will take me back there so viscerally that I can smell the antibiotic mouthwash I gargled with while the wound in my mouth was still open. I can even feel the pain in my jaw, but in a way that feels survivable as things only can once you’ve survived them.
* * *
I’m thirty-two. I have a baby of my own now. I knew, of course, that the act of becoming a father does not suddenly make you qualified for the work, but still, I can’t believe this child is my responsibility. Henry is only a couple months old, and I’m still terrified by the idea of being someone’s dad, of how utterly he depends upon me, when I know myself to be profoundly undependable.
I roll the word father around in my head all the time. Father. What a loaded gun of a word. I want to be kind and patient, unhurried and unworried. I want him to feel secure in my arms. But I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve literally read more books about Hamlet than I’ve read about parenting. He won’t stop crying even though I’ve changed his diaper and offered him a bottle. I’ve tried swaddling and shushing and swinging and singing, but nothing works.
Why is he crying? Maybe there is no why, but my brain needs a why. I’m so incompetent, so quick to frustration, so totally unprepared for every facet of this. A baby’s cries are piercing—it feels as if they cut through you. Finally, unable to get him to stop crying, I put him in his car seat and rock him slowly, stick earbuds in my ears, and turn “New Partner” up as loud as I can, so I can hear Will Oldham’s plaintive wailing instead of my son’s.
* * *
I’m forty-one. For Sarah and me, the song now sounds like being in love all those years ago, when we were each other’s new partners, and it also sounds like our love now. It’s a bridge between that life and this one. We’re playing “New Partner” for our now nine-year-old son for the first time, and Sarah and I can’t help but smile a little giddily at each other. We start dancing together slowly in the kitchen despite our son’s gagging noises, and we sing along, Sarah on-key and me way off-. At the end of the song, I ask my son if he liked it and he says, “A little.”
That’s okay. He’ll have a different song. You probably have a different one, too. I hope it carries you to places you need to visit without asking you to stay in them.
I give “New Partner” five stars.
THREE FARMERS ON THEIR WAY TO A DANCE
August Sander, Young Farmers, 1914. Pictured, left to right: Otto Krieger, August Klein, and Ewald Klein.
MOST DAYS, I walk past a vertical strip of four photographs featuring Sarah and me. The pictures were taken at a photo booth in Chicago in 2005, just a couple of weeks after we got engaged. It’s standard photo booth fare—smiles, silly faces, and so on—but the light was good, and we were young.
As I get older, the picture keeps changing. In 2005, I thought, This is us. These days, I think, We were just kids. Seeing that picture every day helps remind me that in another fifteen years, I will see pictures of us from 2020 and think, Look at everything those two didn’t know.
There is one other photograph I see almost every day: It’s a print of a picture taken by the photographer August Sander initially titled Young Farmers, 1914, but later known as Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.
Sander took many photographs that he called Young Farmers for his massive, never-finished project People of the 20th Century, which sought to photograph all sorts of people in Germany, from aristocrats to circus performers to soldiers. But this picture is probably the best known of them all. I first learned about it from Richard Powers’s novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which I read in college. Powers later wrote an autobiographical novel in which a young computer programmer becomes obsessed with the picture and abandons his career to write about it. I, too, have become obsessed with the picture. I spent years working to track down the biographies and other extant portraits of the boys depicted in the photograph.*
There’s so much to love about this picture. I love how the young men are looking over their shoulders, as