Volume 4, Issue 25: A Lifetime to Find

"It takes a lifetime to find a life like the life you had in mind."

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We’ve been spending the summer week out at Lake Keowee, South Carolina, pulling the children behind on big inner tubes, drinking light beers while listening to Tom Petty and occasionally jumping off tall things into the water even though we are way too old to be doing so, like this:

My time limit for lake activities, as pleasant as they are, tends to be a bit shorter than everyone else’s: Relaxation has never been a Leitch family strength. But it was a fun time. It turns out that I enjoy all those people who live in my house.

At one point, I was guiding the boys up a rock crevice to a cliff that we were going to leap off, like idiots, when we ran into a man, his daughter and her younger brother. They were headed to the same jump we were, and I paused to let them by. As they passed, my younger son Wynn said to them, “watch out, there’s glass down there.” There was. There was actually a lot of broken glass, busted beer bottles, along with a scattering of discarded cigarette butts, empty Fireball mini-shots, half-drunk aluminum energy drink cans and various piles of snack wrappers, Cheez-Its, Twinkies, and the like. There was also a burnt semicircle around the area, like someone had half-heartedly attempted to start a campfire but gave up and just dumped whatever trash they had in their pockets on the embers. It was disgusting.

“Why is there all that broken glass there?” Wynn asked me. Instinctively, I looked at the other dad, and he turned his head to look at me. It was as if centuries of evolution had been pulling both of us inexorably toward this moment.

“That’s a great question,” I said, still looking at Trail Dad, shaking my head with almost cartoonish moroseness, as if I could sum up the entirety of humanity’s failings in one furrowed, I’m-not-mad-I’m-just-so-disappointed brow.

“Some people,” he said, looking at me, then Wynn, then his own children, shaking his head too, in the exact way I had, “some people just don’t have any respect for anything.”

“Definitely not wrong about that,” I said, both dads now fully locked in on each other, being awesome dads, teaching lessons, making a difference, kickass dads. “People only thinking about themselves.”

He clicked the top of his mouth with his tongue and did a little eyeroll.

“Typical,” he said to me. “That’s the way some people are these days.”

“Don’t I know it, right?” I said to him. I shook my head. He shook his too.

We probably would have went on like that for a couple of hours, just two white bros in their 40s wearing swimsuits on a mountain and harrumphing about the state of the world, but the kids had already run out in front of us, telling us to hurry up. We caught one last glance at each other, then the broken glass, then each other again.

Sad, my head shook.

So sad, his head shook back.

Couple of dads, being dads, dad bros, dad life. What’s this world coming to, ya know?

******************

This November, I will have been a father for 11 years. I’d always been obsessed with being a father for the 35 years on this earth that I wasn’t one—I even wrote a whole book about it, leading to a very funny, astute Chuck Klosterman blurb that called it “the best book about Midwestern fatherhood ever written by a childless man in Brooklyn”—but that obsession didn’t ultimately prepare me any more for actually being a father than if I had just come across an infant lying in front of my apartment.

The weirdest thing about being a father—and there are so many weird things; I am not sure how to react to the fact that my eight-year-old has started calling his penis “Little Johnny”—is that it changes you so much without, in the moment, feeling like it’s changing you that much at all. I mean, obviously, there have been changes: There are two little human beings that didn’t exist 11 years ago that I now believe to be the most incredible creatures ever introduced to this planet, and they live just downstairs. But I mean more in how I’ve changed. I’m a Dad now. How am I different?

The obvious answer is that my life is more serious now, more grounded—my life has stakes. I went from “the worst thing that could happen to me this week would be someone being mad at me on Twitter” to “I would hurl myself into traffic if it meant this little baby never has to feel a second of pain or sadness.” So that’s a transition. I have a better understanding of the world, specifically of time, I think, of its eternity, and my own impermanence. I remember vivid moments from when I was 10 years old, and what my parents looked like then and what they look like now. This is particularly disorienting to consider when one remembers that not only will my sons remember all these moments they’re having with me today, but when they become the age I am now, because I was 10 years older than my father was when I was born, I will look (and surely act) about 10 years older than my parents do now—if I am alive at all then. By the time they are able to truly see me the way children can only truly see their parents once they’re parents themselves, I will be a very old man.

I think being a parent can’t help but make you a little bit more grave about the world. Am I (and the people of my generation) handing them this planet in better shape than we found it in? Is this place even going to be livable for them by the time they are my age? Living through this particular era can’t help but exacerbate these thoughts. Donald Trump went down that escalator on June 16, 2015, and I think you can make an argument that just about everything in American life has gotten worse since then. That day was three days before my son Wynn’s first birthday. It is all he knows. It is the whole world of his life.

