The Book I Never Read

I went looking for where my leadership began. It kept pulling further back than I expected.

I think a lot of men live life believing they are nothing like their fathers.

Mine opened his life’s work with me.

The first men I ever led, I led without knowing it.

They were my sons.

I did not have a title then. No team. No framework. No word for what I was doing, other than “Dad.” I had two boys and a responsibility. I molded them through good and bad. Through adversity, struggle, love, and guidance. They grew into strong men.

They are both strong leaders of men. One forged in the military and one leading in the corporate world.

This was the thought that came to me late one night, long after the house had gone quiet. I have built my whole identity around leadership. And the first leading I ever did, I did before I knew its name.

Then the thought kept moving.

I went back over my life. I kept looking for where the leading started, and it kept pulling further back.

I am the oldest of four boys.

I grew up close to my three brothers. Between us four there is a spread of twelve years. Being the oldest, maybe I was viewed as a leader by them. I don’t honestly know. I do know we all grew up well and are great friends and brothers to this day. We don’t see each other enough, like brothers do when they have families of their own.

The youngest is twelve years behind me. He grew up to put on a badge. I wore the uniform first, and somehow the baby of the family ended up wearing one too.

Four boys. We are all still here. We are happy. We built good lives. We are still close. Still there when one of us needs the others.

They were my first brothers. Before the ones in blue.

But I left a man out of the accounting.

The one at the head of the table.

My father.

He was always present, as best as men of that generation could be. He had a large family to support. Moms didn’t work then, so he carried a heavy load. She did too. It was a different time. My ethos today is Lead, Protect, and Provide. My father and mother did all three with gusto. None of us ever wanted for anything.

My father is a mental health professional. He spent his career with the people most of the world would rather not think about. He wrote a book about that work. Political Asylums. It came out in 2002 and it won a literary award.

I was busy then. That is what we always tell ourselves, at least.

I never read it.

I told myself we were too different. He lived in one world. I lived in another. He sat with the broken and the forgotten. I chased them down dark alleys and faced men with guns.

I was honest with myself about one more thing. He had his own failings. He had his own dark nights. Maybe all men carrying a load do.

So the book sat on a shelf. I knew what it was. I knew who wrote it. I never opened it.

This week I opened it.

I expected a research paper. Something dry and academic. A man nothing like me.

That is not what I found.

I found people. He took a hundred years of history and refused to write it as a textbook. He wrote it as a story with no fiction in it. Every person real. Every name that needed protecting, protected. He put me in the room with a homeless man who slept in alleys and cared for one stray cat. He set me beside a trapper locked away for a crime that was barely a crime. He made me feel all of it.

And he did something I did not see coming. He wrote himself almost entirely out of his own book. He stood offstage so the people he cared about could stand in the light.

It wasn’t about him. It never was.

Then I reached the Prologue.

Before the first chapter. Before any of the history he spent years gathering. He opens the entire book with one scene.

A schoolyard. 1998.

A day that twenty-five years later will open my upcoming book. The same dramatic story told from two perspectives. Mine, lived in the first person. His, a worried father and health professional who understood the anguish of my bad guy from a place of empathy I did not have.

He opens his life’s work with one of the worst days of mine.

He interviewed me to get it right. He wrote down that I left the job after ten years and moved away. Out of a century of lives, out of everything he could have started with, he walked the reader in through his son.

He did not write a chapter about me.

He made me the doorway.

I sat with that for a long time.

I spent my whole life believing I was nothing like him.

The man I thought I climbed away from was doing the same work I do. He put people first. He kept himself offstage. He told the truth plain, no color, no softening the hard parts. He has his own dark nights too.

I thought I had walked a different road.

I was walking his line the whole time.

A son finally opened the book his father had the courage to write. On the very first page, before anything else, he found himself already there.

— B.