You’ll be a man, my son

Ethan Gunnels turns 21 today, and I’ve been wondering for some time now how to mark appropriately the occasion of my son’s official entry into adulthood.

My first instinct, of course, is to burst into tears and curl into a fetal ball.

But that would be a disservice to the splendid young man he has become and to the adventures he yearns with quickening pulse to commence.

Ethan always has possessed an independent mind and a contrarian spirit. He’s not a joiner, not a follower, not a hanger-on. He charts his own course and steps boldly to the beat of his own drum.

He is on schedule to graduate from UNT in December, a semester early. He’s eager to get on with his life and whatever it holds. He’s a bit vague about his plans. He talks about getting a job tending bar in a ski resort or going to New York to make films or a dozen other ideas that flit through his mind as he waits for the future to come into sharper focus.

I’ve resisted the impulse to lecture him about starting a career, exploring opportunities and making responsible decisions – all the nonsense fathers are expected to offer their sons at this pivotal moment in their lives.

I just can’t bring myself to do it. If I’ve learned one thing after more than 40 years of toil in the marketplace, it’s that 21 is too young to abandon your dreams, yoke yourself to a lifetime of responsibilities and toe the line society demands of promising young men with sharp minds and courageous hearts.

Ethan wouldn’t listen anyway, bless him. He’d endure my droning for a while, looking distracted and uncomfortable, and then, at the earliest opportunity, slip quickly away.

Improbably, he’s found himself at UNT. That should be the function of a college education but often isn’t. Instead, college has become the place where society prepares the next crop of innocents for the commercial maw.

His mother and I sent Ethan to Denton with some trepidation, worried he might sink like some Southlake kids into a dazed muddle of partying, dope-smoking and beer-guzzling. He dabbled in some of that – honestly now, what college kid hasn’t? But he shocked both of us last year by making the Dean’s List, deciding on a history major and sacrificing party-going and girl-chasing for a part-time job.

I don’t worry so much about him anymore, at least no more than the normal father, mindful of his own feckless youth and the inevitability of the gene pool.

To be kind, he was a lackluster student at Southlake Carroll High School, where he maintained a gentleman’s C while nurturing a barely concealed contempt for the privilege and glitter around him.

Ethan mostly hung out with Carroll’s more bohemian crowd, offering bitter, often cogent commentary about life in the “Southlake Bubble.” But he remained his own man, maintaining friendships he’d formed in childhood among Carroll’s “cool kids,” including members of its heralded football team.

Once upon a time, he’d been one of them. As a child, Ethan sampled all the sports – soccer, Little League, inline hockey, basketball and the rest. It was only when he showed up on his first flag football field that he found his place. From that moment, he embraced football and played flag and then tackle with a passion and determination that brought tears to my eyes more than once.

I loved every minute he played. And he loved it, too, until a concussion in the 8^th grade, and the medical complications that followed, eventually robbed him of his passion for the game.

So he switched to the rough-and-tumble sport of lacrosse, drawn I suspect to its violence and physicality. That’s when I learned just how tough my quiet, brooding young son really was.

I had hints before that, of course. In the 6th grade, during his last year in peewee football, I arrived at practice one night to see him coming off the field, holding his right arm, his pale face tight with pain.

“It hurt real bad, Dad, but I didn’t cry,” he told me through clinched teeth. He was out three weeks with a hairline wrist fracture, but he returned to his team wearing a Dragon-green cast and played the rest of the season. The refs made him encase his cast in bubble wrap, lest he use it as a club. At season’s end, the Senior Green Dragons won the Dragon Youth Football championship, and Ethan was a big part of it.

In lacrosse, my son, new to the game, lacked the net-handling skills of his teammates, most of whom had played the sport since grade school. But Ethan showed the fearlessness and aggressiveness needed to play goalie. So that’s where he lined up, with only light pads and an oversized netted stick to protect him from the hard rubber balls being hurled his way from every direction.

Southlake Carroll, a premier football school, had a so-so lacrosse program. After one lopsided JV game (22-3) with lacrosse powerhouse Episcopal School of Dallas, I met Ethan coming off the field. He had played a full half in the box, no match for ESD’s swarming attackers.

“Tough game,” I said. “You must have felt like you were in a shooting gallery.”

“Yeah, they were throwing the ball pretty hard,” he admitted, lifting his uniform shorts to reveal a mass of black, blue and green bruises covering the inside of both thighs. “They usually don’t turn this color for a couple of days!”

He’ll need some of that toughness as he travels along life’s road. But Ethan will manage. Turns out, he’s got a good head on his shoulders. I’d like to think I have something to do with that, but it’s probably as much my wife’s contribution as mine.

From me, he gets a low tolerance for ineptitude, malfeasance and mendacity and a generally low opinion of his fellow man. I’m not proud that I’ve made my son a cynic, and I fear that legacy will cause him more pain than joy. But alas, it is what it is.

Around his mother and me, Ethan mostly is reserved, even somber. If he has a silly side, and I devoutly hope he does, he saves it for his friends and, on rare occasions, for his sister. Rachel delights in calling herself the “Perfect Child” in her brother’s presence, and he generally regards her with irritable distain, except for when he seeks out her advice on girls and other topics he judges too sensitive for his so-square parents.

He and his mother share a special bond. He came after two miscarriages, and Marice always has considered Ethan to be her miracle baby, special beyond compare to a mom who has only sisters and whose closest cousins are female, too.

She understands him better than I do, and she has endless patience for her youngest child, even when he displays appalling judgment and engages in questionable decision-making. Her baby can do no wrong.

I look at my son and often wonder what’s going on behind those guarded brown eyes. I don’t worry about his character. He’s a good person with a kind and giving heart, and he keeps his commitments. Even as a child, he felt compelled to defend weaker kids from schoolyard bullies. He didn’t have to be taught that. The instinct to protect the victimized and confront their tormentors always has been strong.

But I’m not sure I completely understand him. And perhaps he doesn’t fully understand himself. God knows I was a cipher at his age – to my parents, many of my friends and myself.

I came late to parenthood, goaded into it by my patient and loving wife. But I have never enjoyed anything more than being the father of Rachel and Ethan. I’ve watched, with a mixture of soaring joy and profound sadness, as they successfully negotiated the transition from child to grownup.

Family and friends know I’m a sentimental man. I still cling to memories of when my children looked to me for security and guidance, when I stood much taller in their lives than I do now.

 So I still cherish the nightly ritual my son and I perform on the rare nights when we sleep under the same roof. It’s one we’ve shared since he was 3.

 “Good night, Son. Love you.”

“Good night, Dad. Love you, too. Don’t let the bed bugs bite!”