A Christian Counselor on Co-narrating: Helping Teen Sons (and Fathers) to Tell Their Stories – Prelude
Chris Lewis
All “A Christian Counselor on Co-narrating” Articles
This series offers personal reflections and therapeutic perspectives related to Dr. William Pollack’s book “Real Boys,” on engaging the hearts of young men who are confronted with the shame-hardening effects of “the Boy Code.” The following narrative prelude introduces this 4-part series.
The one enduring image I have of my paternal grandfather could have tumbled right out of the classic, blue-collar Billy Joel song, “Allentown.”
Well we’re living here in Allentown
And they’re closing all the factories down …
The author’s grandfather served in the U.S. Army’s 414th Infantry Regiment, 104th Division. “Pap” was wounded in Germany during World War II.
My grandfather died in 1983, a year after the song’s release. I was 10, nearly 11, and I remember sobbing as my Dad gently shared the news. I felt confused – and embarrassed – by my tears. After all, we were living halfway across the country. I’d met “Pap” only a handful of times, on biennial visits back to my parents’ hometown in Pennsylvania.
But the scene, because it was always the same, is still gummed to my memory: that narrow, Ninth Street row house, one nondescript domino stacked against hundreds of others, in the humble barracks otherwise known as Allentown’s north side.
Inside the dimly lit living room, I was mesmerized by the iron floor grate, through which the furnace blew hot air – and random puffs of coal dust. (As a boy on wintry mornings, my Dad warmed himself on this same grate before starting his newspaper route.)
Pap would be tucked into his faded tweed chair, gazing blankly at the Phillies game on TV. My Dad would gamely make small-talk with him, while I hid out by the potato-candy jar in the kitchen, straining to hear broadcasting icon Harry Kalas narrate how our boys of summer were faring. The “Fightins’,” as they were known.
Well our fathers fought the Second World War
Spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore …
Dad would nudge me into mustering some awkward words for Pap. About school, or Little League. Between pitches on the big-box Zenith, Pap and I would exchange nods, sentence fragments, faint smiles. All by the flickering dint of another Phillies loss.
By game’s end, we were gone.
The restlessness was handed down
And it’s getting very hard to stay …
Dad had been the first in the family to leave Allentown by choice – off to Bible college in Philly instead of the military. When he said good-bye to his step-mother, standing at the kitchen stove, she never turned to acknowledge him. Pap, a deli manager at the local grocer, also had left for work without saying a word to him.
In Dad’s immigrant, working-class neighborhood, college was a frivolous and foreign concept. It was not how men were made. Evidently, he had violated some sort of unwritten code. Not that Dad gave it much thought. Such permission had never been granted.
Pap was a World War II vet. An infantryman wounded at the Roer River in Germany: February 2, 1945. I learned this last bit only recently when pressing my Dad to dust off an old filing box in his basement. Apparently Pap had been awarded both Bronze Star and Purple Heart medals. It was on the discharge papers, right smack there in black typeface … and yet as dormant and distant as the day is long.
On a whim, I Googled “Roer River.” That distance evaporated like muzzle mist. What surfaced was a stunning, 8-minute YouTube video of American GIs crossing that river in 1945 and taking the town of Jülich, while under bombardment from German Luftwaffe planes.
I was riveted. I found myself intently scanning the gray footage of grim-faced men, holding them up to my mind’s-eye memory of Pap – looking for a match. I followed soldiers ducking into river boats and darting through fields. Close-ups of bone-cold men camped in foxholes, warming themselves by cigarette light. Men firing rounds through jagged holes in shelled-out buildings. Men made of hardened shells and hollow eyes.
I quickly emailed the video link to my Dad. Minutes later my cell phone buzzed. I could hear the energy in his voice. “Hey, did you see the caption on this film? It says ‘104th Infantry Division’ – that’s Pap’s division! Hard to believe, but it’s dated within weeks of his being wounded.”
Grandfather “Pap” with his son, the author’s Dad in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Dad was holding a yellowed photo of Pap against his computer screen, pausing the video to search image by image. Face by face. We were two men on a reconnaissance mission to find another who’d lost a part of himself on the front lines … and then gone missing on the home-front.
Pap never talked about the war. When he returned to Allentown and started a family, no one dared to ask. Men of Pap’s generation neither minced words nor wasted them. His first wife, my Dad’s mother, was confined to a sick-bed in the living room for months when Dad was a boy. Pap never even mentioned she was ill.
Dad figured it out for himself when Pap met him on the stairs early one morning. “Well, she’s gone,” he said plainly, before brushing past him. Dad was seven years old.
At the funeral he recalls Pap lifting him over the open casket, and leaning him down. He figured out for himself, again, that this was good-bye. How strangely cold Mom’s cheek seemed to his lips.
His second-grade teacher soon told the entire class a story about a boy who’d attended his mother’s funeral –and never shed a tear. Many years later, Dad had a sudden realization: the teacher had been talking about him. “I still remember sitting in class that day,” Dad once told me, “thinking how terribly sad it was that this boy hadn’t cried. I was that boy.”
Pap was now widowed with three kids – and even more widowed by words. He eventually remarried, but his primary language was a silent, withdrawn anger, and alcohol. And, after emptying a bottle of its last drops, veiled tears, too. As a boy, Dad would wake at times in the middle of the night to find Pap sitting at the foot of his bed.
Back turned, shoulders hunched. Sobbing.
Then, slipping back into the buffering dark. Back into the trenches of his mind, and maybe the fog of the Roer River.
Well I’m living here in Allentown
And it’s hard to keep a good man down
But I won’t be getting up today …
* * *
This narrative serves as a prelude to a series exploring father-son relationships:
- Part 1: Trauma & narrative – the call for fathers and sons to co-narrate
- Part 2: Do I have what it takes? The shaming, socializing functions of the “Boy Code”
- Part 3: How father-son rites of passage can help to revise the “Boy Code”
- Part 4: A parental primer for “generative fathers” connecting with their son’s self-defining journey – and how this encourages a father’s growth
Fathers and sons may spend a lifetime searching out the true face of the other, as part of finding their own. Professional Christian counseling can invite a deeper understanding of father-son dynamics and a fuller expression of masculinity.
