A brief reflection on fatherhood
By Ivor Shapiro (writing as Evan Vanovic)
First published in the June 2001 issue of Today’s Parent.
“I never thought I’d be this kind of father,” I said. The ordinary kind, I meant: the kind other sons have. Dads who play catch, who rough-house, who build forts.
Building a backyard fort for Paul, five, was what I was busy doing when I made the comment to my wife last spring. Take one sheet of fibreboard and a length of old two-by-four, plug in the circular saw, arm the power drill, add screws. Dad Stuff.
My dad didn’t do Dad Stuff. I think deep down he would have liked to, but he was disabled, and prone to depression, and not what you’d call good with his hands. I loved him, across the silent ditch he’d dug between himself and the world. I don’t remember envying other kids their fathers, but decades later, the scene in Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner and his dad playing catch made me weep.
Anyway, I myself was always the original nerd. High school extracurriculars: chess, debating, music (classical, of course). At university: student politics. Favourite sport: none.
Then Paul arrived. I taught him to catch a ball, got him swimming — a big joke, since I myself am just one level up from dog paddle. (Yes, I am teaching him chess, too, and he has a thing for Brahms.) And he’s taught me to wrestle. He stands there with knees and elbows bent, hands patting the air, head down, eyes glaring up past a V of eyebrows, smile not quite stifled, and then we’re at each other, issuing manly grunts, until we collapse, panting and laughing.
Paul was first in his class to have a fort in his yard. By summer, he’d decided he needed one at the cottage, too. We picked a piece of forest at the far end of our little island, donned gloves and work hats, secured axe, hammer and nails and fashioned a rough enclosure, a tangled web of trimmed branches and rescued plywood. The next day, Paul woke with a new design feature: a table. The day after, a door. Then, an inner wall. A back door. A ramp for his cars. A secret third door that swings shut. By vacation’s end, the sprawling habitat had a main lobby, a hidden side entrance for adults (no stooping required), an inner sanctum, and a sign: “PAUL’S FORT: Private. Members and friendly adults only.” I had tennis elbow.
If my clearest image of last summer is Paul at work on his swimming — his bright blue eyes exulting as he managed another stroke, his tight lips muffling squawks of effort — Paul’s is different. He still talks about the fort; not so much the finished product (if it’s finished, which I doubt) but the work we did together.
In the late fall, each child in kindergarten made a collage on the topic of his or her choice. Paul’s creation, mounted and framed at his mom’s prompting, became my most precious winter-holiday gift. No sign of artistic prodigy here: a patchwork of bark, cedar, lichen and paper. But it’s the label I like reading. “Building a fort by the water,” he called it, to which I add silently: with my Dad.
© Ivor Shapiro