Flying home at forty thousand feet. Jack had a movie playing on the little screen attached to his seat, and I thought he was done talking to me. But after a couple of vodka tonics, he wanted to know what else I wrote about him in the journal that chronicled his boyhood.
“Let me think for a minute,” I said. I had kept a journal for each of my children and I decided a long time ago that I was going to give the journals to them to take with them when they left home. “You were a great eater,” I told him. “There was one morning when you were six months old. We were letting Mommy sleep in, and you and your sisters were in the kitchen, where I was feeding all of you pancakes. You kept eating them as fast as I put them down in front of you. When your mother came downstairs, I said, ‘Look at your little boy wolfing down these pancakes.’ She said, ‘He doesn’t eat solid food yet, Don. Nothing but breast milk.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he sure loves pancakes.’ There was no turning back after that.”
His smile encouraged me to go on. “That winter when you were five years old and I was working construction, you waited at the door for me to come home each evening. You would take my carpenter’s belt and say, ‘I’ve got a knuckle sandwich with your name on it.’ ”
I laughed and closed my eyes, recalling how I had hurried home from work each day to see him. “You were a real character,” I said. “I was teaching you to ride a bike when you were four. The safest place was the beach at low tide when the sand was packed hard. The day you finally figured it out, you just rode straight into the Atlantic Ocean.”
“I remember that day,” he said.
“We had a lot of good times,” I said. “And look, I’m sorry about all my speeches on this trip. I really should be disqualified from talking so much. I’m going to try to stop making speeches as I grow old.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
He asked me what the highlight of the trip was for me.
“Finding your ball,” I said. “And seeing you walking those fairways. What about you?”
“Getting the car back without an accident.”
“Come on,” I said, “I had it under control.”
I listened to him laughing at this. I told him that it was good to hear him laugh; we hadn’t had a lot of laughter between us in a long time. “Things slip away,” I said. “It’s no one’s fault. They just do.”
I asked him if he remembered our days in upstate New York when I was teaching at Colgate University and we would all go sledding down the big hill on campus.
“Not really,” he said.
“I never thought those days would end. We spent all winter sledding. I used to love pulling you and your sisters up the hill. I was forty-one, forty-two maybe; I guess it made me feel strong and young, you know? And then one time you wouldn’t let me pull you up the hill. You wanted to climb up yourself. You were all bundled up in your snowsuit and boots, so you could only take these tiny steps. It took you forever to get up the hill, and I kept trying to explain how much better it would be if you just let me pull you to the top because you could save all that time for going down. But you had made up your mind. And you just marched up like a little soldier. That was when I knew.”
“Knew what?” he asked me.
“Knew that I wouldn’t have you forever,” I said. “It was that way with your sisters too. There was a moment with each of you when I realized the same thing. Part of falling in love with all of you when you were babies was believing that I would have you forever. And then there was a moment when it came clear to me that I wouldn’t. I remember telling your mother how sad it made me feel. I said, ‘He’s starting off now, on his own.’ She didn’t understand. ‘He’s only four years old,’ she said, ‘we’ll have him a lot more years.’ Something like that. But I felt it. And it’s gone so fast, I’ll tell you that, Jack. So damned fast.”
He didn’t say anything more. I had my eyes closed, and I was dreaming back that sledding hill and him in his powder-blue snowsuit.