An Uncomplicated Life Read online

  Kelly saw that we cut his sister no slack. He recognized how she worshipped him and never doubted him. Love is love. Even for a teenager in full rebellion, it’s hard to resist Jillian, especially if you know her more than a little. Kelly knew her a lot.

  “I always loved Jillian,” he said.

  As for loving his parents . . . it was more from afar.

  When he was 17 years old, Kelly moved his room into the basement. He spent most of his time down there. I’d get up at 3:00 a.m. for a drink of water, and the light would be on. Kelly stayed awake for days at a time, playing guitar and video games. At one point in high school, he wrote the word “LOST” on the wall of the basement.

  “Why’d you do that?” I asked.

  “It was part of a quote. From Chaucer.”

  “Chaucer?” My kid’s quoting Chaucer?

  “Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale,” he said. “Lost money is not lost beyond recall. But loss of time brings on the loss of all.”

  Well, all right then.

  “Do you feel lost?” I wondered, obliviously.

  “No,” Kelly said. “I’m broke.”

  But the thought gnawed at me: What to do with a lost son? With Jillian, it was easy: The Coffee Song, the walks to the bus, the immutable fact that I was Dad, and little girls love their dads. With Kelly, it was elusive, like eating soup with a fork.

  Kerry came up with the answer. And like lots of answers involving your teenaged kid, there was a little desperation attached. We decided to spend our last dollar on a lottery ticket. What the hell.

  We’d take a trip.

  Kelly was 14 years old the first time I took him to Montreat, North Carolina. Montreat is a Presbyterian retreat about 15 miles east of Asheville. It’s God’s country. Literally. The Rev. Billy Graham has lived there for at least half a century.

  By the time I was 40 years old, I’d been going to Montreat on and off for 35 years. I’m not especially religious. But certain places affect us all in certain ways. Montreat blessed me with a spiritual peace I’d never found anywhere else. I felt I belonged there. It’s hard to articulate that feeling. You just know it when you’re in it.

  Montreat progresses in geologic time. It changes about as obviously as the needles on a hemlock. I needed its constancy. I first went there with my birth mother. Then I went there the summer after she died with my grandparents, her parents, to grieve. The protective shoulders of the mountains afforded a place for my sad head. I tried to make it back every summer.

  I’d lost touch with Montreat for several years, though. We’d lived in Dallas and New York, too far by car. When we moved to Cincinnati in 1988, the partnership resumed. Montreat was 400 miles by interstate. I started taking a few days there alone, to wander and ponder. Kelly came by his introspection genetically.

  Kerry suggested I take him along. I hesitated.

  “That’s my time,” I said. Still selfish, after all those years.

  “Make time for your son.”

  The first few years, we didn’t speak much. Neither of us enjoys lots of conversation anyway. The teen years were starting to take full effect. He really didn’t have a lot he wanted to communicate with me. It was a six-hour drive, and we spent three nights in a bed and breakfast. We might have said 30 words.

  We did what I liked because I wasn’t worried about what he liked. We hiked Lookout Mountain in Montreat. We followed the ancient spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains to Craggy Gardens, where we carved our initials into the beam of a shelter, originally built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1934. We hiked down to the 100-foot sheer plume of Crabtree Falls. We visited Graveyard Fields, a mile-high meadow named for the stumps of trees felled by hurricane winds early in the last century. The tree stumps resembled headstones.

  I told Kelly to watch out for bears, and that the blueberries along the trail were suitable for eating.

  None of it seemed to interest him.

  After two summers, I decided I’d had enough. It was awkward, I wasn’t enjoying it. Kelly didn’t seem to be either.

  “I think I’m going alone next year,” I told Kerry upon our return.

  “Why?”

  “Because we don’t talk, and I’m tired of wondering if he has a good time.”

  “He loves going with you,” Kerry said.

  “What?”

  “He has told me the last two years what a great time he has had.”

