Skip to content

Log Out

×

Good Letters

20100401-a-sense-of-the-stakes-by-david-griffithWhen I was in my twenties, my greatest regret was never having learned to play the piano, so much so that when merely walking by a piano I was overcome with a sense of anxiety and frustration. The sight of those eighty-eight keys was like catching just a glimpse of the ocean between buildings from a fast-moving car.

Since the birth of our daughter four years ago, walking past my laptop computer has come to embody a similar sense of anxiety and frustration. I think of all the times—wait, I am interrupted here by my daughter who has wandered out into the living room on the pretense of having to go to the bathroom—I think of all the times that I have wanted so desperately to be at the keyboard writing but instead and am with my daughter.

I feel like such a creep writing this, but then again there are also moments when being with her and caring for her brings unexpected insight and vision. For example, one night sitting on the edge of my daughter’s bed reading to her, I noticed through the curtains a flashing and flickering light. We live at a bend in the road, so at first I thought it was just the headlights of car making the sharp turn past our house, but then it happened a few more times, a flashing and flickering beyond the shade. It was spooky, like something out of a David Lynch film, a trope that foreshadows the entrance of the sinister.

By this time my daughter was asleep, so I left the room and opened the front door of the house to find that the source of the flickering and flashing was the porch light burning out again—the second time in a week. As I stood there on the porch staring dumbly at that light, flicking the light switch on and off, I suddenly remembered a cognate moment: Pittsburgh, 2004, staring up at a flickering street lamp dressed as Captain Kirk waiting for my ride to a Halloween party.

That was six years ago. I was newly married. We hosted weekly parties at our little row house, and spent our disposable income on books, music, coffee, and good beer. My responsibilities were relatively few.

So much has changed since then.

A few weeks after this porch light incident, out that same window, I noticed tracks running through the snow in our front yard. I went to another window that looked out onto the side yard and noticed more tracks—they were big, almost human-sized.

I put on my boots and went out into the backyard and found that the tracks came in through our back gate, seemed to pause right outside the window of our master bedroom, skirted around the heat pump, then around the corner of the house where some old lattice work leans, and into our front yard by my daughter’s window.

The tracks continued across the entire front of the house to a corner of the yard where the house meets the wooden fence. Here, one fence board was dislodged and hanging askew and the one directly below it was broken clean through, as though karate-kicked in half. On the other side of the fence there was a large imprint in the snow where something big and heavy seemed to have fallen, struggled to get up, and then ran away down the road.

There are a lot of deer on the college campus where we live. It’s not unusual to see a dozen or more grazing in broad daylight out in the open. There had been a lot of snow, making food scarce, so I hypothesized that a deer looking for food had come in the back gate in search of food and then couldn’t find its way out, saw the gap in the fence and tried to crawl under it but got stuck.Then, I imagined the panicked deer began to flail with its powerful legs, breaking the fence board clean in two.

But the more I looked at the tracks, the more they seemed human. I put my feet inside the tracks and followed them along the side of the house and into the front yard; the prints were a little bigger than my size 11 boots, and I had to take big, unnatural strides to match the gait of the tracks. When I went inside, I looked on the internet for websites devoted to animal tracks, but none of the pictures I found depicted what I was seeing in the snow outside our house.

That morning I called a colleague of mine, a poet, who owns guns and asked him how hard it was to get a gun and what kind he thought was right for me.

What weighs on me recalling all of these instances, is the fact that I am a father and that I am responsible for this defenseless and naive creature. The weight I feel is partly thrilling and partly dreadful—I want this responsibility; I think being a parent is an important and meaningful job, but then I also find myself imagining the worst. I imagine the child rapist lurking the snow outside her window. I imagine the escaped convict on the porch, testing the door to see if it is locked.

I don’t want these visions—they disturb, and, sometimes, consume me to the point that when I sit down to write I can’t summon up anything but sinister and cynical visions of the world.

But I can happily report, speaking as a father and a writer, that the peculiar rhythms, hours, demands, and terror of having children is poignant because it helps me to see my old life and old selves more critically and understand that despite the struggle, despite the fact that there’s never enough time to write, or read, this is what I have been looking for my whole life.

As a wise teacher once told me, “Every good story has a clear sense of stakes.”

Image depends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.

+ Click here to make a donation.

+ Click here to subscribe to Image.


The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Written by: David Griffith

Dave Griffith is the author of Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America. His essays and reviews have appeared in Image, The Normal School, Creative Nonfiction, The LA Review of Books, Killing the Buddha, Offline, and the Paris Review Daily, among others. He lives in Michigan with his wife, the writer Jessica Mesman Griffith, where he directs the creative writing program at Interlochen Center for the Arts. He recently finished a book manuscript titled Pyramid Scheme: Making Art and Being Broke in America.

Receive ImageUpdate, our free weekly newsletter featuring the best from Image and the world of arts & faith

* indicates required