Papa, PhD: Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy

Hair-Raising Experiences

Nineteen ninety-seven was the year that my son, Garland, and I came into a new life at the same time. He emerged from the warmth of his mother’s womb, while I came out of a similar level of comfort as I moved from faculty to administration. Neither of us asked for what we got, and neither of us understood what we were getting ourselves into. Wide-eyed, we would both enter this new world screaming, knowing that the relative ease of the recent past was gone. It struck me that I was given identical advice for my move to administration and for my transition to fatherhood. My advisors, an unlikely pair, were the provost at the college and my shirtless middleaged neighbor, who never tired of giving me his version of how to be a good father (spank ’em harder). Although they couldn’t have been more di¤erent , their words were uncannily the same. The advice started with the provost. Upon assuming the head of the honors program at the liberal arts college where I taught, he called me in to o¤er his wisdom. “John,” he intoned, his left leg bouncing wildly, “taking on administrative responsibilities doesn’t mean that you are abandoning your calling as an educator. In fact, it means that you have merely gone from selling education retail to selling it wholesale.” I wasn’t at all certain what the hell he meant, but I nodded with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. I agreed with the same level of feigned understanding as I did when the doctor explained why my newborn son, whose complexion had turned a deep shade of orange, needed to spend the night under a big heat lamp. “You will be faced with many diªcult choices, and you may wind up o¤ending some of your colleagues.” This sounded ominous. “You will have to make decisions the likes of which will have a lifelong impact on people, and that is sometimes a heady responsibility. You will need to exercise your power with humility.” How else would power be exercised as the honors director at a small liberal arts college in Appalachia? Try as I might, Hair-Raising Experiences j o hn w. wells 34 01 Part 1_Manu 7/1/2010 5:29 PM Page 34 Hair-Raising Experiences 35 I couldn’t imagine myself as a kind of midlevel college-manager version of Idi Amin. The “welcome to the big leagues” lecture ended with the provost smiling broadly. He pumped my hand and gave me the good-natured warning , “Get ready for some hair-raising experiences.” I was sweating when I left his oªce. Only days later, my wife and I brought our son home from the hospital . Our neighbor was a Vietnam War veteran. I couldn’t understand why a man with a stomach that large had decided that shirts just weren’t for him. Perhaps it had something to do with how hot that jungle got back there in ’Nam. Maybe it was because the workers now manufacturing the cheap shirts capable of masking such alarming girth were the sons of the people he had fought in Southeast Asia. Maybe it was because it bugged his wife. We were careful as we took the bassinet out of the car. Our son was home, and we couldn’t wait to introduce him to the room we had prepared for his arrival. “Hey there!” bellowed the shirtless one. This was the same man who had rearranged our garage without asking, who had planted trees in our backyard because “we needed ’em,” and for reasons known but to God would capture raccoons in homemade traps. He was getting up from his seat on the porch. “Whatcha got there in the basket?” I didn’t want this to be my son’s first visual of the neighborhood, but there was no clear path to the top of the stairs. Shirtless stood over the basket. He attempted a baby-cooing sound that resonated more like a marine grunt (Slash and burn, boys, slash and burn. Charlie’s around here somewhere). “Great baby,” he finally muttered and turned to walk back to his yard. I thanked him and moved quickly toward the door. As if to demonstrate that his life, too, o¤ered exciting novelty, he announced that he and his wife were the proud new owners of a jerky machine and we were welcome to some of the homemade...