I’m on the porch. 90 degrees, past ten now, moths are performing figure-eights around the bug zapper over the screen door like we all do sometimes—circle, never alight, never quite leave. Stella is laying at my feet.
The corn past the Schleicher place is still brittle and curled tight from the drought. Still looks shredded where the hail came through on the ninth. I had my nephew Scot in my passenger seat last week to see it and he didn’t say a damn thing. Just drove and watched and then looked up at me and nodded once. And then kept driving. That was the conversation. It was enough. More of it has gone through my mind than conversations that took actual words and the whole 90 seconds of them.
I do not intend to tell you a story tonight. I’ve told a few for you lately, all scrubbed and shined up with names and timestamps and somewhere in the process of shining I sort of… lost what I was going to say in the first place. Story is where a man can hide a bit, even in truth telling. So here. No hiding and frankly, not a great lot of order to this. I’m just going to… speak. How I would if you were here beside me, cigar still burning fitfully on its ash. Jameson in my hand.
What has occupied my thoughts is the process of becoming a good man. Not the neat and tidied-up version. I mean the weekly, humiliating, continually-screwing-it-up kind of good man. Not the one in here, in this space online where many of you have found me. More the one in the rooms in a life: you know, the kitchen, the truck cab, the four feet in space between two people at a funeral whose faces seem ready to split open but can’t find any words and so something small just pops out, out of the thinness of it, of their own little offerings of comfort.
I figure most of what passes these days as caring is noticing, and please know that I’m not saying noticing is unimportant. Kindness offered online, by folks I’ve never seen, has gotten me through days I’m not proud of. Days where I picked up no phones. Where I didn’t want any part of myself to be seen that close up, and a word from some stranger just… caught me. No irony in it at all, that part is true. It’s just—notice is fast. You register what’s unfolding and then keep moving. It’s engineered for speed and I doubt anyone at its center loses any sleep about the pieces left behind.
Attending is slow. It costs.
I still think of Patricia’s hand over the air conditioner dial. After 29 years, whenever she asks how my hip is, I still say ‘fine’ too quickly. And every time, without a word about it, her hand comes over, from across the room, and turns the A.C. down a notch anyway. Then she’ll ask again. Slower. More deliberate. That half-second that her attention lingers on me—I’ve never once told her in all those years that that’s what it does. But here I am, talking to you—most of you have never met Patricia—telling you instead on this porch.
It’s not so big an expense, generally. Ten minutes. But right when someone needs you—before you know what to say, before you even know what they’re really asking for—ten minutes feels enormous. It isn’t, though. One person giving ten minutes does work that four hundred people can’t do in two seconds apiece. It stops something in a man that started long before he ever had words for it.
I’ve long since stopped believing that goodness is a thing a man has, like blood type. It’s smaller than that. It’s a collection of choices, mostly those that nobody is around to see a man make, or make and that list for me stretches on far longer than I want to revisit tonight in any detail. I’ve missed opportunities to offer the true thing so many times it’s difficult to quantify. The plan was always to circle back. Rarely did.
The difficult days don’t undo the good, though. They don’t disappear. They just remain, and sometimes on a night just like this one, you can finally look one straight in the face.
My dad was in possession of a can of screws and nails, kept tidy by his own unspoken logic. Forty dollar bills, tucked, folded small, were found, upon his passing, under the assortment of screws. No one was looking then. No one had put them there for anyone. Just a man putting his house in order, knowing no one else was going to. Mine doesn’t have such a can. But it occurred to me that a man’s last 20 years might be exactly that—a private ledger no one audits—and when mine is finally read, whatever form it takes, I just wonder if there’ll be any scrap of value in it for anyone. Not that it was ever really about the finding, I don’t think. More about a man doing right by something even when nobody was ever gonna know he did.
I need to tread carefully now. It would be easy to pull this into a neat little bow of the ‘support’ variety; I don’t think that’s the honest space right now. There’s a woman, a neighbor, who lost her husband this past spring, and for about six weeks we all came round with meals on real plates, in real casseroles that sat steaming in our real ovens. Then poof. June arrives, casserole flow ceases. And we stop bringing meals, not through any conscious decision—no hard week gets scrutinized that closely—we just… stop; the same way a tough job, or a hard piece of gossip, just begins to feel too remote to act upon. Grief doesn’t really go anywhere, far as I can tell. We’re just the ones who stop showing up to it.
Support often changes nothing, for the simple reason that for most of life’s calamities there’s little left to change; instead, we have people who require another human willing to simply remain—not at the far remove of advice-giving, which affords us the opportunity of exit, feeling helpful, as though we have done something—but rather to linger in the not-knowing space along beside them, so they’re no longer in that space alone at 11 p.m., with the television running and no one there to turn it off.
