Walking with Jack

As far back as I can remember, when my son, Jack, was still putting his shoes on the wrong feet, golf was always drawing us together, and we were always making one last long putt across the living room floor or one final great shot in the backyard for the championship of the world. Even then all I wanted was never to lose him the way my father had lost me, and so the two of us pledged that no matter what happened, he would become a pro golfer someday in the bright future of our time, and I would be his caddie so that I could walk beside him for as far as the game might take us.

All last night a nor’easter battered the coast here in Maine with high winds and heavy snow. This morning I was outside shoveling our driveway two hours ahead of dawn, putting my back into the work, feeling strong and fit. In the harbor behind me a shabby parade of lobster boats motored through the cove for the open water while I worked in the half-light of this new day, breathing the salted air beneath a bright sickle of moon. I was trying to clear my head of yesterday. Jack’s eighteenth birthday. Two daughters had come home from college to join the third daughter to celebrate the occasion. I went into town for candles and ice cream in advance of the storm and when I returned, I found two of the girls plugged into their iPods, another at the computer, and Jack on the couch in the family room, staring at a poker tournament on TV. It was one of those unremarkable moments in the life of an American family that in itself has no meaning or consequence until you imagine it replicated in ten thousand other moments that somehow add up to hours, days, and even years of your life together as a family that you will never get back, and you’re left wondering how it could be possible that after having four babies in six years and falling blissfully in love with each of them at the moment you first beheld them, and spending every waking and sleeping hour building your new world around them and holding that world together with a love so profound that the joy or sorrow of one of them was registered deeply in all the others—you wonder if all of that is gone forever, and if there’s nothing you can do to get it back.

I found Colleen in the kitchen, where Jack’s birthday cake sat on the counter. She asked me if I had remembered the candles. What I
wanted to do was climb up on the dining room table and shout: Okay, everyone pack your bags. In one hour we’re moving to Africa!

Soon the storm was upon us. We gathered for cake and ice cream, and the day passed away.

Shoveling snow this morning made me feel real again. And I wasn’t worried about the girls; they had a strong sense of themselves. It was Jack who concerned me. He had been one of the most talented golfers in Maine from the time he began his freshman high school season, and he believed that by his senior year golf coaches at the Division I colleges and universities would be interested in him. When no one was, he began losing faith in himself. And I couldn’t look at him without thinking that my life as a father had really been a long run of fixing things. First it was the little things that break—gluing wheels back on, and dolls’ heads. Then bigger things, bicycles, skateboards, cars. Now I wondered if it would be stuff inside them, stuff that I couldn’t fix. I knew that I wanted to do something to reassure Jack that a light still shone on him. I had no idea what I might do, but this morning at sunrise while he slept in his room just above me, I got the idea of clearing the snow off a patch of grass in the front yard and setting up the big net I had bought him one Christmas.

The whole time I shoveled snow I was thinking of all the miles we had walked together, side by side, on golf courses from Canada to North Carolina. Then I went up to his bedroom and woke him.

“What time is it?” he asked, squinting at me.

“Almost six,” I said.

“What are you waking me now for?”

“Golf,” I said.

“Golf?”

I had everything set up by the time he came outside. I hit a few balls into the net while he tried to figure out what planet he was on. “I still don’t feel like I’m getting my shoulders turned through the ball,” I said.

“You’re not,” he said miserably. “You’re swinging like Nanny. What the hell are you using for a tee?”

I told him proudly of my invention. The ground was frozen too hard to get a wooden tee in it, so I’d cut off the tip of a rubber nipple from one of his cousin’s baby bottles, and it worked perfectly. “Pretty good, huh?” I asked.

“Jesus, Daddy,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re crazy and I’m going back to bed.”

He began walking toward the front door.

“Wait,” I called to him. “Just try a few, Jack.”

He thought for a moment, then came slouching down the steps across the driveway. I watched him hit a couple of drives—crushing, fluid blows that far exceeded my ability—before he handed the club back to me. “This is stupid, man, I’m freezing,” he said. When he got to the door, he called back to me, “Go to bed, Daddy.”

He was gone before I could say anything. I stayed out for a while longer hitting balls into the net while the sky over the cove filled with pink light, but my heart wasn’t in it after that.

Somehow in my sleep last night I was given nine years back. It was 1997 again, and I was flying across the Atlantic with Colleen and our children to take them to Ireland so they could walk through the village their great-grandmother left at the turn of the twentieth century to make her way to America.