  I was stunned. I’d never heard a word. By the end of year two’s trip, I’d assumed Kelly was going along to humor me. I had no idea.

  That was Kelly. Rather, Kelly and me. Why do fathers and sons sometimes have such a hard time communicating? I could talk to Jillian all day. Kelly and I communicated in grunts.

  “He has never said a thing to me about it,” I told Kerry.

  “Why don’t you ask him?” she said.

  Okay.

  “Do you like going to Montreat?”

  Yeah, Kelly said. He did. “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why don’t you say anything?”

  “I dunno.”

  “You want to go back next year?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think we might actually, you know, talk?”

  Haha. “Maybe,” Kelly said.

  We kept going back. It got a little better each year. He got a little better each year. I’d lucked into a common love. I’d found a kindred spirit. I wasn’t about to let it go. I’d find my kid again, one hike at a time.

  We’d do the same things every visit. As we crossed the state lines from Tennessee to North Carolina on Interstate 40, I’d play the Van Morrison tune “Alan Watts’ Blues.” Morrison’s mystical, wandering side comes through in this tune when he sings of finding solitude atop a mountain. “Cloud hidden,” he calls it.

  We’d head into Asheville at night to eat and wander the downtown streets. Over the past decade, Asheville has reinvented itself as a cultural mecca for young and creative people. Kelly enjoyed the hippie-esque vibe.

  He’d still go silent occasionally. He’d leave the room at 11:00 p.m., to talk to his girlfriend for an hour on the phone. He’d also spend an hour talking with me. He even started listening to the Rolling Stones.

  “Best Stones album,” Kelly offered a few Augusts ago as we meandered down some half-forgotten North Carolina trail, 5,000 feet above the everyday. He had to be 24 years old by then. He was going to be a senior at Ohio State. He was majoring in English, making good grades. He’d met a girl and fallen in love.

  “Exile,” I said. Exile On Main Street was recorded in 1972, at a chateau in the south of France, where the Stones had fled to escape the high taxes of merry old England.

  Kelly agreed, though he suggested Beggars Banquet was a close second.

  “Not even in the photo,” I said. “Exile, Let It Bleed. Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out. Sticky Fingers. Then, maybe Beggars.”

  I stopped for a second then, to ponder the wonder and irony of that conversation. A decade earlier, I’d played “Gimme Shelter” to Kelly’s indifference. Now, we were debating Stones’ albums as if we were critics.

  We’d made a connection.

  The cure for our ills was time and patience. Kelly and I will never be peers. But we have become friends. The tug-of-wills that defined our relationship when he was younger has abated. I enjoy him. I believe he feels likewise.

  I have no idea if Kelly’s rough seasons came in part from the necessary attention we paid his sister. He has said no. He was just being a teenaged boy. It doesn’t much matter now. Now, we can see Jillian’s good effect on him. And, maybe, our effect, too.

  Kelly and I have been to Montreat every summer for the past 14 years, half of Kelly’s life, willingly, as Van Morrison would put it, cloud-hidden. He emerged from the dismal swamp of high school, hardly worse for wear. He frayed Kerry and me some, but that was part of the parental deal. Kelly grew to be the person we’d hoped. I’d like to think that Montreat helped, that somewhere among those magical
peaks, whereabouts unknown, my son and I found the adhesive of our lives, and it made a difference.

  I will go to Montreat with him as long as I am able, and whenever he is available. I rue the summer when life decides we’ve had enough. Kelly sees Montreat now as I always have. It is my best gift to him.

  My hope is that when I’m done, Montreat will remain an heirloom. Kelly will take his son there. Maybe their relationship will be cantankerous for a while. Maybe Kelly will see his son’s silence as disapproval, when all it is is a coming of age.

  Maybe he’ll think of abandoning the project. A wiser head will discourage that. He’ll keep going, with his son, up the trail leading to the heath bald of Craggy Gardens, half in the clouds. They’ll go to that place where in June, the Catawba rhododendrons bloom in bursts of red, like a five-alarm fire.

