I enjoy his company, he shares my delight in bad jokes and word play. We joke a lot, sometimes so as not to talk about heavy stuff, mostly for the fun of it. Christmas day My son dives too deeply into the pool and suddenly he's standing in the water, looking at me with a frightening intensity. He's hit his head, hard, on the concrete bottom. As I rush to hold him a thought skitters across my mind that there are other fathers watching and they'll think we're wimps if I hold and comfort my boy.
Conditioning dies hard.
I hold his shaking body close as he gulps great sobs. It's the first time I've seen him cry in years. Conditioning dies hard. Another boy runs past us, trips on a tree root and lands Y-shaped on his hands, face and front in the hard dirt. A though skitters across my mind, admiring him.