Parenting

This is a passage from The Thanksgiving Visitor, by Truman Capote (a beautiful short story, by the way, that can be read as an adult and enjoyed or read with children, who will equally enjoy it):

"While I was eating, Miss Sook put her arm around my shoulders. 'There's just this I want to say, Buddy. Two wrongs never made a right. It was wrong of him to take the cameo. But we don't know why he took it. Maybe he never meant to keep it. Whatever his reason, it can't have been calculated. Which is why what you did was much worse: you planned to humiliate him. It was deliberate. Now listen to me, Buddy: there is only one unpardonable sin—deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven. That, never. Do you understand me, Buddy?'

"I did, dimly, and time has taught me that she was right."

Those italicized words in the text, incidentally, are as the author wrote them. The Thanksgiving Visitor is largely an autobiographical story by Capote, who grew up in Mississippi. He is Buddy. Miss Sook, who is speaking to him in this passage and who is pictured above with Truman, is a character based on the older woman who raised him. His best childhood friend was Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill A Mockingbird as an adult, and to whom the story is dedicated. The boy who stole the cameo—an old-fashioned piece of jewelry—was named Odd Henderson, who was a bully who torments Buddy. But in a twist of circumstance, it is Odd Henderson who emerges, as Capote writes, "as someone superior to me, even more honest." The story continues, with Miss Sook making sure Buddy understands what she's telling him:

     "Do you Buddy? Understand?'

     "Sort of. Pull,' I said, offering her one prong of the wishbone.

     We split it; my half was the larger, which entitled me to a wish. She wanted to know what I'd wished.

     'That you're still my friend.'

     'Dumbhead,' she said, and hugged me.

     'Forever?'

     'I won't be here forever, Buddy. Nor will you.' Her voice sank like the sun on the pasture's horizon, was silent a second and then climbed with the strength of a new sun. 'But yes, forever. The Lord willing, you'll be here long after I've gone. And as long as you remember me, then we'll always be together...'"

      As long as we're here, and we are all here, Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Posted April 27, 2010. Know anyone who is having a baby? More specifically, know anyone who is having a baby who wants the man in her life to get more involved in the pregnancy and childbirth? Have I got a book for you! It's the virtually new, completely updated second edition of The Everything Father to Be Book, A Survival Guide for Men, by yours truly.

     The book is for men, written from the point of view of a man who has been a pregnant father four times. It was first published in 2004, and it was such a winner that Adams Media, the publisher, decided to put out a revised edition in 2010. I did the rewrites late last year, adding some new info and features and updating the material where needed. Interestingly, pregnancy and childbirth haven't changed all that much in the past half-dozen years, but the technology of our every day lives, such as the use of cell phones, has changed remarkably.

     In the 2004 edition I advised fathers to bring lots of dimes with them to the hospital so that after the baby was born, they could call their family and friends on the pay phone down the hall to tell them the big news. Of course, pay phones barely exist now and there is no longer any need for men to carry dimes with them because they all have cells. The one kicker is that many hospitals do not allow people to use cells inside the building, so they have to go outside to call.

     The sparkling second edition of The Everything Father to Be Book, A Survival Guide for Men is now available for sale here at KevinNelsonWriter.com. Amazon and Barnes & Noble online don't have it in stock yet, nor do bookstores. But it will arrive in these places soon.

More news on the literary front: The other day I was chatting with one of the grand men of California publishing, Malcolm Margolin of Heyday Books. Malcolm has published two of my books, Wheels of Change: From Zero to 600 MPH: The Amazing Story of California and the Automobile and The Golden Game. I was pitching him on doing an airplane book or maybe even one on mountain climbing. 

     So Malcolm, who has a long gorgeous gray beard that Walt Whitman would have envied, noted what others have noted as well: that I seemed to have attention deficit disorder when it comes to my writing. "It's interesting," he said thoughtfully. "Though I'm not sure it's best strategy."

     Really, why would Malcolm think such a thing? I have a new book on fatherhood out. My last book was on cars. The one before that was on forgery and true crime, and the one before that on baseball. And now I'm tossing out ideas on airplanes and mountain climbing and thinking, quite seriously, that what I really should be blogging about these days is beer.

     Speaking of that car book, Paul Kilduff of The Monthly did an entertaining interview with me that you can read and listen to here. And Bill Millard, historian at the California Automobile Museum in Sacramento, called Wheels of Change "a helluva fun read—a wonderful effort" [that covers] "a gigantic subject in a very neat, readable package. It deserves a prominent place among the standard references on California's history."

Posted 2/8/10. Many people do not know that Jennifer and I had a baby, Leah, who died. She was born Monday, November 25, 1996, and died Friday, November 29, 1996, after five days of living only in a hospital. This is a picture of her in the last hour of her life; she had breathing problems she could not overcome.

One of the reasons that many people do not know about Leah is that I do not tell them about her. Privately, among our family and close friends, we of course speak of her and remember her. Every November around her birthday, a time of year that is particularly hard for her mother, we recognize her life by lighting a candle or hiking, as a family, up to the hill where we scattered her ashes. We talk about her freely with our sons, who never met her and will never understand the impact she has had on their lives.

Among people I do not know, however, talking about Leah represents an awkward challenge. Whenever a new book of mine comes out, the publisher releases biographical material about me that typically mentions the fact that I have children. I often speak publicly in front of groups, and occasionally do radio and TV interviews. These, too, generally mention my children, at least in passing, and this is where the awkwardness comes in. Do I say I have four children, or three?

This issue arose again last month when I was putting the finishing touches on the second edition of The Everything Father To Be Book, A Survival Guide for Men, which will be released this year. In my acknowledgments for the book, I thanked only three of my children by name, leaving out Leah. There was a reason for this. When you are having a baby, understandably, the last thing you want to hear is that something bad can happen to your child. I have written three parenting books, and after Leah died I had a spirited discussion with an editor (not my current one) about how much I should talk about her death when writing for expectant mothers and fathers.

"When you talk about that," she said (and she was a mother herself, and not unsympathetic to my concerns), "it puts the book in another category. It's no longer a parenting guide, it's a book about loss and recovery from loss." Indeed. As this blog post shows, as soon as I start talking about Leah the discussion becomes somber and the audience falls silent.

So, in my writing (especially for new parents) and my public speaking, I have generally avoided the subject, sticking with the public fiction of three children rather than the personal truth of four. Until the other day when I was watching TV. A man came on who was being interviewed on some issue or another. I can't recall his name, what program he was on, or the issue he was talking about. What I remember is that he said he was the father of two children, one of whom had died. "An angel," he called her. His eyes became teary. The host changed the topic, and they went on to discuss whatever it was they were supposed to talk about.

I was struck by this man's courage to be open about a hidden hurt. Following his lead, I decided to change my approach. I rewrote the acknowledgments to The Everything Father To Be Book, dedicating the book to all my children and mentioning them all by name. Is a child who is gone still your child? She is, and always will be. I have four children, and their names are Annie, Hank, Gabe and Leah.

Annie, who is now in college, with her sister

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