Wuck, you began with fatherhood: the Jones men face to face with the grail, forced to choose between fulfillment or each other—a fine dramatic moment to choose. It allowed me to see these professors from your past not just in artistic terms, but in familial ones. 

I can’t help but wonder what yearnings—or expectations—you inherited from your father early in life. 

Your father wasn’t an artist per se, but he must have recognized his son’s brilliance early on. Your relationship made an impression on me, at least, in ninth grade, when I was just getting to know you. I was struck by how your dad accompanied you and your science fair bid through regional and state rounds—the time, the travel—with a zeal I’d only witnessed in <quote-01>club-soccer parents<quote-01>. His involvement was intense. Was he the one who first encouraged you and your piano onto the stage at Word of Life? Considering your lonesome beginnings there, that first performance had to have been electric—like becoming real. <quote-07>Like being born—again<quote-07>. An experience to seek and recreate over and over. 

But, like a middle-aged Indiana shocked to hear his father tell him to let it go, might you also be seeking <quote-02>permission to let go of your grail-quest for artistic notoriety<quote-02>?  

I don’t want to pry, but you gave us the material at length, bro.

And you, Murph, your treatise on the honeymoon years of childhood is quintessentially you, <quote-03>like, the kind of stuff I would quote in a homily at your funeral<quote-03>. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so lazy with words like “fucked up.” Though I do think I’m aiming at that “clean up,” that “do better” sentiment you ended with. I mean, Abram’s not reading the stuff I write about any time soon. I’m not stepping on the wet cement of his current experience with these self-analyses. Rather, my office—my writing—it’s all a kind of antechamber where I can scrape off the gunk of my personal history, the psychological grime I’ve picked up, naming it in word documents like an endless ream of paper towels so that when I go inside, when I encounter his actual childhood and heart, I’m not thoughtlessly traipsing my shit, so to speak, into our new home.

You know, I don’t think I made this connection when we converted this old mud room into what is now my office.

I’m thinking now of how many cultures remove their shoes at the door. I respect this instinct. I used to cringe at religious purity codes, all the cleanliness standards in Leviticus and how they’re weaponized even now. I still cringe when it comes to policing who’s in and out, when it comes to lying about or sanitizing our humanity. But the act of removing one’s sandals in the presence of what is holy—like when I washed my hands before first holding baby Grammar with Uncle Pat by my side—is entirely good.

As is your furious defense of innocence: “Little ones deserve the best versions of us, their parents. The cement is setting forever right now. We should keep our goddamn careless footprints out of it.” But you’re right to note that your early childhood was somewhat rosy, Murph, given your parents’ love for each other before your dad died, the absence of fighting between them, and their adoring treatment of you. Hold on to that. 

So many childhoods—so many—were sadly not so. Adults hurt children—often. This is my profession, in a sense: uncovering these sadder stories from those that end up in society’s lockup dumpster. Because the men I meet aren’t quick to parade their childhoods as excuses. Rather, they do everything possible to avoid naming how they were tortured as kids. They often belabor what saints their mothers were and, other than admitting their poverty—readily naming they “didn’t really have shit like other families”—explicitly say they have “nobody to blame.” 

This is the dizzying common denominator in most of the wild lives I meet behind bars: the rollercoaster ups and downs of their stories nearly all erupted from significant childhood experiences of sheer terror. I’m embarrassed how long it took me to get this. 

Every man in prison was once a child no less holy—no less <quote-04>tender<quote-04>—than Abram or Grammar. 

Their caretakers, all wounded adults, stepped with carelessness and unclean fury in the wet cement of these children’s hearts. I’ve since become a cartographer of those hardened craters, a tracker of those awful footprints. So yes, I’m probably obsessive in my self-scrubbing, with each step vigorously careful in the presence of my own little boy whose toes aren’t even stinky yet. His terrible sweetness and unguarded goodness sends me back to the mudroom regularly.

Even this morning, I’m here wiping my cheeks as I write these sentences. 

An hour ago in the living room, on my way to my desk, Abram and I crossed plastic swords as Captain Hook and Peter Pan. And just now, on a quick coffee-refill trip to the kitchen, I asked him if he wanted to take our kayaks to “Never Never Land” later this afternoon. He jumped up in his pajamas, knees-to chest, cheering, “Yes! Yes! Yes, Daddy! SANK YOU, Daddy!” and began telling me everything we’d do, eyes unblinking: “Daddy! I wear the blue life jacket, Daddy wear the green life jacket, and Mama wear the red life jacket . . .” and so on. His sweet and sheer excitement absolutely floors me.

