This week, my wife and I welcomed our first child, a baby boy. This is to him, and admittedly to myself as well. Thanks for letting me share it with you.
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This is published now, and that means you’re in the world. How lucky I am to write those words. I hope that sometime in your life, you read this, and that it brings you value, sentimental or practical or of some other kind. Some of what follows is advice. Some of it is a love letter. Some of it is an explanation, an estimate of what I am and a guess at what you will be. I hope it brings you something. I wrote the first draft on a stormy night at our kitchen island, the night we first thought your arrival could be imminent. I’m finishing this last edit in a calm, peaceful dark, your swaddled silhouette to my right against the under–the–door light from the hospital hall.
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You are, above everything else right now, a dream come true. Had an angel come eleven years ago and told me you were coming, it would have been the greatest promise I could want. Eleven years ago this past spring, I walked across a little stretch of Spain. Your great-grandfathers’ deaths were fresh, and I was wishing here and there for a life with your mother. Now I have you, your mother’s son, and you bear those great-grandfathers’ names.
Your first name belonged to an adventurer, a man who knew great joy. He was curious and brilliant, and I’ll be pleased if you are those things. More importantly, he was good and decent and kind. It is my hope that you will be the same.
Your middle name belonged to a farmer, a man who knew great faith. He was steady and solid and steadfast, and I’ll be pleased if you are those things. More importantly, he was good and decent and kind. It is my prayer that you will be the same.
Your first name also belonged to a saint, and in a roundabout way, that saint was how I came to be in Spain that week. He was loyal and ambitious, and they say he had a temper, and your great-grandmother was born on his feast day. I found that interesting when I learned it, years after she too had passed. It was a thread through cornfields and seashells and the other little fragments of past which form these great mosaics we view from the present tense. I don’t know what that thread means, or if it means anything at all. If you are loyal, it may be because your great-grandmother always stood by her people. If you have a temper, you’ll share that with her and the saint as well. Your ambition could have come from anywhere.
You are named for your great-grandfathers, together adventurous and sturdy, curious and steadfast, but above all good and decent and kind. I hope many things for you. Above all, I hope you are good and decent and kind.
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Your great-grandfathers were Midwesterners. We all are on that side. Your mother’s side has some Midwest to it too, and some East and some South. You were born in Texas. In Austin, city of bluebonnets and moontowers and the Violet Crown in the west where the sun sets over the Hill Country horizon. I don’t know if you will be Texan or Midwestern or something else altogether. But that is where you come from, and that is where we, together, are.
Your mother is brave. You should know that about her. You should also know that she wanted very badly for you to exist, and that this week and this year she went through a lot more than I did to make your existence happen. Your mother is strong, and she is gentle, and she will nurture you and protect you and prove herself a million times wiser than me. You have a dog, too, and she is foolish and gangly and sweet, and I have no doubt you and she will make fast friends. She will love you very much.
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With introductions out of the way, we can start with a few of the little things. It’s useful to carry a bit of cash on you. It’s rarely useful to panic. You know more and less than you think you do, so trust yourself but pursue humility, for you are generations of life incarnate and simultaneously the merest speck of dust. I once heard a philosopher say that in debates, emotional reactions are an internal sign of bias. Your grandmother told me to ask others questions about their lives, because we all love talking about ourselves. Your grandfather preached in Little League that we could control how hard we played, our commitment to the fundamentals, and the enthusiasm we brought to the diamond. That second one, for some reason, has always been the most helpful to me.
There’s a line in our family about learning to drink your coffee black and eat your burger with everything on it. The intended message there is that you should know how to not be a pain in the ass. This can be overdone. It’s ok to be a pain in the ass sometimes. The key is knowing when not to be one, and being capable of prudent self-denial in the moments when self-denial serves the things you want to serve.
Build your creative vessels young. Draw a lot and color a lot and write silly words so your hands learn how to make all the letters. Learn to read music. Learn to play an instrument or three. Make sure one of those instruments has some strings. Stringed instruments use a different way of thinking from pianos or the ones which use your lungs.
If you become a pitcher, throw strikes, and see if you can paint the corners. A teaspoon of command is worth a tablespoon of velocity. There’s probably a life lesson in that one. Command won’t hurt your elbow, and there’s a lesson in that as well. Whether you pitch or not, do your pushups and learn to do your pullups and stretch before you need the flexibility. Squat. Play multiple sports. Try as many out as we’ll let you try, and learn what you enjoy, and check out theater and photography and chess and everything else that catches your eye.
Whatever pastimes you enjoy, enjoy them, and ask yourself frequently what it is that you want. We do some things because of the opportunities they create for us. We do others because we simply like to do them. I hope you find many things in your life which fit each category, and a few that fit both.