Then again: It’s not like my parents (who had me one year after the President of the United States resigned his office and plunged the nation a half-decade of gloom) or their parents (who had multiple children come of adulthood right as they could be drafted to die in a quagmire 8,500 miles away) didn’t feel the pressures and existential perils of the outside world either. That’s part of the job description too: Figuring out how much of the outside world to protect them from, and how much they’re going to need to start reckoning with sooner rather than later. It’s terrifying now. But it’s always terrifying. I’m sure it forever has been. How could it not be?

Personality-wise, though, I have changed. It doesn’t feel that way: I feel like the same guy, and certainly try to pretend that’s the case when the children are not around. But I’m not. I am quicker to grouse than I used to be, with a shorter fuse toward frustration and grouchiness. It takes a toll having to act like you know what you’re doing all the time, to be an authority figure when you’re not sure you’ve earned the right to be, to dispense advice and guidance on matters that I haven’t quite figured out myself. I also can’t help but compare myself to my own father, not just in tactics but in how my own children perceive me. My father was not perfect, but he wasn’t a canyon’s length away from it, and more to the point, growing up I mostly believed he was, if not perfect, at least never wrong—or certainly not someone I should be questioning when he told me I was wrong. My father is an affable, friendly person, but when I was a kid, he was generally stern and unyielding—mostly, I realize now, as an extended parental strategy, a vague interpretation of what his (good-hearted, but more more distant) father was like while making sure to be a little more kinder and attentive, as much as he could be, anyway. My father, more than anything, had dignity to me when I was a child. He never looked the fool; I was never embarrassed of him. This has led to one of my primary flaws as a parent: I try so hard to project that same image to my kids—I was so proud never to be embarrassed of my father! There were so many embarrassing fathers!—that I sometimes forget to connect with them as the little humans I love so much. And that ends up making me grouchy too. I’m working on it. I’m working on it all the time.

But, fair to say: That’s never something I thought to work on before I had children. I wasn’t one person (a regular human idiot) some of the time and another (father trying to project the right image and help the two most beloved creatures in his life navigate this often-calamitous place) the rest of the time. No one was looking at me as a signal for how to act, or a hero to worship, or an adversary to vanquish. Now I have two people—my favorite people!—who will do those things every day of their lives, including for years after I am gone. God, of course it changes you. It changes me every day. It forever will.

I’m more comfortable with it now. I’m more of a dad than I was 11 years ago, and, honestly, I’m more of a dad today than I was yesterday. It’s like anything else: You do your best to fake it the best you can and hopefully, along the way, learn just enough that you can cobble together some sort of rough sketch of how it’s supposed to work. I don’t get everything right; I’m not sure I get half of everything right. But I’m happy with the person being a father has turned me into, the person it will continue to turn me into. Even if sometimes I run into a random guy on a cliff over a lake in South Carolina and instantly turn into every single mockery of every Dad who has ever existed. What’s this world coming to? You can’t help but just shake your head.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock Are What Dems Need … But They Have to Win First, Medium. Kind of a big election coming up here in Georgia.

2. The LIV Tour Is Built to Withstand Outrage, New York. I bet the tour lasts. I bet other sports are next.

3. All-Stars, Ranked, MLB.com. Yep, every one of them.

4. “Better Call Saul” Is the End of a Television Era, Medium. When’s the last time you sat down and watched an actual television program, on a network, at the time it aired?

5. MLB Players Due for a Second-Half Breakout, MLB.com. I might be dreaming on Tyler O’Neill here.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discuss “Thor: Love and Thunder,” “Both Sides of the Blade” and “The Sea Beast.”

Seeing Red, Bernie and I talk about the team I’m in St. Louis to watch right now.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, no show this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“‘I’ve Already Made That Decision,’” Olivia Nuzzi, New York. This made news headlines, but the piece itself is just incredible. It also has one of my favorite ledes in a long time.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

(I know I am behind on these, but I’m catching up this week. I mean this time.)

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Polar Opposites,” Modest Mouse. They’re playing in Atlanta in October, and I’m going. There are three separate decades that have this band as a little bit of the background music. It’s also terrific writing music.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

So William and I are in St. Louis right now for our annual trip to Busch Stadium. We saw the Cardinals win 7-3 last night and we’re heading out again today; I think Pujols is gonna start.

In the first inning of last night’s game, the Reds scored two runs in the first inning before Donovan Solano flied out to Cardinals right fielder Corey Dickerson to end the inning. As Dickerson ran into the dugout, he heaved the ball into the stands down the first base line so a fan could have it as a souvenir. It soared way over our heads, and I saw William’s shoulders slump as he watched it.

Then his eyes got wide. “That guy dropped it!” he screamed, and before I could respond, he’d torn off down the aisle. Ten seconds later:

The baseball, it is good.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will