With moments like this one still fresh in my mind, how can I not hurt for the countless men I meet in red scrubs or khaki pants and white t-shirts, those who didn’t have fathers to play with them, whose happiness was already being hammered out of them at Abram’s age? 

Let me tell you about a man who came home from prison this week, Junior Morales. 

Junior has dark X’s tattooed over his eyes, like a dead cartoon character. His street name was Bonkers. Because of the five years he spent in a protective-custody prison with a dedicated mental health professional and group therapy, he is recovering with stunning eagerness a language to actually speak about his childhood. So far, I’ve learned that he and his brother Reggie—known as ”Smiles” on the streets of Mount Vernon—grew up in Southern California, where their heroin addict mother regularly turned tricks for drugs. These two brothers watched as different men “beat the brakes off” their frail mother, beatings she’d pass along in drunken rages the next day, calling the boys terrible things, whipping them with electrical cords. Sometimes her boyfriends or pimps would sneak into the boys’ bedrooms and molest them, as well, always with whispered threats of worse violence. 

I’d heard some of these same stories before from Reggie—when he was at maximum-security Clallam Bay Corrections Center way out on the Olympic Peninsula. Their mother had died while he was locked up there, and he couldn’t say goodbye. He clearly hadn’t had a place to talk about his mom, either her life or her death. So when I asked him to tell me about his mother and these stories spilled out of his mouth, I saw a new despair come over him: he could no longer gather this stuff into the old narrative of his saintly mother, the flimsy fiction he’d needed all these years to feel human and loved. He was so ashamed and undone in my presence—sweating and shaky as the guard escorted him back down the hall—that he didn’t write or call for nearly two years afterwards.

Junior, however, found an environment in which to tell these stories without shame. He was released just days before the lockdown hit the state, making his reentry to the normal world anything but. We’ve videochatted from his halfway house every day this week. He calls just to say hi, just to tell me how grateful he is to be alive. Yesterday we talked about his recovery from addiction, how he understands his mother’s struggles and forgives her for throwing pots and pans at him as a boy, for telling him he was a nasty piece of shit. “I know what drugs can do to a mind,” he says with authentic calm. 

Junior has a team of retired folks from a local Presbyterian church who take him to appointments and video chat with him. Just before the lockdown put us all on house arrest, one widow was taking him to the humane society once a week to volunteer. They’d take the dogs from their cages and walk them through the surrounding woods together. Anyway, yesterday this support group had its first Zoom meeting.  To be honest, I was dreading it. I thought it might be awkward—normally we’d all be in someone’s backyard or in the church fellowship hall or at a restaurant. But it was poetry, all of it.

From our individual spots in the Brady Bunch grid of nine faces, we talked about the  lockdown: how we felt alienated from the outside world, how we missed celebrating milestones with family and friends, how we feared our aging parents might die alone—challenges inmates regularly face but now accessible to every American at home by law. For whatever reason, the conversation then turned toward pop music, and an elderly lady quoted, of all people, Missy Elliott. Junior, however, didn’t take the bait, insisting he was an “oldies” guy. Then another retiree who adores Junior asked, “Oldies? Does that mean music from the nineties, for you?” We all laughed. “No,” Junior said, <quote-05>“more like Smokey Robinson and Sam Cooke and the songs that take me back to my mom dancing in the kitchen with us.”<quote-05> I felt like crying. I was the only other person in the Zoom who knew what else had transpired in that kitchen. And yet this happy memory persists. It won’t be taken from him. In fact, this one golden memory may have even become the emotional foundation on which he builds new and loving relationships. His square inch of unmarred cement

I should stop now, especially if I plan to make good on my promise to take Abram to Hope Island this afternoon. He’ll want to play swords as soon as our kayak scrapes up onto the rocky shores of our own personal Neverland. I’m both delighted and careful. We’ll take turns smacking each other’s fingers and kissing them better.

All of this and I almost forgot to tell you both the one thing I’d planned on sharing this morning:

<quote-06>Rachel is pregnant<quote-06>.