A lot of what we want in life is purpose. Purpose arises most often in the committed pursuit of a worthy goal. When you find purpose, don’t mistake the source of the joy it gives you. Only some of that joy comes from the goal. Most comes from the sense of purpose itself. In the big picture, it’s usually harder to figure out what you want to do than it is to go and do it. Seek purpose.
Get good grades and all of that, but only to the extent that you’ll use them. If you might need straight A’s for something you might want to do, then by all means, go and make straight A’s, or A-pluses, or whatever your schools will give. That way, you have them. But if you’d rather get a B in algebra and spend more time on music, it’s ok to get a B in algebra. Ask yourself what you care about most. Treat your top priority as your top priority, and find your balance from there. Trade school is a worthy kind of education, but it’s easy to treat other kinds of education like trade school, or—worse—to treat education as a series of boxes to be checked, boxes which only exist for the checking, boxes with no value of their own. There are certain things you should know, and it is your mother’s job and my job and your teachers’ job to convince you to want to learn those things. Your job is to find things you want to do and to try to do them. Education can be a pastime. It can also be a tool. Distinguish when it is what, and treat it like the thing that it is, and search long and hard for the value in a thing you don’t understand. But in the end: Don’t do valueless things.
On that note, you should take a microeconomics class at the earliest chance you get. If the teacher’s any good, you’ll learn how to make decisions. Much of life is making decisions.
Sleep is valuable. Magical, almost. It’ll make you taller and smarter and better-looking, and it’ll give you more willpower—a valuable, exhaustible resource. Get good sleep, and get enough of it, and drink lots of water. No need to be a nut, but hydrate and get your rest.
It’s easier to form a bad habit than it is to break one. Complicating things, some habits aren’t bad when you form them. Some become bad when they become too strong.
You cannot exceed your potential. That’s not how potential works. Overachievement isn’t real. Accomplishment is.
There’s no such thing as cat people and dog people. There are only people who don’t understand cats and people who don’t appreciate dogs.
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Don’t belittle other peoples’ interests. Those things have value to them, the same way your interests have value to you. Remember that all the people you meet and all the people you see and all the people you do not see are people, with realities as deep and personal and total as yours. This is hard to comprehend. That’s why you should try to comprehend it. Stretch before you need the growth.
There’s something special about being on a team. I think it’s the combination of community—a deep, biological gift—and that purpose idea we talked about before. Teams can take a lot of different shapes. Try to join good teams. Try to create them sometimes, too.
If you think you love someone, strive to see them as they truly are. It’s easy to love our conceptions of people. It means more to love the real person.
If you love someone, invest yourself in their betterment. Challenge them to grow. Those that love you want you to be the best you can truly be.
Your mom and I are going to mess you up in some ways. Unfortunately, I don’t know which ones yet. If I did, we wouldn’t mess you up in that particular way. But if we didn’t mess you up that way, we’d mess you up in some other fashion. We’re going to mess you up. That’s how parenting works. Parents do so much for their children, and they also mess their kids up.
The truth is, you weren’t born to the best parents in the world. You were born to two 30-year-olds who have a lot to figure out. We will make mistakes. We will hurt you. We will let you down in ways you don’t deserve. It’s ok to be mad at us for that. It’s ok, when you realize it, to be frustrated. I can promise you that we tried really hard, that we cared a lot, but I also know it’s rare for a person to truly do their best, even for the people they care about the most. We are so mortal, we humans. We are limited people, your mother and I.
People tear themselves apart trying to respond to their imperfect parents. Two specific responses aren’t good: One is to try to deny the imperfection, to swear yourself to uphold your parents’ excellence by emulating them exactly. Please don’t do this. If you have children, parent them better than we parent you. The other is to reject the parents altogether, to swear off everything they did and commit yourself to doing the opposite. This too is stupid. Don’t curse yourself with a lifelong one-way war. (Also, you can tell us how we messed up. We can take it.)
Going off of that: Please never tell your mother that she’s the best mom ever. She’s going to be a hell of a lot better at parenting than I am, but there is no way she’s the best mom in the world. Top 1%? That’s very possible. But the best? Absurd. Tell her you love her. Tell her you’re glad you were born to her. Tell her thank you for everything she does for you. But if you find yourself wanting to call anyone the best anything, stop yourself and give them a real compliment.
I hope you don’t feel a need to answer every question which burns inside your head. I hope you find yourself capable of letting some of those questions rest. But because I am not, and because you have a lot of my blood and too much of my influence on the nurture side, I’ll offer you this: Not everything is your fault, and not everything is everybody else’s.
