"Dad, Is It Ever Discouraging?"

On work that has gone fallow, and being a small part of a large design

Children home from college for the summer is a beautifully strange thing, because when they first leave, when they pack up the car and drive off to this new life that doesn’t involve you, they become something new. It’s terrifying and necessary and intriguing, this parting of ways, this diminishing and shifting of roles.

I watched my cousins with their babies at our family reunion last weekend, and it was so foreign and long ago, the utter dependency of those little ones. The way their parents had to follow them around and make sure. The physical connection.

Now that they’re older and back home, it’s almost the opposite: we bump into each other, wriggling around like two butterflies sharing a cocoon. We step on toes. They are young adults with a taste of freedom, but who still need to help with the dishes, mow the lawn, help clean up after the littles.

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I exhale after a long, long day and grab the book I’m reading (The Overstory), clutching it like a hidden gem. I make a cup of tea and turn on the lamp in the corner and read the most beautiful lines.

Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

My oldest son wanders in, sits in the opposite sofa, relishing the thought of his first day off of work in over a week. He asks what I’m reading. We start in by listing our favorite Pulitzers, look up the complete list, then discuss our favorite McCarthy, then our favorite Steinbeck. We list all the Hemingways we can and look on my phone to see if we know them all. He’s finishing Tana French’s The Witch Elm—I insist he read The Goldfinch next.

Without me bringing it up, he asks which of my books I enjoyed writing the most. He says his favorite is These Nameless Things. He asks if there’s any money in it, in the fiction writing I do simply because I love it. I chuckle and say, not that much but some, if I can get an advance. I guess there’s some money in it then. But I list off the novels I’ve completed, or half completed, that haven’t harvested any greenbacks yet, the ones lying dormant: one and a half murder mysteries; a novel about Susan Pevensie grown old; a novel about Jesus’ father Joseph.

We sit there in the summer quiet, the younger kids loud and chirpy in the next room. Outside, a lone firework explodes in the humid air and our dog comes inside, heads for the basement.

“Dad,” my oldest son asks me. “Is it ever discouraging, knowing you’ve written so much that hasn’t gone out into the world?”

You miss the half of it and more. There’s always as much below ground as above.

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Friday morning. I drive into the city and park in the parking garage and drop off my bag at the store. I walk up the street and get a breakfast sandwich, an iced coffee. I come back and put the sign outside on the sidewalk, place some mail orders for folks who have emailed us, straighten the shelves.

Whimsical classical music plays in the background. Someone comes in and buys a book. And another customer. And another. Stories going out into the world.

I think of the book I’m reading, The Overstory, and of my little life up against the centuries lived by trees. My few years. I think of what I’ve written, how our children will add to the world, how this little bookstore is becoming a place for people.

How can I ever completely understand the part I’m playing?

. . . Redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize.

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Italicized quotes are from the book, The Overstory by Richard Powers.

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