"41 Going On 8" Canvas Print
"41 Going On 8" Canvas Print
from $80.00
I haven’t told many folk this, but I spent much of the past 20 years
convinced that I’d be dead by 40.
That’s bleak, I know, but in my defense, I did the math.
It wasn’t pessimism. It was bookkeeping.
I had studied the arithmetic of my life —
the drinking, the drugs, the disappearing,
the increasingly creative ways I misunderstood ruin for relief —
and the equation in the end kept insisting that 40 was for people
with less combustible habits.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when I tell you that I turned 41 yesterday —
a whole year past the edge of the map I had drawn for myself.
What’s even more strange is that I turned 8 the night before.
No for real — it’s true.
It happened somewhere around midnight, though I can’t be sure about that time since dreams have long considered clocks a form of government overreach.
I’m pretty sure though that I had been asleep for 'bout 30 minutes,
after the trazodone and three episodes of The Last Kingdom had done did
what sheep-counting, warm milk, and responsible screen habits could not.
That’s when someone knocked on the front door downstairs.
Three times.
So gentle I might have missed them.
So familiar I knew I couldn’t.
I threw on the closest pair of Wolves’ shorts I could find
and marched downstairs like Uhtred of Bebbanburg himself,
fully ready to either unleash my loud “HEY WHO IS IT” voice
men use while hoping that the darkness can’t sniff their fear,
or to calmly and rationally defend Naz Reid’s honor before a jury of his peers.
When I opened the door, however, neither service was required.
Which was disappointing because I had prepared remarks.
Standing before me beneath the porch light was a small boy, maybe 8,
who wore a face I hadn’t seen in years: Mine.
He had the same blue eyes and 3rd grade cheeks that I used to have.
The same pair of rounded out little bomb shelters
where I stored Cheez-Its in case the Minnesota winter went permanent.
He had the same slightly spaced front teeth leading the way,
still looking like two best friends
who decided to leave room for one more at the lunch table.
He even wore the same cowboy hat that I thought I had lost 20 years ago,
the one I had marked MJ, for Matthew Jones (obviously),
the proud eldest and favorite son of Indiana Jones.
That was my favorite part of being 8.
Back then, I didn’t need any proof that I belonged to something heroic.
I just needed a sharpie and bang it was true.
The boy looked me up and down,
like he was trying to gauge whether or not he still believed the claim.
Whether this shirtless, unshaven man who is built less like an adventurer than someone who had recently discovered that chips can be delivered directly to his home, was still the brave son of Indiana Jones. Or if I had become the part of the franchise everyone politely pretends never happened.
“Wow,” he said.
“What?”
“You got old.”
“I’m 41.”
“Yeah that’s what I said.”
He smiled wide like he knew punishment was temporary
but comedy was forever.
“Come on,” he said, motioning towards the dark. “He wants to remember you.”
“He?”
Out of the blackness behind him, the night stood up.
Moving towards the home at 400 pounds of midnight and muscle, shadow,
and no visible interest in whether I had recently made peace with God,
was a massive black bear with 20 crowbar claws,
each capable of turning a deadbolt into a brief and largely symbolic obstacle.
The child seemed irrationally ok with this.
I started to sound like a teakettle.
“He won’t hurt you,” the boy said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I asked him not to.”
There was a time, apparently,
when I believed that the world honored requests that simple.
When “please don’t” was a force field
and sincerity counted as protective equipment.
The boy patted the side of the bear and the bear sank onto the pavement.
He then climbed up on the tush of this dark mountain,
patted the space in front between the bear’s shoulder blades,
and said, “Let’s go.”
Without asking any of the questions generally recommended before mounting a wild carnivore at midnight, I found out I was 8 enough to follow him and so we went.
The boy wrapped his arms around my waist, and gave my belly a judgmental rub.
“Oh,” he said. “We got bigger.”
He laughed into my back until the laughter had nowhere else to go,
and then rested his cheek between my shoulders
and listened to the years moving around inside me.
