The Council of Dads Read online

  The Council of Dads

  My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could be Me

  Bruce Feiler

  For my father

  Keep walking

  Photograph by Edwin Feiler

  Contents

  .1. The Council of Dads

  .2. The Orange Sting-Ray

  .3. Twenty Fingers and Twenty Toes

  .4. Chronicles of the Lost Year: Volume I

  .5. Jeff: Approach the Cow

  .6. Twentieth-Century Two-thirds

  .7. Chronicles of the Lost Year: Volume II

  .8. Max: Pack Your Flip-Flops

  .9. The Lesson of the Dunes

  .10. Chronicles of the Lost Year: Volume III

  .11. David: Don’t See the Wall

  .12. Use Your Words

  .13. Chronicles of the Lost Year: Volume IV

  .14. Ben: Tend Your Tadpoles

  .15. Be a Collector

  .16. Chronicles of the Lost Year: Volume V

  .17. Ben the Second: Live the Questions

  .18. The Last Few Steps

  .19. Chronicles of the Lost Year: Volume VI

  .20. Joshua: Harvest Miracles

  .21. Always Learn to Juggle on the Side of a Hill

  .22. Chronicles of the Lost Year: Volume VII

  .23. Take a Walk with a Turtle

  .24. Hug the Monster

  Say Please and Thank You

  About the Author

  Other Books by Bruce Feiler

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  .1.

  THE COUNCIL OF DADS

  Dear ____,

  As you know, I have learned that I have a seven-inch cancerous tumor in my left femur. The afternoon I first heard the diagnosis I was standing on York Avenue in Manhattan. I sat on a stoop, telephoned Linda, called my parents, and wept. I went to get some crutches, stumbled home, lay down on my bed, and stared at the sky for several hours imagining all the ways my life would change.

  Then Eden and Tybee came in, running and giggling and looking in the mirror. They began to do this dance they made up when they turned three a few months ago. Mixing ring-around-the-rosy, ballet, and the hokey pokey, they twirled frantically in a circle, going faster and faster until they tumbled onto the ground, laughing with all the glee in the world. As I watched them, I couldn’t control myself. I crumbled. I kept imagining all the walks I might not take with them, the ballet recitals I might not see, the art projects I might not mess up, the boyfriends I might not scowl at, the aisles I might not walk down.

  The next few days were a tangle of tears and late-night conversations, doctor consultations, insurance negotiations, determination, hopes, and fears. I quickly determined I was looking at one of three options: the lost year, the lost limb, or the lost life.

  Through it all, I kept thinking I would be fine. Whatever happens, I have lived a full life. I have traveled the world. I have written ten books. I am at peace.

  I also thought Linda would be fine. She would experience a lot of pain and inconvenience, but in the end she would find a way to live a life of passion and joy.

  But I kept coming back to Eden and Tybee and how difficult life might be for them. Would they wonder who I was? Would they wonder what I thought? Would they yearn for my approval, my discipline, my love?

  My voice.

  A few days later, I woke up suddenly before dawn and thought of a way I might help re-create my voice for them. I started making a list of six men—from all parts of my life, beginning with when I was a child and stretching through today. These are the men who know me best. The men who share my values. The men who helped shape and guide me. The men who traveled with me, studied with me, have been through pain and happiness with me.

  Men who know my voice.

  That morning I began composing this letter.

  I believe my daughters will have plenty of resources in their lives. They’ll have loving families. They’ll have welcoming homes. They’ll have each other. But they may not have me. They may not have their dad.

  Will you help be their dad?

  Will you listen in on them? Will you answer their questions? Will you take them out to lunch every now and then? Will you go to a soccer game if you’re in town? Will you watch their ballet moves for the umpteenth time? When they get older, will you indulge them in a new pair of shoes? Or buy them a new cell phone, or some other gadget I can’t even imagine right now? Will you give them advice? Will you be tough as I would be? Will you help them out in a crisis? And as time passes, will you invite them to a family gathering on occasion? Will you introduce them to somebody who might help one of their dreams come true? Will you tell them what I would be thinking? Will you tell them how proud I would be?

  Will you be my voice?

  And as I lay on my bed that morning, hoping I didn’t wake Linda as I shook with tears, I said to myself that I would call this group of men “The Council of Dads.”

  The Council of Dads. Six men. All very busy and burdened with their own challenges, but together, collectively, they might help father my potentially fatherless daughters.

  Naturally I hope that I will fully recover from my illness and that we will all be able to enjoy many family occasions together in the future. But I would like my Council to continue no matter the outcome. I would like my daughters to know the world through all of you. I would like Tybee and Eden to know me through this group.

  I would like them to know themselves through their Council of Dads.

  I understand this request might come as something of a burden. It is not intended to be an overwhelming commitment of time, resources, or emotion. A few words, a few gestures, an open door, a welcome embrace every now and then will ensure that your presence will be a constant guide in the girls’ lives.

  Your voice will merge with mine.