  “This is where Grandpa and I used to come,” he’ll say. Maybe he’ll point to the pair of initials cut into that great beam of wood in the shelter. KD. PD.

  Kelly will nod then and catch the lump in his throat. He’ll know how I felt, all those years ago. Just wanting a conversation.

  Kelly and I groped for a long time because groping is often what fathers and sons do. That would have been true, regardless.

  Ultimately, with time, patience and time spent cloud-hidden, Kelly became the man we knew he could be.

  CHAPTER 17

  An Appropriate Education

  Any parent who has a child that’s different

  has a right to be irrational.

  —BUZZ BISSINGER

  Jillian arrived at Loveland High School an excited and enthusiastic freshman. As she had with previous milestones, Jillian reminded me that she wasn’t my little girl anymore. “Your little girl is growing up,” she’d say.

  “You could be Father Time and you’d still be my little girl,” said I.

  School buildings changed, but Jillian’s academic issues did not. Her biggest struggle was reading. Jillian struggled in ninth grade with the same words she tripped over in sixth grade. That indicated two possibilities:

  Jillian had maxed out her reading potential.

  Her teachers weren’t doing all they could.

  Teachers said Jillian worked hard. The summaries of her test results always came with qualifiers. Jillian is “actively involved.” Her “focus and attention” rarely stray. She “wants to do well and seems always to do her best.” However, Jillian “struggles with the main idea and struggles with concrete and abstract questions.” Jillian “struggles with summaries.” In general, Jillian works hard but struggles to comprehend anything. She reads words. She doesn’t know what they mean.

  Kerry and I were not convinced Jillian could become a better reader, but we were determined to do everything we could to give her a chance. What we wanted cost thousands of dollars a year for private, individual instruction. The law clearly says that if a school cannot provide an in-house service that a student requires, the school is obligated to pay for that service elsewhere.

  When Jillian was a freshman, Ellen Mavriplis suggested we enroll her in a specialized program at a local reading center, where Jillian would get one-on-one training for two hours a day. The high school simply couldn’t provide that.

  The Langsford Learning Acceleration Center claimed to have “proven results teaching phonemic awareness, phonics, reading, spelling and comprehension, using specialized, research-proven approaches.” Ellen convinced us of the effectiveness of Langsford. Ryan had already been going there for two years.

  We said okay. Then we looked at the cost and flinched. The going rate at the Langsford Center was $65 an hour: Ten hours a week, for roughly 30 weeks. Thirty weeks, at $650 a week. Even a sportswriter knew that math: $19,500 a school year, not including the summer session.

  Our gulps must have been audible. “You’re entitled to this,” Ellen said.

  We might have been. The school system was not going to rubber-stamp it. The district superintendent at the time, Kevin Boys, claimed that each special-needs student cost a school district three times more to educate than a typical student. Meantime, Boys said, the federal government was bearing only 28 percent of the cost.

  That gave Kerry and me pause, even as we fought for the money. Boys’s job was to spend tax money efficiently. Spending thousands of extra dollars on one student was inefficient. No matter what the law said.

  There were times when I agreed with Boys. I thought we were selfish. What makes our child so special? I believed we were somewhat hypocritical. We wanted Jillian entirely included in regular classrooms and treated the same as her peers. And yet, we demanded that her disability be given special dispensation because that was the law.

  Who were we to have it both ways?

  I was ambivalent as we went to the IEP meetings and asked for more. By the time Jillian entered high school, Ellen had become our advocate and participated fully in the meetings. Blunt, candid and wise to the fine points of the law, Ellen was a formidable presence on our side of the table.

  We even brought Jillian to a meeting. We wanted her to experience fighting for herself. We wanted her to articulate what she wanted from her high school experience. We coached her a little the night before the meeting.

  “You need to tell them you are your own advocate,” Kerry said. “You want to graduate from high school and go to college. You want to be a preschool teacher and get married to your boyfriend and have your own apartment.”

