… somehow — and I’m not entirely sure how this happened and am still pretty shaken up over the whole thing — I experienced two very bizarre, two very unexpected, life events at the same time.
Well, that’s not true. These two incidents had been building up separately for years— each slithering along different paths, dangerous and unrestrained until they were eventually too big and too close to ignore. And it’s when I noticed the first of them — all slimy and cold — did I see the second not far behind it. Lurking behind a tree. Leering.
This first of these observations was the fact that my two sons, Nick and Alex, had both stepped into their teenaged years and were now well into their teenaged years — with Nick at seventeen, was now driving, he had a part-time job and a girlfriend and his fourteen year old brother, Alex, was not far behind him.
My two kids were teenagers. My two kids were older teenagers which meant they were almost men.
How did this happen?
How did they go from one minute playing with Pokémon cards to the next driving and working? — Nick now had his own checking account and Alex was weeks away from buying his first razor.
How was I not prepared for this? And if I was not paying attention long enough for this to occur, then what else was I not ready for?
And as I was wondering all of these things, as that comfortable denial was breaking away, when I made the second discovery — the one that had been watching and leering.
This one told me that in less then six months, by the end of the year, I would be fifty years old.
They call it the old one-two-punch. One shot to the chin and the second to the gut. Pow.
Now the idea of being fifty years old doesn’t frighten me at all. Not one bit. I’m actually looking forward to turning fifty because that’s the age you can start wearing fedora hats — you can when your younger but you look like a complete tool. It wasn’t the age of fifty that I cared about, what concerned me was that being fifty years old meant that I was now becoming an older man, not just a man. And an older man has different responsibilities then a younger man does.
Younger men are adventurers and protectors. Older men are leaders and teachers. Younger men are brave. Older men are battle tested.
So, my sons would soon be men and I would soon be an older man.
And once the blood had returned to my head, I began to make a list of all the things I wanted to make sure that my sons knew about to prepare them for being men.
At first this list was a practical guide — how to change a tire, how to grill a steak, what type of super glue actually works and what brands aren’t worth buying — but as the list grew I realized that there was a deeper part to this exercise. It wasn’t important to just know how to change a tire, it was also important to know why it was important to be able to change it.
Because the why, meant that at three in the morning, driving down that dark road that there was power — and comfort and strength — in the knowledge that if the tire blew right then. Right at that moment, pow —. Well, then — nothing. Then no big deal. Then you just change it.
Then that blown tire simple becomes one of those — I’ve got this, moments.
And that was the list I wanted to prepare. A list to prepare men for all of the I’ve got this, moments of life. The nuts and bolts. The basic skills. The tricks.
Because what determines being a man anyway? Are you a man if you can gut a fish, or if you can tell what size socket you need just by looking at the bolt? Are you a man if you can haggle over the cost of snow tires or if you know how escrow works? No, and it seemed that the list itself was part of the answer to this. That each skill, each experience, was just one simple tool to be used during our experience as men.
So I started listing everything but when the list topped three hundred, I knew I had a problem. And by the time it had slipped into the four hundreds, I knew I had a bigger problem. The first was, where to put it all.
So here it is. This list is for every man. Every son and every father.
This list is for us.
Everett De Morier