  Even though it has been painful to write—and to contemplate—this unexpected idea at this moment in our lives has brought great strength and comfort to Linda and me. We are pleased to know that our girls will learn from you some of the valuable lessons you have taught me over the years. We are thrilled that we all have an excuse to keep more closely in touch in the seasons to come. And we are honored to add your fatherly counsel into the heart of our family.

  And above all, we know that this assembly of surrogate dads can, if needed, be me.

  Love,

  .2.

  THE ORANGE STING-RAY

  THE BIKE WAS BRIGHT ORANGE. It was a Schwinn Sting-Ray with a swooping banana seat, a miniature front wheel, and handlebars called “ape-hangers” because the grips rose so high they made the rider look like an orangutan. Modeled after hot rod motorcycles, the Sting-Ray was the most popular bike in America in the spring of 1970. My parents had given me one for my fifth birthday a few months earlier, and it was my most prized possession.

  One day it almost cost me my life.

  My family had recently moved to the south side of Savannah, Georgia, into a neighborhood where all the streets were named after Confederate generals—Johnston, McLaws, Early, Stuart. The idea that a century after the Civil War, socially conscious Savannahians would flock to a subdivision that memorialized the Lost Cause was a mark of how proud many Southerners still were at the tail end of the civil rights movement. We lived at 330 Lee Boulevard in a contemporary stucco ranch house built by my parents.

  Late one afternoon I was exploring the neighborhood with my friend Scotty Sutlive when we came upon Pickett Circle, a small, magnolia-lined appendage off nearby Johnston Street that none of the other streets seemed to have. A secret discovery! We must return for more reconnaissance!

  Racing home along the shoulder of Habersham Street, a heavily trafficked, two-la
ne thoroughfare that bisected our neighborhood, I had a brilliant thought. Why waste precious seconds turning around in Lee Boulevard? I could make a hasty 180 on Habersham and be back at Pickett Circle in no time. As Scotty lamely pedaled into Lee Boulevard (Hah! You’ll never be a spy!), I deftly veered my bike into Habersham and was promptly—screech!—smashed by an oncoming sedan.

  Wham.

  My mangled Sting-Ray flew in one direction. My lacerated body in another. For a second I just lay in the road, my body stretched across the yellow line, feeling the warm pavement underneath my head. The owner of the house on the corner, Polly Meddin, suddenly appeared from her garage and came sprinting to my side. Her shadow crossed my face. “Andy! Andy!” she cried, using my older brother’s name. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m Bruce,” I replied, and promptly passed out.

  I WOKE UP THE next morning in the hospital, unable to move. A plaster body cast stretched from my chest to my left toes, then down the opposite leg to my right knee. A steel bar ran from my right knee to my left foot. I had broken my left femur, the largest bone in my body. For the next two months I would lie flat on my back.

  Back at home, my parents set me up in my bedroom, with a large folding table nearby, where I could pile all the toys I was getting. On top was a replica of the Apollo 11 command module that had splashed into the Pacific a year earlier. My mother, a junior high school art teacher, wanted to paint my cast, but I wouldn’t let her until the day before it was scheduled to come off. We held our Passover seder in my room that year, and when the time came to hide the afikomen matzah—the highlight for young children, who receive a prize for discovering it—my father asked me to close my eyes and lift my head. He hid the treasure underneath my pillow.

  For the next thirty-eight years, my broken left femur was the only medically interesting thing that ever happened to me. When I would visit a new doctor, I had only a few words to pencil in as I raced through page after page of ailments on the medical history forms. The truth was, I no longer thought about my broken leg. The only time it affected me was when I tried on shoes, since my recovery corresponded with a growth spurt, leaving my left foot a half-size larger than my right. But overall I was healthy. I looked younger than my age. I almost never saw a doctor.

  And, on top of it all, I made a living by walking. For more than two decades I traveled the world and wrote about my experiences walking in other people’s shoes. I taught junior high school in rural Japan; I earned a graduate degree in England; I performed as a clown under a traveling American big top; I crisscrossed the United States with Garth Brooks and other Nashville stars. And for the last ten years I had retraced the Bible through the war zones of the Middle East—climbing Mount Ararat in Turkey, crossing the Red Sea in Egypt, spelunking in caves in Jerusalem, airlifting into Baghdad, trekking across Iran.

  Walking the Bible became a bestseller; the television series of the same name was seen around the world. I was the “walking” guy. The tag had become so indelible—and so aligned with my desire to be an experientialist—that on the last Thursday in June, thirty-eight years after my accident, I had dinner with my publisher and proposed an idea: I would spend the next ten years retracing the journeys of American history. I would follow its paths.

  I would walk America.

  We toasted the idea. I went home to bed. But the next morning, unbeknownst to anyone other than my wife, I went to the nuclear medicine department at New York–Presbyterian Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to get what’s known as a full-body bone scan. I had been directed to do this by a doctor I barely knew. A year earlier, our beloved family physician announced she was leaving our insurance plan, and I arranged for a farewell physical. All clear. For ten months I didn’t see a doctor, which was normal for me. Finally, in May, I got around to finding a new internist, who ordered some routine blood work in our introductory meeting.