I started to defend the expansion his hands had discovered
when he stopped me with a “Shhh—I’m trying to hear if we grew braver too.”
The woods seemed to recognize the boy.
Branches lifted out of his way. The creek spoke louder when he passed.
Even the moon kept moving from tree to tree to get a better look at him.
The faster the bear would sprint, the louder the boy would shout,
naming everything that he saw like he was being paid by the noun:
“Fox.”
“Crow.”
“The fort Bjorn and Erik built.”
“Ashbach’s rope swing.”
“Stars.”
Nothing was permitted to remain anonymous.
He named each thing like the forest might disappear
if it didn’t hear itself being loved.
I turned around and his whole face had opened.
Joy was pouring through him like someone had struck a match behind his ribs and every pore became a window.
Why was my first instinct to become the rain?
Why had I become the kind of man who reacts to the glowing
by immediately calculating the distance to the burn ward?
I wanted to grab his Cheez-it cheeks in both my hands and warn him.
Tell him about how there is a day that is coming
when he’ll learn to shave off his edges and swallow whole sentences,
fold himself down so small until pain no longer knows where to aim.
Tell him how in a few years he’ll stop naming things out loud
and start building a locked door in his chest instead.
How he'll give 20 more years after that towards
admiring the craftsmanship of the door,
all while ignoring the young and wild body that kept
throwing itself against it on the other side.
I thought he should know about the people we would love badly,
not because we didn’t want to love them rightly,
but because fear kept putting its fat fingers over love’s mouth
every time it tried to tell the truth.
I felt my spine stiffen when I considered telling him about the whiskey.
How do you tell a child that one day a bottle will learn his name?
How it will learn to tuck him in, kiss his forehead, pull the blanket up to his chin and cover every unbearable light with one hand,
while quietly unscrewing the earth below with the other.
I thought he should know about death.
About Doc Nielsen. Grandma Kay and Grandma Jo. Tom Petty.
Thought he should know about how much it can all hurt.
How there will be nights he will beg heaven to either save him or finish the job. How there will be dirt that knows more of his prayers than any church.
How there will be people who offer him mercy and he will ball his fist.
I wanted to tell him everything, but he wouldn’t stop shouting:
“Moon!”
“Pines!”
“Deer!”
Besides, how do you explain 30 years of storms to someone
who still tilts their face toward heaven, mouth open,
convinced the rain came all that way just to find his tongue?
How do you describe the flood without ruining the water?
I couldn’t, so I didn’t.
I just asked if he was ever afraid.
“Of the bear?” He asked.
“Of anything.”
He thought about it.
“Sometimes I think everyone will leave.”
I reached back for his hand.
When I found it, I held on as though the future had already started to pull.
“Some people will,” I said.
It was the gentlest shape I could give the blade.
The bear slowed down.
“Why?” He asked.
“Because some people are raised inside exits.
They learn the door before they learn the room.
Some people will love you honestly and fail you completely.
Some people will promise forever and really mean it for an hour.
And sometimes, you will be the one who runs from those who were here to stay.”
The boy was quietly taking it in.
I could tell that curtains were being drawn over each of his pores
by the owls that went unnamed above.
“Does anyone ever stay?”
I gathered up every extinguished star I could find
and started to re-build his galaxy.
“Only the best,” I said. “There are people that you don't know yet who will sit on the floor beside you when you have become the floor. People who will learn the shape of your silence and never demand that it become a song. People who will keep the porch light on long after you have given them every reason not to."
He started coming to life. He grabbed my shoulder and excitedly asked,
“Soo do we marry Pamela Anderson?!”
I had just delivered the emotional thesis of our entire existence,
and his main takeaway was still Baywatch.
“No,” I said. “But it’s even better. You will marry a woman who knows the worst thing about you and still hand you the grocery list like tomorrow isn’t up for debate. You will have children who will shout your name like they’ve been searching the whole earth and cannot believe the earth answered back.”