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You are an American, if you choose to stay that. That’s a nice thing about America. It was the first nation in history which chose to exist. There are a lot of grave sins in America’s past, and despite all of those, it has been on the balance a force for good. You are born into the most prosperous moment in human history so far, and you will likely live to see new prosperity of which we haven’t yet conceived. Your great-grandmother, the one born on Saint James Day, the one who lived on the farm? I don’t think she had a washing machine when your grandfather was born. She washed every kid’s clothes by hand. Your other great-grandmother almost lived to 90 because someone went and figured out how to treat certain cancers. Humanity is curing cancer, and it is solving world hunger, and a lot of this owes itself to processes and ways of life forged in the country of your birth. Not all of it, of course—other nations have their triumphs, and every nation has its beauty—but a lot of it. You were born into a good place at a good time. It is easy to be persuaded of the opposite, especially regarding timing. It’s easy to find fleeting validation in plenty of false notions.
There are, though, those sins. America is eminently human, in the best and the worst of ways. Don’t diminish those sins. Ignoring things doesn’t make them untrue.
I will ask you two things, regarding America. The first is to see it. Many would-be patriots have no idea what San Francisco Bay looks like from Tiburon despite having more than the means to go see it. Many of our best-off countrymen don’t understand the glory of soybeans and sundogs. Travel all the states. Go there and know them. If you want to visit Europe, visit Europe, and Australia and Africa and Asia and the rest. But there is so much to see and to learn within this country.
The second thing I’ll ask is that you remember that all nations are more than just their governments. For some reason, we have an easier time grasping this with cities and states and countries other than our own. Presidents aren’t gods. Don’t pray to them, or to any group of people. If you want something to change and you can change it, try or accept. If you want something to change and you cannot be the one to get it done, pray to God, not man.
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I think my basic job as your parent is to deliver you to adulthood ready for the lifetime ahead. I hope you’re successful in worthy endeavors, but I hope that only for the sake of your satisfaction. If you find yourself unsuccessful by others’ standards but satisfied in yourself, I will be much happier for you than if the opposite is true. I wish you satisfaction. But again, more than anything, I want you to be good and decent and kind. And even if you are none of those things, you are still a dream come true, and I love you.
There was a writer named Brian Doyle whose work flitted into our life from a few different angles. He died in Oregon, and somehow it’s been almost a decade since he passed. He said many worthwhile things, and I hope you’ll read them, and he offered some great advice, including to familiarize yourself with the King James Version. (I would add that The Killers have a good translation to Luke 15, but we’ll get to that at the end.)
One of my favorite things Doyle said, between the musings and the stories about sea lions and basketball and blueberries, was when he wrote that “There are many ways to be a man, and all of them have to do with honest.” Be honest with others. Be honest with yourself. And once more, I beseech you: Be good and decent and kind. Your mother is brave, and I hope you have sisters and that they are brave too. But I hope that you and what brothers may bless us are honest, and that all of you are kind.
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Maybe I’m a heretic for saying this, but I’m not convinced God made us in his image. Maybe he did. I don’t know. What I do know is that we have a tendency to shape God in our own image, and to our own convenience. I’ve seen lawyers worship a rules-based God. I’ve seen the Instagram-obsessed find some sort of self-help Jesus. I tend to prefer an ecumenical God, a simple God, a God who is endlessly forgiving. That God would sure be easier for me.
The truth is, we know a lot about God and we hardly know God at all. Since the beginning of language, we’ve used language to try to explain God to ourselves and one another. So many of our stories began spoken, in a cave. Those stories are human. Those stories come from humans. Often, they come from humans doing their very best to know the face of God. Often, I suspect, they come in part from God offering them a glimpse. Still, it’s a winning bet that there are mistakes in every sacred text. Many have done their best. All of them were human.
I suspect we are something smaller to him than ants are to us, and that one of the many gifts of Jesus was that when we say he humbled himself, we mean he humbled himself, climbing into a tiny, frail, helpless human frame, a frame like yours now and yours whenever you might read this. Remember how much humbling it took. Remember you are an animal. Remember those around you are animals as well. Remember you are in senses less perfect than an ant, tireless and dutiful and governed by instinct. Nobody is perfect. That goes for you too. Pride is a real sin.
Sin’s a tricky one, but there is simplicity within it. A lot of sin is just laziness, a choice to do the easier thing. (Though we should always be careful to distinguish laziness from rest.) Within sin’s great catalogue, sexual sin gets a disproportional amount of attention. I don’t know why this is. I hope we find you good churches through your teenage years. Some sin can be sexual, sure. But pride and jealousy and hate almost always produce worse than the things ninth-grade boys confess.
