When you were eleven
and shy and shuffled your feet
from classroom to classroom
in that middle school, eyes downcast,
avoiding bullies like a midge fly
zipping away from the hungry maws of
rainbow trout lurking in
a mountain stream,
your father sat you down
at the dinner table on a cold Monday
night, over a steaming plate
of meatloaf and a baked
potato and some type of microwaved
canned vegetable
(the same meal that he served
every Monday night),
and he lectured you about the
importance of direct eye contact,
always making
direct eye contact,
while he held the fork in his left hand
and pointed it at you,
its tines coated
in starches and ketchup,
like he was jamming
his index finger straight into your forehead.
“Never look away when someone is
staring at you,” he said. “It
shows that you are afraid. It
shows that you are weaker than they are.”
Then, to make his point, he held his
eye contact—an aggressive, primal stare—
with you, an introverted child,
for as long as he could,
knowing that it would hurt you,
that it would make you wince and cringe,
but hoping that it would strengthen you,
solidify some resolve deep
within you, foster the germination
of some thorny plant there
beneath your sternum, which
over time would grow into
a gnarled cuirass designed to
protect you against the world
and make you into a Man—a true Man’s Man,
the kind of Man who uses his hairy
knuckles to smash his problems—the kind
of Man who eats red meat and drives
a truck, and never backs down
from a ******* contest, even with
an introverted eleven-year-old boy,
and so on, and so forth. Of course,
no such hardness ever germinated
within you, and whatever bond it was
that existed between you
and your father there beneath
your sternum simply frayed
in that moment—a sacred rope
spanning generations
suddenly transmuted into dust.
And of course
you looked away ashamed,
and your father was ashamed, too,
not for his own abhorrent behavior,
but because you were his child.
But he was also proud of himself
in that moment for showing
what a Man he was now,
for finally having proved his own father,
your grandfather,
wrong,
even after all of those years had passed.