He considered this. Maybe.
“Does Pamela Anderson ever regret not finding us?”
“Please stay focused.”
The forest reached it’s end and the concrete of Xerxes returned.
Streetlights replaced the moon.
The dark became lawns again.
Mailboxes. Minivans.
A basketball hoop leaning toward the street like it had grown tired of waiting
for someone to put the Fortnite down and come outside.
When we got to our house, the boy slid down first.
I touched the tip of his hat where “MJ” was scrawled.
“Keep your eye on that,” I said.
“On what?”
“The part of you that knows who you are.”
He nodded in a meh kind of way, as if this was perfectly normal advice and not something that took me four decades, several disasters, and an unreasonably expensive amount of therapy to find.
I turned toward the house, but before I reached the door,
the child ran up behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist.
I spun and held him so tightly I could feel every year between us dissolve.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I shouldn’t have left you.”
He pulled back and looked confused.
“You didn’t leave me. You just got really bad at finding me.”
“I’m working on it."
With that the boy started going back towards the bear,
who was waiting patiently beneath the streetlight.
“Hey one more question.” He shouted.
“I got you.”
“Do we still draw?”
I said, “Yes.”
“Do we still write?”
“Yes.”
“Do people like it?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do we get rich?”
I said, “Spiritually.”
His entire face collapsed: “Oh no.”
The streetlight flickered.
For one breath, the whole world went dark.
When the light returned, the bear was gone.
I couldn’t see the boy in my hat either, but he’s still here.
• 1.25″ (3.18 cm) thick poly-cotton blend canvas
• Canvas fabric weight: 10.15 +/- 0.74 oz./yd.² (344 g/m² +/- 25g/m²)
• Fade-resistant
• Hand-stretched over solid wood stretcher bars
• Mounting brackets included
• Blank product sourced from the US, Canada, Europe, UK, or Australia
This product is made especially for you as soon as you place an order, which is why it takes us a bit longer to deliver it to you. Making products on demand instead of in bulk helps reduce overproduction, so thank you for making thoughtful purchasing decisions!
convinced that I’d be dead by 40.
That’s bleak, I know, but in my defense, I did the math.
It wasn’t pessimism. It was bookkeeping.
I had studied the arithmetic of my life —
the drinking, the drugs, the disappearing,
the increasingly creative ways I misunderstood ruin for relief —
and the equation in the end kept insisting that 40 was for people
with less combustible habits.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when I tell you that I turned 41 yesterday —
a whole year past the edge of the map I had drawn for myself.
What’s even more strange is that I turned 8 the night before.
No for real — it’s true.
It happened somewhere around midnight, though I can’t be sure about that time since dreams have long considered clocks a form of government overreach.
I’m pretty sure though that I had been asleep for 'bout 30 minutes,
after the trazodone and three episodes of The Last Kingdom had done did
what sheep-counting, warm milk, and responsible screen habits could not.
That’s when someone knocked on the front door downstairs.
Three times.
So gentle I might have missed them.
So familiar I knew I couldn’t.
I threw on the closest pair of Wolves’ shorts I could find
and marched downstairs like Uhtred of Bebbanburg himself,
fully ready to either unleash my loud “HEY WHO IS IT” voice
men use while hoping that the darkness can’t sniff their fear,
or to calmly and rationally defend Naz Reid’s honor before a jury of his peers.
When I opened the door, however, neither service was required.
Which was disappointing because I had prepared remarks.
Standing before me beneath the porch light was a small boy, maybe 8,
who wore a face I hadn’t seen in years: Mine.
He had the same blue eyes and 3rd grade cheeks that I used to have.
The same pair of rounded out little bomb shelters
where I stored Cheez-Its in case the Minnesota winter went permanent.
He had the same slightly spaced front teeth leading the way,
still looking like two best friends
who decided to leave room for one more at the lunch table.
He even wore the same cowboy hat that I thought I had lost 20 years ago,
the one I had marked MJ, for Matthew Jones (obviously),
the proud eldest and favorite son of Indiana Jones.