Will you be a Christian? I hope so. I think it’s a good religion, and I think religion is good. In case we succeed in our recruiting pitch, a few thoughts on the god we hung on a cross:
I will yield and say the Passion is the most important story in the Christian faith. I have my questions about the meaning, but I’ll leave it to you to one day pick that fight for yourself. (I’m drawn to the “smaller than ants” thing. I also wonder how much of God’s intention there was to teach us a lesson about death. But I digress.) In addition to the Passion, then, three good ones:
Cain & Abel might be the most illustrative story about mankind. I think it’s the most haunting. It can get deep, deep, deep under your skin. Once there, it can do some good.
Steinbeck got a letter wrong in East of Eden, or so is my impression. I think the word is timshol, but I think he ultimately got the message of the relevant phrase correct. We have free will. The choice is ours, along with certain responsibilities. Additionally, as Christ would later confirm, God is unfair, although we should readily admit how overall, this works strongly in our favor. “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?” Timshol.
The parable of the Good Samaritan might be the most instructive story about mankind. The full exchange spells out the only two things we are ultimately called to do.
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself…
But…who is my neighbour?
And then Jesus goes and tells the story, and he says that everybody’s our neighbor, dammit, and that all he needs from us, and all he wants from us, and all he would command us to do is to love him and to show one another mercy.
Go, and do thou likewise.
That’s it.
But as much as I love the Good Samaritan and am ashamed by it, and as much as I loathe Cain & Abel’s perceptiveness and fear Cain & Abel’s challenge, the story we pass down which I most want you to know is that of the Prodigal Son.
I went to church one time in Carson City. It was a Presbyterian place, and I think it had a big circular open layout. It was June, and I don’t know that the pastor wore a robe, and he talked about the Hound of Heaven and he talked about the Prodigal Son. He said that a thing we should know about those days is that when the father ran across town to meet his son, he would have looked quite undignified, and that this indignity is hugely important to the story. The father would have worn some sort of robe, and he would’ve had to hitch it up and hold it around his loins as he sprinted. He wouldn’t have been able to run very smoothly and—if I interpreted the pastor correctly, for I doubt he said this exact phrase in a church—everybody would have seen the father’s ass. And what’s more, the pastor explained, is that at this point in history, dignity was everything to this kind of guy. So the story, you see, isn’t just about the dad being excited to see his son, or even about the dad forgiving his son. The story is about the dad embarrassing himself and humbling himself, bending over and showing the whole town his undercarriage. And for whom? Not for some Christlike messiah, riding in on palm fronds. No. For the worse of his two sons. A burnout. A fuck-up. A failure and an idiot.
I like to think of that story as one which calls us failures and idiots. I think it’s important we think of ourselves that way. Not all the time, of course—I will raise you to have more confidence than that—but in comparison to what we’ve been given by God. God gives us everything, and inevitably, we fumble it. We fail. We waste our substance. We come to ourselves, flat on our backs and lower than the swine, and we start the long, humbled journey home. And what does God do? He comes running. He loves us so much that he comes running. Not in some perfect sprint, a Jesse Owens Jesus crossing the water. Instead, God runs as a dad, a dad with his robes hitched up around his groin, kicking dust up with his sandals as he gallops to greet us with a kiss.
There’s a lot within that story. At times we are the father, and at times we are the son, and at times we are the other son, the disgruntled brother who lost half his inheritance because his sibling burned his own portion on riotous living. (The implicit edit to the will was another thing the pastor wanted to make clear is in the story.) But the biggest thing I want you to know is that I really believe God loves you like that father. And the second-biggest thing I want you to know, the thing I want you to know about you and about me, the thing that’s more important than goodness and decency and kindness and even throwing strikes, is that I promise to love you like that father loved his son.
Maybe this is foolish. Maybe you’ll test me. But what choice do I have? You are my son, and I love you, and there’s nothing you can do to change that. So go explore, and go adventure, and go try all the things you want to try. I hope, as you try them, that you are good, and that you are decent, and that you are kind. But when you are not—because of course, there will be times when you are not—and when the other shoe drops (because the other shoe will inevitably drop), and when you find yourself on your back, lower than the swine…
Pick up the phone.
Pick up the phone, and I will come running.
I will gallop to you. I will show the town my ass. I will embarrass myself and treat my other loves unfairly. I will give you all that I have a second time. All that you might come home.
I hope you never find yourself so low in a grand and real sense. I hope this story is a small thing to you. But if you really should find yourself in such a place, such a ditch of your own mistakes, or if you find yourself somewhere lesser, burned up but safe and simply encountering the worst of your own mind: Look up from the darkness. Pick up the phone.
Because when you come back empty-handed, I will meet you in the road. I will fall on your neck. And I will take you back home.
You are a dream come true.
