Say no more

I'm learning to shut up.

The people who know me will wonder at that revelation. I am no great conversationalist as it is. I never have been. When it comes to small talk, I have an embarrassingly short list: the weather and the Twins. Once I've exhausted those topics, I usually am at a loss for words. I wish it were not so. Trading in small talk puts people at ease. It has a charm – a charm I simply do not possess.

Nonetheless, for 25, 20 and 18 years, respectively, three people on this planet have had to suffer my opinions. I have counseled them on just about everything under the sun. On this and that and the other thing, I have spoken ad nauseam.

Offering advice to them was easy at first: Streets have to be clear before being crossed. Straws do not belong in noses.

It is not so easy anymore.

When children are little, their problems, typically, are, too. We can fix what ails them. If they need pointing in the right direction, we can do that because more often than not, we know which direction is the right one.

My kids and I shared the same compass for the longest time. It was my compass, built from my experiences, aligned to my ideals, to those magnets of truth that I thought I had discovered in the course of navigating a life. Lately, however, it has occurred to me that my compass might be wrong.

It would have been worthwhile to have known this earlier. I perhaps could have spared a certain son the certain misfortune of entering college – and leaving – and entering college – and leaving – and entering college – and leaving. It was clear to him – but not to me – that he preferred work to school, that the education he desired was the real-world kind, that what I had found inspiring in academia, he found dull.

If I had known what I do now – that what is north to me is not north to all – I also might not have protested so openly when my daughter quit playing basketball after her sophomore year in high school. It was clear to her – but not to me – that basketball is a game. It is supposed to be fun, and when it ceases being fun, when it grinds but never gives, it is time to devote one's energies elsewhere.

I make no secret of the worth I place on education and sport. Hang around me long enough and you'll think it a tribal chant. So for this son and for this daughter, these had to be hard decisions because though we sometimes think they meet indifference, a father's suggestions are never dismissed. They are not channeled away but are instead absorbed like rain falling on dry earth.

Elroy Berdahl knows the great weight of words. A character in the novel "The Things They Carried," Elroy owns the Tip Top Lodge on the banks of the Rainy River in northern Minnesota. It is Elroy whom Tim O'Brien meets on a late August afternoon in 1968 as the young man contemplates disappearing into Canada to dodge the Vietnam War, and it is Elroy who stops him by taking Tim fishing and by keeping his mouth shut.

It is a memorable scene – 81-year-old Elroy and 21-year-old Tim in the middle of the river, Ontario on one side, Minnesota on the other. During the six days Tim stayed at the resort – alone, just he and Elroy – he never tells Elroy why he is there. And Elroy never asks. But Elroy knows because Elroy is 81. Finally, when the two are fishing, Tim can stand it no more and starts to weep so immense does the pressure of his predicament become. Elroy says not a word.

I thought of Elroy Berdahl a couple of weeks ago when I visited a different son at college who is at that point where he must decide what he wants to be. He appears to be weighing a career in either the sciences or the arts. I can tell he is conflicted. I can see it in his eyes. Truth be told, I have a preference. It is one based on what I think I have discovered about life, and though I was tempted to share my thoughts, I kept them to myself.

These are voluble times. If we do not have a cell phone shoved in our ears, we're lit by the blue glow of a TV while some talk-show chatterer blathers about everything and nothing.

Never has talk been so exalted. Never has silence been so scorned. What Elroy Berdahl understood, however, and what I only now am beginning to understand is that in life there are certain decisions people must make for themselves. No one can make the decisions for them.

At these moments we ought to just shut up even when we think we know the correct course and even – and maybe especially – when those people are our children.