That was my favorite part of being 8.
Back then, I didn’t need any proof that I belonged to something heroic.
I just needed a sharpie and bang it was true.
The boy looked me up and down,
like he was trying to gauge whether or not he still believed the claim.
Whether this shirtless, unshaven man who is built less like an adventurer than someone who had recently discovered that chips can be delivered directly to his home, was still the brave son of Indiana Jones. Or if I had become the part of the franchise everyone politely pretends never happened.
“Wow,” he said.
“What?”
“You got old.”
“I’m 41.”
“Yeah that’s what I said.”
He smiled wide like he knew punishment was temporary
but comedy was forever.
“Come on,” he said, motioning towards the dark. “He wants to remember you.”
“He?”
Out of the blackness behind him, the night stood up.
Moving towards the home at 400 pounds of midnight and muscle, shadow,
and no visible interest in whether I had recently made peace with God,
was a massive black bear with 20 crowbar claws,
each capable of turning a deadbolt into a brief and largely symbolic obstacle.
The child seemed irrationally ok with this.
I started to sound like a teakettle.
“He won’t hurt you,” the boy said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I asked him not to.”
There was a time, apparently,
when I believed that the world honored requests that simple.
When “please don’t” was a force field
and sincerity counted as protective equipment.
The boy patted the side of the bear and the bear sank onto the pavement.
He then climbed up on the tush of this dark mountain,
patted the space in front between the bear’s shoulder blades,
and said, “Let’s go.”
Without asking any of the questions generally recommended before mounting a wild carnivore at midnight, I found out I was 8 enough to follow him and so we went.
The boy wrapped his arms around my waist, and gave my belly a judgmental rub.
“Oh,” he said. “We got bigger.”
He laughed into my back until the laughter had nowhere else to go,
and then rested his cheek between my shoulders
and listened to the years moving around inside me.
I started to defend the expansion his hands had discovered
when he stopped me with a “Shhh—I’m trying to hear if we grew braver too.”
The woods seemed to recognize the boy.
Branches lifted out of his way. The creek spoke louder when he passed.
Even the moon kept moving from tree to tree to get a better look at him.
The faster the bear would sprint, the louder the boy would shout,
naming everything that he saw like he was being paid by the noun:
“Fox.”
“Crow.”
“The fort Bjorn and Erik built.”
“Ashbach’s rope swing.”
“Stars.”
Nothing was permitted to remain anonymous.
He named each thing like the forest might disappear
if it didn’t hear itself being loved.
I turned around and his whole face had opened.
Joy was pouring through him like someone had struck a match behind his ribs and every pore became a window.
Why was my first instinct to become the rain?
Why had I become the kind of man who reacts to the glowing
by immediately calculating the distance to the burn ward?
I wanted to grab his Cheez-it cheeks in both my hands and warn him.
Tell him about how there is a day that is coming
when he’ll learn to shave off his edges and swallow whole sentences,
fold himself down so small until pain no longer knows where to aim.
Tell him how in a few years he’ll stop naming things out loud
and start building a locked door in his chest instead.
How he'll give 20 more years after that towards
admiring the craftsmanship of the door,
all while ignoring the young and wild body that kept
throwing itself against it on the other side.
I thought he should know about the people we would love badly,
not because we didn’t want to love them rightly,
but because fear kept putting its fat fingers over love’s mouth
every time it tried to tell the truth.
I felt my spine stiffen when I considered telling him about the whiskey.
How do you tell a child that one day a bottle will learn his name?
How it will learn to tuck him in, kiss his forehead, pull the blanket up to his chin and cover every unbearable light with one hand,
while quietly unscrewing the earth below with the other.
I thought he should know about death.
About Doc Nielsen. Grandma Kay and Grandma Jo. Tom Petty.
Thought he should know about how much it can all hurt.
How there will be nights he will beg heaven to either save him or finish the job. How there will be dirt that knows more of his prayers than any church.
