Real Men don't raise troubled sons

There was a time when I was young that I was a devout church member.  I worked in the refrigeration trade, and there was an older man in my church who was a union pipefitter.  So while we didn't do exactly the same thing, we had a lot in common and became friends.

He had spent his life working on some of the biggest projects in the West.  He'd helped build parts of the Hanford nuclear complex in southeast Washington, various coal-fired power plants, etc.  His work kept him moving every few years as one project finished and another opened.  He spent inordinate amounts of time away from home.

He had two sons.

One of them I knew well, as one of my "charges," you might say, in my unofficial position as a youth leader in the church.  The other had already left home and was doing time in Cedar City, Utah, which was rumored at the time to be one of the rougher state prisons in the country.  Hopefully I've painted enough of a picture of where these boys were heading without being explicit.

Suffice it to say that my friend was supremely disappointed in both of his sons.  I remember a conversation we had once, one of those rare moments when men fully open up to each other, in which he wondered what went wrong.  He ran through three or four different possible theories, such as "Maybe it's the Devil," and I don't remember the others except for the last one:  "Maybe it's just the times we live in."

His sons were the only disappointment in a life that was otherwise well lived.  But that one disappointment was so big, that it wasn't a life well lived.  He felt empty.

One day I was driving two or three of the boys from my church to an event a hundred miles away.  The route follows the Clark Fork River most of the way.  As we were whizzing along the highway, one of the boys started pointing out places along the river:  "Me and my dad went fishing there."  A few miles later, "Me and my dad camped there."  At about the third one of those "Me and my dad did X there," the younger son of my friend exploded.

"I WISH I COULD SAY THAT!!!"

We all went, "Whaaaaaat???  You wish you could say what?"

"Me and my Dad did this.  Me and my Dad did that."  He was so angry that he was throwing spittle.

The last time I saw him, he had gotten into drugs.  A quick Internet search on his name just now returned a somber result:  "Deceased at 25 and lived in [the only city in the list of search results that was anywhere near where we lived]."

That one line, spoken by a kid who is now surely dead from his bad choices, hit me hard.  I've never been able to forget it, and the seething rage with which he spit it out.

I never told his father.  The man was hopelessly clueless, blaming everything in and out of this world -- except himself.  But I never forgot that moment, and it shaped the way I raised my own sons.

Men:  If you want to be a Real Man, take your son(s) fishing.  Or camping.  Or hunting.  Teach them to shoot a gun.  Build something together.  Whatever "manly things" means to you.  Because it really does make a difference.