It surprised me how keenly I missed the crisp, sharpened-pencil focus of my own classroom and campus home. But this would be a year spent on tilling my own garden—in a number of different ways. I was right where I needed to be, or so I consoled myself, and every day that passed only seemed to emphasize that truth.
One night a few weeks into the fall semester, Jep came home, gave me a kiss on the forehead and said to Stefan, sitting at the table, “Well, if it isn’t Father Nature.” He got a beer out of the fridge, put it back, and extracted the jug of orange juice. “I can’t let myself have a beer tonight. I’ll never stop. I’ll end up hopelessly drunk. One of my players told me today that he wanted to ask his sociology professor a question, but he didn’t know who she was or where the class met. The tutor just does all the assignments for him. Isn’t that a great system? But if I pointed out the irony, my player would just stare at me and say, What’s up, Coach? It’s his norm. Like he’s been treated like royalty all his life.”
Stefan got up, walked into the living room and stood looking out the window at the tree he’d climbed as a child. Without turning around, he said, “Dad, it’s funny you brought up that whole deal with your players. Because I’ve been thinking about that, not exactly that, but how that whole dynamic applies to me. I have some news for you guys. Not like earth-shattering big news. Just news.”
My mind was a thumb flipping pages: Everything went by. He had AIDS. He had cornered and attacked the guy from the lumberyard. He was on drugs again. When I finally remembered to breathe, my inhale hurt my chest.
“I had an idea,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. Ever since I got hurt, actually. It could be stupid. But it’s about those things I was telling you a while ago when I first came home about people who end up in prison… About how you need to change the things people believe about you. About how doing something good has to be a thrill. It’s sort of a program. Julie thinks it’s a good idea.”
That made me smile.
He’d confided in Julie before me. Again.
Well. On the other hand, I had to admit, “If she thinks it’s a good idea, it probably is.”
And it turned out to be a very good idea. It would end up changing my son’s life, and all our lives, in ways that seemed to mean that the possibility of redemption was real and in reach. We didn’t know that then. At the time, I just surrendered to hope, because why not? Hope was always my default setting.
BOOK TWO:
Renewal
5
The germ of the idea came to Stefan when Jep spoke to him one day about how rest was an important part of his healing, about putting off trying to save the world until the day after tomorrow.
“You have to make healing yourself a project,” Jep had told Stefan. “You have to let yourself feel the healing.” His father’s words didn’t have the intended effect, Stefan later told us. Instead, the sound of the words rolled over and over in his mind, healing, feeling, healing, feeling, urging him to do something, to offer something, to realize something that would really matter to someone else, but would excite and delight him at the same time.
He thought about what he still felt…grief, shame, frustration, remorse. He thought of what he wanted to feel, especially since his eye had healed so well…a second chance, a new life, a different outcome, a positive point of view. It was a project.
The Healing Project. Those three words.
“Look, Stefan,” I told him. “That day we went to the cemetery, I wasn’t trying to use your obsession with Belinda to guilt trip you. I was just reminding you how she always would say to you, don’t waste your life, and how, as awful as it is, you now have this second chance to make something meaningful of your life.”
“Which your landscaping company is doing,” Jep said. “You’re making a lot of people happy, some who you’ll never even meet. You’re giving people beauty to appreciate. And you’re healing. You’re healing from your injury and from prison.”
Neither of us knew how to say to our son, you don’t have to be president of the United States. You don’t have to be president of a bank… But what if he did want to be a bank president, or a computer designer or an architect? Were we suggesting somehow that his sights should be limited? That he somehow wasn’t smart enough?
“It’s just that what I do doesn’t really matter,” Stefan said. “Oh sure, I could just go on making people happy with all the pretty flowers and arrangements. Making myself feel temporarily happy.”