The fact that Lake Michigan formed its eastern border and Lake Superior its northern notched it slightly above the landlocked wastelands below it. At least Wisconsin had some blue around it. As with nearly every state in the Hell No Zone, I had neither visited nor bothered to learn much about Wisconsin; I knew it only by its clichés: dairy farms and polka bands and bearded lumberjacks in flannel. At six foot six, his size-fifteen socks overhanging the end of the futon, Matt was a veritable Paul Bunyan himself. The cliché didn’t seem so far-fetched. And compared to the Pacific, Lake Superior was a puddle. I shook my head and swept my arms at my waist, like a football referee calling a dead ball. “Sorry, can’t do it. No way. Wisconsin stays in the Hell No.”
Katherine laughed and drained the last of her beer. “Good to know.”
The words we say to our future spouses often become freighted with importance, even if nothing important was intended when those words were said. As time passes and we trundle past one milestone after another, those early conversations can begin to feel prophetic, as if the universe were giving us a glimpse of the future but not the eyes to see it. I’ve thought about this day many times over the years, and in my memory I see my declaration before the map as both idle talk on a Saturday afternoon and its opposite: an early glimmer of my destiny. Given my superstitions about the causal links between pride and falls, I see myself laying my hand over the map of Wisconsin and guaranteeing, by virtue of my rejection, that I’d one day end up there.
Yet in spite of my declarations, Wisconsin had become home, far more than I’d ever expected. I missed Wisconsin when I was away from it, a sure sign I belonged to the place. Nestling my chair into the sand at Crescent Bay that afternoon I couldn’t escape my longing for the ferns descending the hill from campus toward the river, the way they bobbed in the evening breeze, the desert-stark light when the temperatures plummeted below zero. While Dad peeled an orange with his thumb, I snapped a picture of my bare feet in the sand, the ocean in the background, and texted it to Katherine. Jealous much?
Enjoy it while it lasts, she replied. It’s 28 degrees here. I had to chisel the sleet off my windshield.
Dad broke the orange in two, releasing a burst of citrus. He passed me half. The beach was sparsely populated, and we sat with our ankles crossed, talking like old friends. Thirty years since he left Texas and I’d never stopped wanting his company; I’d never stopped wishing for time to slow when we were together. He told me about his trip to Boise for Christmas, to see Devin and her family. My mom had moved to Idaho a few years earlier, following her divorce, so my dad had spent the holiday with them both. The image of my mother and father seated around the same table was so bygone to me that I could hardly imagine it. “Was it weird?” I asked. “Christmas together?”
“We had a nice time,” Dad said. “Everyone got along. She has a cozy house.”
“Was it spotless?”
“You could eat off the floor.”
He dropped the orange rind into a hole in the sand he’d dug with his heel and used the side of his foot to cover it up. He’d probably buried the skins of a thousand oranges at this beach. I wondered how quickly they decomposed, whether any were still beneath us. He was staring at the ocean, away from me, when he said, “Sometimes it still wakes me up at night.”
He didn’t say what “it” was, but of course I knew. Certain pronouns are larger than the words they stand in place of.
We’d talked about the divorce a lot in the months and years after he’d left Texas, when the wounds were still fresh and the bandages still needed to be changed. Slowly, though, the topic had fallen out of conversation. For the last fifteen years, we’d hardly mentioned it at all. I’d half thought he’d put the entire episode—as well as his entire past life—out of his mind. Now that Devin and I were grown, with families of our own, the questions of the past had all been laid to rest. But old regrets don’t go away, they only burrow deeper down, into our secret chambers, where they wait to ooze up through ever-smaller fissures.
“Do you remember that restaurant we used to go to?” I asked. “Daddy Did It?”
“Great catfish,” he said, smiling. “Great hush puppies.” He grew quiet again. “That was the worst thing I ever did. Leaving you and your sister.”
As a father, it was frequently my job to encourage the boys, to help them make sense of the world. If I had no wisdom to offer, then solace would do. But as a son such opportunities were rare. Dad praised Devin and me, but it wasn’t in his nature to seek consolation from anyone, least of all his children. We were alone on the beach and the opportunity was here, so I took it. “I didn’t fault you for going,” I said. “I was never angry about that. I just missed you. I wanted more time.”
“There was never enough time.”
“Well,” I said, “we had the phone. We talked a lot.”
He spit a seed out the side of his mouth. “Wasn’t the same.”
“It wasn’t nothing.”
It was so much more than nothing. More important than any wisdom imparted while I stood at the pay phone outside the Safeway or beside the Dr Pepper machine was the simpler, unalloyed fact that he’d answered when I’d called. His voice had come through on the other end of the line; whether we talked for a minute or an hour, he’d been there. Fatherhood, I now understood after years of gnawing on the obligations of the job, was much more about presence than wisdom. Being there versus being right. The final and most crucial lesson of fatherhood was to keep showing up. To be at the bottom of the stairs in the morning. Or, if you can’t, to answer the phone when it rings.
Or, if your kids are like mine and don’t know how to talk on the phone, to text. Contrary to my initial unease, the arrival of Galen’s phone didn’t kill our conversations. Quite the opposite. We talked more than ever. Hayden and I did, too, since his new iPod touch had a Wi-Fi connection and he’d figured out how to use iMessage. Following Hayden’s orthodontist appointment, his mouth now full of stainless steel, we had the following exchange:
Me: everything okay? how are your teeth?
Hayden: They Bert
Me: Do they Ernie, too?
Hayden: I mean heart
Me: you mean hurt
Hayden: Dame Otto cerekt
Every so often, an innocuous string of messages spilled over into actual conversation. The other day, when Galen texted to let me know he was home from school, I thumb-tapped, How was your day?
ok
Anything good happen?
no
The response came too fast to be nonchalant, so I ventured one more. Anything bad?
friends r jerks
Why?
they said my name sounded gay
Katherine and I had anticipated the possibility of teasing when we settled on the name Galen, and here it was, right on time.
They’re idiots, I wrote.
numb nuts
Did you get upset?
yes
That’s probably why they keep doing it. Don’t let it bother you and they’ll stop.
He waited a long time before responding.
ok
I swore I could hear Galen’s voice in that long pause, his tendency to minimize whenever he talked about his friends, as though he were embarrassed by the prospect of not fitting in and wanted to hide it from me. I could see myself at a pay phone in Texas, asking my dad for reassurance. Except I was no longer there. I was in my office, and my son was the one calling. I was on the other side of the call.
You’re a sensitive boy, I typed. You always have been. It’s your best quality.
whatever
Have a snack. You’ll feel better. There are carrots in the fridge.
ok
I made a point of signing off with Dad loves you because I wanted the boys to hear me say it, to know that one thing if nothing else. Dad loves you.
ok love you to by
The misspellings threw me off at first. But then it dawned on me, and I realized the only thing a father ever needed to hear had already been said.