  The next day she called. My alkaline phosphatase number was a little high, she said. 235. I didn’t know what to think of this, because I had never heard the term. Alk phos, the doctor explained, is an enzyme in the blood that flags issues related to the liver or bones. She speculated that my level was probably high naturally, but she wondered if I’d had it tested before. A quick call to my previous physician revealed that I had, and that my alk phos number the previous July had been 90, perfectly normal. “Hmmm,” my new doctor said. “That’s surprising. Why don’t we test it again? It’s probably just a lab error.”

  It wasn’t. The subsequent test produced a similar elevated number, and an additional exam ruled out any problems in my liver. That left my bones. She didn’t think I had Paget’s disease, an ailment common in older people whose bones and/or joints are beginning to deteriorate. On what sounded like a whim, she suggested I get a full-body bone scan. “Again, just to be sure,” she said. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  The Department of Nuclear Medicine is located on the second floor of New York Hospital. I was ushered into a crowded hallway and seated in front of a rolling table. A nurse stuck a needle into a vein in the back of my hand and injected what seemed like a Three Mile Island amount of radioactive tracers directly into my bloodstream. The sensation was chilling; I tasted a metallic backwash in my mouth. I was sent away for three hours and told to drink a lot and pee often.

  After lunch I was led into a large room filled with what looked like a giant, robotic daddy longlegs. Stripped of anything metallic, I was strapped to a narrow bench and wrapped in a blanket while the snout of the machine, a huge metal plate, was lowered to an inch and a half above my nose. A bone scan is basically the opposite of an X-ray. An X-ray projects radiation into your body and uses it to create an image; a bone scan draws out the radiation that has been injected into your body and uses it to create the image. An X-ray takes less than a second; a bone scan lasts longer than an hour.

  I was about thirty-five minutes into my scan, with the machine over my legs, when the technician suddenly popped out of his cockpit. “Did you have an accident involving your left leg recently?” he asked. I gulped. “I broke that femur when I was five,” I said, hopeful. He nodded, disappeared into the hall, and for the next twenty minutes proceeded to talk very animatedly with the other technicians, just outside the door, all within plain sight. Two technicians then rescanned my leg from several angles but refused to answer my increasingly anxious entreaties about what they might have seen. “You have to talk with the doctors tomorrow,” they said.

  Tomorrow was Saturday, and there was no doctor to talk to me. By the time Monday rolled around—two centuries later—I could barely function, but again my doctor seemed unconcerned. “It’s not like you have cancer,” she said. “But still,” she continued, “I’ve never seen anything like this. I think you should get an X-ray.” On Tuesday, after she examined the X-ray, her tone had shifted. “You have an abnormal growth in your leg,” she declared.

  “You mean a tumor?”

  “All abnormal growths are tumors,” she said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  But she ordered an MRI, and this time I didn’t wait around for the official reading. I couriered the films a few blocks away to a family friend, Beth, who’s an orthopedist. I paced York Avenue. Beth called just as the late-afternoon sun was shimmering off the surface of the East River. “I’ve looked at your scans,” she said. “I insisted the top radiologist in the hospital do the same. And we both agree.” Here she paused to choose the right language. “The growth in your leg is not consistent with a benign tumor.”

  I stopped walking. For a second I waited for the double negative to convert itself into a single, much more devastating negative. Not consistent with a benign tumor could mean only one thing. She waited for me to complete the thought.

  “I have cancer.”

  Then Beth was talking, and I was no longer listening. I needed to come to her office to get crutches. I needed to see this special surgeon she knew. I needed to call my wife.

  I couldn’t move. I s
at down on a stoop. It was just like that moment, nearly four decades earlier, when I lay on the warm pavement of Habersham Street, knowing I had just been hit by the hardest force I could imagine, but not knowing what was going to happen next. And to think the tumor was in the same leg, the same bone, the same spot in my body. It couldn’t be a coincidence. One thing, however, I already knew. I had spent my life dreaming, traveling, and walking.

  Now I might never walk again.

  .3.

  TWENTY FINGERS AND TWENTY TOES

  LIKE MANY YOUNG COUPLES, WE talked about having children. We dreamed. We feared. We picked out names. And we occasionally rolled our eyes at our mothers, who probed—not so subtly—about whether we had, er, news? One night my father-in-law, Alan, an attorney and elder sage around Boston, called rather late. No doubt his wife and high school sweetheart, Debbie, concerned that her thirty-something daughter had waited too late to get pregnant, was making one of her nightly trips to the Internet to hunt for frozen eggs or surrogate wombs, even though we had no reason to suspect we needed such things. “Are you busy?” Alan asked, more hopeful than concerned.

  “Hey, Linda!” I called. “Your father wants to know if we’re having sex.”