And though it’s rarely convenient to occupy that space, to sit among the unspoken, it appears to be far easier for us to invent countless reasons to decline the invitation; we’re even masters of it when the subject isn’t a broken heart but a sheer stranger at the gas station. I can recall, not that many weeks ago, rendering snap judgment of a man in the checkout line cutting in front of me. He was short with the gas station attendant, already out the door before any word could be formed. It turns out this particular stranger had already driven to Denver and back twice in the past week, had left his wife behind in critical condition, and that was just… that. A man in drowning pain, and I stood there watching him in my own truck and thought ‘I’ll write a sentence for him in a minute’. A man can be carrying the worst week of his life right through a checkout line, and all the rest of us ever see is the line.
So then it hit—my real horror isn’t in my failure to connect. Men have always failed at that, long before there was any excuse in fiber optics for it. The horror is the practice. The sheer ease, now, we’ve developed with signifying something but doing nothing about it all, all the while feeling satisfied about the fact that we did notice. ‘Easy’ is how a failure becomes a habit; a habit, how it ceases to appear in the tally at all. And I have no prescription for that aside from noticing its unfolding in myself tonight, publicly, to the intrepid souls who have read this far. I can offer you no steps.
And I will be back at the same time and station next week, and I hope that one of you will be there to greet me. I know one of you will, though. I am certainly going to.
Here is what really scares me: it’s not that men fail—we always have, long before phones and screens gave us new excuses for it. It’s how good we’re getting at it. How we can mean to do something and never do it, and still walk away feeling like we did. I don’t know what to do about that except notice it, here, tonight, in front of whoever’s read this far, and say it out loud.
I ask only this: if someone tells you they’re okay and it doesn’t sound like it, ask them again. Pick up the dial with them, as Patricia has. Really respond to comments made in the forum—don’t be satisfied with the little heart, as if a tap counts as attention. I’ve done it myself, more times than I’d like to say—thumb already moving before my eyes have even finished the sentence, scrolling on to the next thing before that heart’s even lit all the way up. That comment might represent a hard week in someone’s life, while yours has carried on without a single interruption. The person who wrote it has a whole existence going on apart from you, and you’ve reduced them to one post or one unkind remark. Be gentler on those you’ve diagnosed in four seconds. Be kind before you are right. If you aren’t doing okay, please show someone, because I am truly telling you tonight I am not doing okay yet and I am 66 years old, hiding behind the same damn word my father hid behind.
I don’t know how to wrap this up any other way, and perhaps this is as much of it as you needed to hear tonight. I still haven’t actually told Patricia how much picking up that dial means to me. I spent the whole letter telling you that you needed to pick up the dial, and I am sitting here before you having not done so yet. Perhaps that makes this letter garbage and perhaps it may make it more valuable than any other letter I’ve sent you. I’ve gone back and forth over the last hour to determine which of those two it is.
It seems to me now that all of it—the face, the can of screws, the man who’d offer no word for his own blighted corn—teaches the same one lesson across this wide, flat land: that the measure of a life well lived might simply be a refusal to trade truth for ease, at any junction where that choice comes up. And that at the far end of it, there’s no score kept, no tally handed out—only, on some porch late at night a good many years from now, a quiet reckoning with what you’ve actually been. Nothing more to be had from noticing that now, except to say it out loud before the wick runs out.
The cigar has burned nearly down. The sound of Patricia’s AM radio fills the room now; it is her radio playing an agricultural show that recites corn prices or soybean prices for the people listening; they dropped further again. Stella’s already asleep by my boot, the way she does most nights before I’ve even decided to quit for the evening. In a short while, I will go inside and I will most likely tell Patricia goodnight. The issue would once again be left undisturbed.
I’ll be back next week regardless, and I hope some of you will be too.
But I think about my nephew on the road the other day, his damaged corn, his lack of comment, his movement on. I used to think it was because he didn’t have words. I no longer do. I think he did have the words. I simply think he knew, that somehow, if you say them aloud, they would shrivel and diminish, and he wasn’t ready for that yet.
Some things a man’s just gotta say to himself a good long while before he’s ready to say them out loud to anybody else.
I don’t know that I am either, but I am going in anyway.
It has never been easy for me to ask for anything. So I’ll just ask here, plain. Several of you already support this letter, and I don’t take that lightly.
I couldn’t keep sitting out here with this thing if it weren’t for you. I know some of you pay eight dollars or less, and some pay more, and I’m aware that’s nothing to one person and everything to another. If these letters are worth something to you, I’m asking, quietly, that you think about becoming a paid subscriber. Not out of guilt—just because attending costs something, same as I said earlier tonight, and this isn’t any different.
I’ll go easy on the asking from here. That’s all for tonight.
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