I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son Read Online Free PDF Page A

woods, the wind was worse than the Germans,” Papa agrees.
    “Socks. It’s about keeping your feet dry.”
    Ryan has on a hooded sweatshirt, my grandfather an old gray windbreaker. Both wear long pants and closed-toe shoes. The temperature is above eighty.
    The conversation switches to lighter things. My grandfather remembers emancipating a cottage’s silver, and throwing its owner off a bridge when he objected. “We was the victors,” Papa explains.
    The three of us are lined up in rattan chairs—my grandfather, myself, Ryan, all facing forward—and the veterans’ voices are meeting over me. I feel snug.
At liberty,
like a boy who can swagger into a place because Dad or big brother’s right behind him.
    This bantam privilege—knowing you’ve been given leave to see without fear of being seen—it’s the absolute best feeling in the world. Until the day it’s not.
    “They use IEDs because otherwise it’s not fair,” Ryan says. “You get rich Saudi teenagers coming to the mountains, thinking it’s an adventure. I’d flank them, and they’d still be firing one-handed over a rock. Just kids, you know?” Papa nods, and levels his gaze on his hands on his knees. “At night at the fire base sometimes I’d look through my nods—night vision—and see these fuckers—pardon.” Ryan stands up and pantomimes a blind person stepping tentatively. “See these guys coming up the mountain for us.” Now he pantomimes holding a rifle. “We got an infrared beam that only we can see in our nods, and I’m painting these blind bastards right in the face.” He laughs a little, and so do Papa and I, because he pantomimes the sightless Taliban again. “So I’d let them do a little of this before I put the steel to ’em. Pink mist, you call it.”
    I leave them to it and walk into the house to get another beer for Ryan and another whiskey soda for Papa. My dad turns from the dishes and admits, “What Ryan’s seen, I can’t even imagine. I’m just so relieved I didn’t get him killed.”

9/18/13
    I’ve taken off work to fly out and visit Dad in San Francisco. Yeshiva University, where I am employed under the table as a factotum-cum-Shabbos goy. Not literally under the table, of course, but kind of: the subbasement, where I fix copiers, clean labs, and answer lost students’ questions about the way to the mail room or going unmarried past twenty-five. I found this gig postcollegiately, after thinking long and hard about Officer Candidate School. I could do the push-ups and sit-ups, no problem; it was running two miles in twenty minutes that gummed me up. I didn’t think the army would let me do it on an elliptical machine.
    I applied to roughly thirty thousand NYC-based jobs via Craigslist. The fact that no one stole my identity made me feel worse about myself. I was turned down by the likes of the Central Park Zoo (maintenance man), a blind Iranian scientist (orator), and a tour company (pizza cicerone). YU were the only ones to call back. They treat me kindly enough. I get to emerge every couple of hours to wash toner off my hands and see the sun.
    I told the faculty that there’d been a minor family emergency, which was not untrue. Dad was dying, according to Dad. Again. Still.
    “What is living but dying?” Dad says, and has said, for as long as I myself have been breathing.
    He insists that this is it, though. The big one. I know it is not. Cannot be. He will be released from this coil only when taking the lot of us out with him, we’ve decided, my sisters and I. That’s the only time he’s fancy-free—behind the wheel, with his babies on board. Then, everyone and no one is safe. It’s both terrifying and not, having him as your ferryman. I can certainly think of worse ways to go out than: wheels on air, Russells a-scream, the Taurus chassis leveling into parabolic free fall.
    I’d be inconsolable were he to actually die without me, however. That is a future I can’t even begin to fathom. Talk