  At the meeting, Jillian was pitch-perfect. “I am my own a’vocate,” she said. “I love high school, but I’m growing up. I’m not my dad’s little girl anymore. I’m looking forward to college, and the rest of my life. I want my own ’partment.”

  When Jillian finished, the special-education director resumed debating the reading program. It was as if Jillian hadn’t been there. We thought Jillian’s presence might have had an impact. It didn’t.

  The district agreed to adopt the reading program Jillian’s freshman year, with the condition it be taught at school, by someone already employed by the district. They’d pay to send a teacher to a conference to learn the program. They would not pay for the Langsford Center. We compromised and hoped for the best.

  That year was not successful. The special-education teacher charged with helping Jillian had minimal training. Her workload didn’t allow for the two hours daily that was required. At the outset of Jillian’s sophomore year, we asked again that she attend the Langsford Center.

  The district people agreed, but only after we filed a due process claim against the district that it would almost certainly lose. Jillian went to Langsford her sophomore year. Her junior year, we fought to have her continue there. And so on.

  As a gesture of goodwill, Kerry and I even agreed that when we felt Jillian’s progress had leveled off, we would recommend that she no longer needed to attend Langsford. School officials took issue with the progress Jillian had made while enrolled at Langsford. Everyone came to the IEPs Jillian’s junior year armed with statistics. Ellen brought test results from Langsford. All these percentiles, represented by clean, easy-to-read bar graphs, accompanied by technical headings. Manipulating Syllables. Auditory Conceptualization Test. Big words for simple tasks.

  “I just don’t see it,” the district’s special-ed director said.

  “It’s right there,” Ellen said. On that bar graph. Et cetera. As the parent at this juncture, you feel like leaving your skin. I should have brought the Meyerowitz photograph to wish myself into.

  The district had its own numbers. They indicated that Jillian was not benefiting from the extra work.

  Jillian’s “intervention specialist” at school has written an “IEP Progress Report.” In one neatly arranged column, it lists “Goal/Objective.” In the next are the dates during which Jillian strived to meet that Goal/Objective, and how she did. Here is one of six Goal/Objectives in the progress report:

  Jillian will develop independent reading skills with increased vocabulary, word recognition, fluency, and ut
ilize effective strategies for comprehension.

  Here’s the comment regarding her advancement:

  Making adequate progress.

  Oh. Compared to what? All six of Jillian’s Goal/Objectives included that phrase.

  Utilize effective strategies for comprehension. What does that mean? What are the strategies? How do we know they’re effective?

  Jillian seems to enjoy writing was another assessment. Well, great. Is she making adequate progress in her enjoyment? If so, well, so what?

  The Langsford conclusions were more detailed. They sounded more considered. They were also self-serving: “We recommend that Jillian continue to receive one-to-one, intensive sessions . . .”

  That’s because, as the Langsford people suggest, “One-to-one sessions are important because these programs are retraining Jillian’s brain. Jillian needs the freedom to work at her own pace. Group instruction would not allow this flexibility.”

  And finally: “We recommend Jillian receive a minimum of 200 to 240 hours of sessions before evaluating her again to determine progress and make [a] decision about her next phase of treatment.”

  Two hundred and forty hours? What is Jillian’s “next phase”? Reading Ulysses over a long weekend?

  It was during times such as this, an hour deep into the IEP morass, that I allowed myself to wonder: What if the school district people are right? What if the school people are the ones making sense here? Are we pushing it?

  Maybe Jillian has maxed out. She is a junior. She has been attending sessions at Langsford for more than two years. The Langsford bar graphs show decided improvement. The school’s numbers say just the opposite. We read with Jillian at home, and we’re not sure what to think. Is she comprehending more and better? She’s reading more words correctly. Does she understand their meanings? Is she establishing a base that will allow her to grasp the nuances and distinctions inherent in anything she reads that doesn’t feature pictures?