BYRON DE ARAKAL -- Between the Lines

We have a picture of him taken some years ago when he was a wee lad.

He’s just months old and slight. A puny little guy wrapped around a

fragile human soul without a clue and full of wonder. It is a portrait of

an empty vessel with cinnamon brown eyes. With a gaze, his eyes beseech

us -- the people who created this young chap -- to care and to comfort

and to show the way. And yet there’s a character to the face of this tot

that reveals a wisdom he is not yet capable of expressing by deed. The

photo, as we affectionately call it still, is the picture of our “little

old man.”

What you don’t see is the man on the other side of the camera. The

father spilling over with pride. But there’s a hidden fear there, too, a

fear that he has neither the skill nor the insight to deliver on the

request written in the eyes of his little man.

The days that have occupied the nearly 15 years since that image was

captured have known challenges and despair. Joy and sorrow. Frustration

and satisfaction. Worry and serenity. Raising my oldest boy, I told him

the other day, has been like filling a carton of salt a grain at a time.

It can be tedious and difficult and mundane. Progress is creeping and

mostly imperceptible, save for the occasional events -- at first

separated by months and even years -- when the boy’s good words or

actions or both are evidence that the carton is indeed filling up. That

he gets it.

It’s this way year after year. Grain after grain. And somewhere along

the way, the baby becomes a boy who begins to uncover that side of the

world and people that is cruel and ridiculing and selfish. But he makes

his way -- sometimes brimming with confidence, at times drenched in

self-doubt -- to the brink of manhood.

Now, nearly 15, my boy is beginning to make his way on his own terms.

And it is not lost on me -- his dad -- that the jungle he has begun to

roam holds opportunities and dangers. So often I want to forbid his

adventures, fearing he will fall prey to those things my parents worried

would overrun me. The dope and the cigarettes and the booze and the sex.

But rather than lecture, I trust, praying with all the fiber I have, that

each grain of salt imparted to him was the right one.

Little by little, I see a man emerge. He’s found life’s passion in his

drums, in the countless hours that he’s worked to master them over the

last three years. He is accomplished, and I am proud. I see it in his

schooling, which he is less enthusiastic about and which comes not as

easily to him. But he’s begun to understand its value, and he works at

it.

Yet up until Friday night, I could not shake a lingering fear. He

gathers regularly now with his chums from church, often at Triangle

Square, where they catch a movie and eat some food or just roam. And the

place is crawling with youth seeking discovery and acceptance and

independence. But too many of them seem to think they’ll find it at the

end of a cigarette or some other vice. I’ve left him there often with a

“Be careful” and a few bucks, watching in the rearview mirror as he walks

away with his buds.

As with every evening that he’s spent at Triangle Square, I fretted

that I would receive “the phone call.” But on this night, again, it

doesn’t come. Something -- or someone -- else does. On this night, I pick

up a young man who has come of age.

“Did you have a good time?” I asked. He didn’t answer. He was worried

about a friend to whom he had promised a ride home. He couldn’t find her.

He asked if he could get out and canvass the square for her. “Sure,” I

said. “I’ll drive around the block a couple of times.” I returned, but he

had no luck. He got into the car, and as we began to leave, his face was

etched with worry. He couldn’t leave his friend behind. So we took one

more turn around the block, and there she was. He was relieved. And as he

walked her to the door of her home, I was proud.

“Triangle Square is crawling with kids,” I said to him on the way

home.

“Yeah, it’s always like that on Friday night,” he said. “But I can see

that some of them have been smoking dope.”

“Really?” I said. “Has anyone ever offered you any?”

“No,” he answered. “But a lot of kids there smoke cigarettes.

Sometimes they’ll ask me if I want one. But I tell them I’m ‘straight

edge.”’

“What does ‘straight edge’ mean?” I ask him.

“It means you don’t have any association with any kind of drugs or

things like raves. You don’t have any association with anything you shoot

in yourself or that you snort up,” he says.

I realized then that the carton was indeed full and that, grain by

grain, I had done right by him. And I am proud.

* BYRON DE ARAKAL is a writer and communications consultant. He lives

in Costa Mesa. His column runs Wednesdays. Readers may reach him with

news tips and comments via e-mail at [email protected].