Holding My Own in New York
Rod Dreher on Fathers & Sons
As night falls over Brooklyn and my book-mad toddler Matthew has said goodnight to Moon for the umpteenth time, drawn yet again from the bottomless well of Seussiana, and learned once more what happens when you give a moose a muffin, he rolls into the crook of my arm, cranes his head so he can whisper in my ear, and says, “Pawpaw.”
This is my cue to tell him stories of his grandfather, my own dad, who lives with my mom (“Mammy” in Matthewspeak) in Starhill, a rural south Louisiana enclave where the only sounds at night are crickets and bullfrogs, not the wail of sirens on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
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Rod Dreher is a contributing editor to Touchstone. He is a senior editor and blogger at the American Conservative and author of How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, and Live Not by Lies: A Survival Manual for Christian Dissidents. He is Eastern Orthodox and lives with his wife, Julie, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They have three children.
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