How there will be people who offer him mercy and he will ball his fist.
I wanted to tell him everything, but he wouldn’t stop shouting:
“Moon!”
“Pines!”
“Deer!”
Besides, how do you explain 30 years of storms to someone
who still tilts their face toward heaven, mouth open,
convinced the rain came all that way just to find his tongue?
How do you describe the flood without ruining the water?
I couldn’t, so I didn’t.
I just asked if he was ever afraid.
“Of the bear?” He asked.
“Of anything.”
He thought about it.
“Sometimes I think everyone will leave.”
I reached back for his hand.
When I found it, I held on as though the future had already started to pull.
“Some people will,” I said.
It was the gentlest shape I could give the blade.
The bear slowed down.
“Why?” He asked.
“Because some people are raised inside exits.
They learn the door before they learn the room.
Some people will love you honestly and fail you completely.
Some people will promise forever and really mean it for an hour.
And sometimes, you will be the one who runs from those who were here to stay.”
The boy was quietly taking it in.
I could tell that curtains were being drawn over each of his pores
by the owls that went unnamed above.
“Does anyone ever stay?”
I gathered up every extinguished star I could find
and started to re-build his galaxy.
“Only the best,” I said. “There are people that you don't know yet who will sit on the floor beside you when you have become the floor. People who will learn the shape of your silence and never demand that it become a song. People who will keep the porch light on long after you have given them every reason not to."
He started coming to life. He grabbed my shoulder and excitedly asked,
“Soo do we marry Pamela Anderson?!”
I had just delivered the emotional thesis of our entire existence,
and his main takeaway was still Baywatch.
“No,” I said. “But it’s even better. You will marry a woman who knows the worst thing about you and still hand you the grocery list like tomorrow isn’t up for debate. You will have children who will shout your name like they’ve been searching the whole earth and cannot believe the earth answered back.”
He considered this. Maybe.
“Does Pamela Anderson ever regret not finding us?”
“Please stay focused.”
The forest reached it’s end and the concrete of Xerxes returned.
Streetlights replaced the moon.
The dark became lawns again.
Mailboxes. Minivans.
A basketball hoop leaning toward the street like it had grown tired of waiting
for someone to put the Fortnite down and come outside.
When we got to our house, the boy slid down first.
I touched the tip of his hat where “MJ” was scrawled.
“Keep your eye on that,” I said.
“On what?”
“The part of you that knows who you are.”
He nodded in a meh kind of way, as if this was perfectly normal advice and not something that took me four decades, several disasters, and an unreasonably expensive amount of therapy to find.
I turned toward the house, but before I reached the door,
the child ran up behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist.
I spun and held him so tightly I could feel every year between us dissolve.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I shouldn’t have left you.”
He pulled back and looked confused.
“You didn’t leave me. You just got really bad at finding me.”
“I’m working on it."
With that the boy started going back towards the bear,
who was waiting patiently beneath the streetlight.
“Hey one more question.” He shouted.
“I got you.”
“Do we still draw?”
I said, “Yes.”
“Do we still write?”
“Yes.”
“Do people like it?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do we get rich?”
I said, “Spiritually.”
His entire face collapsed: “Oh no.”
The streetlight flickered.
For one breath, the whole world went dark.
When the light returned, the bear was gone.
I couldn’t see the boy in my hat either, but he’s still here.
• 1.25″ (3.18 cm) thick poly-cotton blend canvas
• Canvas fabric weight: 10.15 +/- 0.74 oz./yd.² (344 g/m² +/- 25g/m²)
• Fade-resistant
• Hand-stretched over solid wood stretcher bars
• Mounting brackets included
• Blank product sourced from the US, Canada, Europe, UK, or Australia
This product is made especially for you as soon as you place an order, which is why it takes us a bit longer to deliver it to you. Making products on demand instead of in bulk helps reduce overproduction, so thank you for making thoughtful purchasing decisions!
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