It’s spring, and we’re driving south, and when we get out of the car after the song ends, we discover that our long-sleeve T-shirts are no longer necessary. I scrunch my sleeves up and feel the sun on my forearms for the first time in months. At the pay phone inside McDonald’s, I call the number my mom has given me, and a quivering voice answers, “Hello?”
I explain that her cousin, Billie Grace, is my grandmother. The woman says, “Roy’s daughter?” And I say yes. And she says, “You’re saying you’re kin to Billie Grace Walker,” and I say yes, and she says, “So you’re saying you’re kin to me,” and I say yes, and then my distant relative, Bernice, says, “Well, then come on over!”
* * *
I’m twenty-two, working as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital, newly and quite miserably single. I’ve just finished forty-eight consecutive hours on call. It’s been a rough couple of days. Leaving the hospital, I can’t believe how bright it is outside, or how alive the air feels. I get into my car and stare for a while at the parents and kids walking in and out. I play “New Partner” on my car’s tape player.
A child had died for no reason the night before—sudden infant death syndrome, a disease that in its name acknowledges our ignorance of it and powerlessness before it. He was a beautiful baby, and he was gone. His mother had asked me to baptize him. In my faith tradition, you’re not supposed to baptize the dead, but then again, babies aren’t supposed to die. He was the first person I ever baptized. His name was Zachary, a name taken from Hebrew words meaning, “God remembers.”
* * *
I’m twenty-eight, newly married, living in a basement in Chicago with almost no furniture. I’m in the midst of a series of oral surgeries to try to repair my mouth after a bike accident, and I’m in pain all the time. The pain is maddening—I’m trying to start work on a new novel, but all I can write is a series of stories in which a young man tries increasingly absurd strategies for pulling out all his teeth.
I remember lying in a borrowed bed in that apartment, listening to “New Partner” to calm myself down, staring at the ancient ceiling tiles with their tea-colored water stains that looked like continents on another world’s map. Sometimes, the song 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 if they barely have time to pause for the camera before going toward the dance and the rest of their lives. Their feet are in the mud, but their heads are in the sky, which is not a bad metaphor for being twenty. And their expressions capture the way you feel when you’re with your best friends in your nicest clothes.
The clothes themselves are also fascinating. As the art critic John Berger wrote, “The three young men belong, at the very most, to the second generation who ever wore such suits in the European countryside. Twenty or thirty years earlier, such clothes did not exist at a price which peasants could afford.” Industrialization combined with mass media like films and magazines meant that urban fashion was now available, and attractive, to young people in rural Europe.
But there’s also tension in the picture. The farmers’ dandy-like poses with cigarettes and jaunty canes are strangely incongruent with the pastoral landscape in the background. Also, their heads are sort of being cut off by the horizon line, which turns out to be tragically resonant, because when the picture was taken, the three farmers could not have known that they were also on their way to World War I. The photograph was made shortly before the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Soon, Germany would be at war, and the same industrialization that made those suits possible would mass-produce weapons far deadlier than any the world had previously seen.