I’ve been trying to figure out the answer to this question since I cut my hair at 17 and traded in my skintight jeans and studded belts for something my dad was more willing to tolerate when he took my brother and me to the annual Hunting and Fishing Expo in Edison, New Jersey, where for one weekend every year the Indian people were suddenly outnumbered by dudes in pick-up trucks with camo overalls, unkempt beards, and tobacco under their lips.
That rough-and-tumble sort of masculinity never appealed to me. I was more interested in the version I got from stories Nono told me about 1950s and ’60s Argentina and the Lost Generation writers—Hemingway, Fitzgerald—Mr. Sweeney had my junior-year English class read about. “I am going to get married young, father children, drink brown liquor in a leather wingback chair, wear a tailored suit on dates, and collect old stuff,” I’m sure I wrote on notebook paper that is (hopefully) long disappeared.
I wanted to be a grandfather before I was 20.
When my friends had me over during family parties, I picked the oldest guy in the room who didn’t want to talk politics and offered him a beer and a blank tape onto which he could share his life story. I offered Nono a blank canvas until way beyond the point when I realized the version of masculinity he was teaching me about was warped. In the version he preached, you married a good woman, but you didn’t have to love her as long as you put money on the table and kept from hitting her. You fathered children you were never around to see because you had other, manlier things to tend to, like working late and crisscrossing the country following your favorite soccer team. You clocked in at your job every morning before the butt-crack of dawn and drank wine with every meal (these things were appealing). But you also gave up every chance at real friendship because you were too busy fighting, hogging the spotlight, or too afraid of being called a nancy if you showed some vulnerability.
I often return to the question of what it means to be a man, whether in my mind or my statements to the public and on social media or Substack. I’ve explored it here before in terms of general stereotypes of masculinity—owning tools, working a blue-collar job, preparing meat, and knowing how to take apart a car engine or a gun. But even in the broader categories of physical strength, courage, mastery, and honor, I don’t break the 50th percentile.
For the past weeks, I’ve been listening to two songs on repeat: Alex Melton’s cover of “I Should’ve Been a Cowboy” by Toby Keith—I’ll write a column about that one in the next couple of weeks—and Ben Rector’s “What Makes a Man.” Though I’m not a huge Rector fan, he’s written songs about things I think about a lot now: “Old Friends,” about what makes your childhood buddies different from your grown ones, and “Heroes,” about growing up and realizing the people you looked up to were screwed up, too.
There’s a verse in that first song in which Rector mentions his dad:
Well, my father
He’ll never see his name in lights
Worked at a desk his whole damn life
Didn’t chase his dreams
Gave himself so me and my sisters would be alright
The next line reads, “Sometimes I wonder what they’ll say of me when I am gone…” It’s a big thought in a song full of them. It’s something I talk with Haley, my therapist, my best friends and pastors, and other artists about all the time. We often phrase it another way. We ask, “What will be my legacy?”
I’m in the awkward position many of you are or have been in of serving as the bridge generation in your families. My dad sacrificed so that I could get my education and have a better quality of life than he does. This is a typical immigrant or working-class family narrative. He’s sitting in a chair at home right now, his knee torn apart after years of abusing his body with 70-hour workweeks and salt and mayonnaise, trying to figure out how to make it if he can’t work another day past his 65 years as a plumber/laborer. For all my moaning about my lack of literary success, I have two college degrees, a 401k and a pension, a job with ample time off, and for which I sit my butt in a chair for no more than 8 hours a day.
I thought that by making good on my dad’s sacrifice I had to be not just “some ancient kind of man,” as Jason Isbell sings in “Alabama Pines,” but also a man who made the world his own. Mixed up with the view of Christianity I had in my college years, this meant putting both the Canever name and Jesus’s on the map. I convinced myself I had to be important (“inimitable, an original,” “not throwing away my shot,” and so many phrases from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton). I am the promise of a dream deferred (as E. Alex Jung put it so poetically in his review of The Farewell). I couldn’t be the reason anyone in the family asked, “So what was the point of making it to America after all? What was the point of all those hours your father worked, or all those As on your report card?”
Having children has been changing me, slowly and painfully. I’ve been prompted by people I care about and respect to think not about what accolades I achieve that form part of a legacy my children won’t care about. Even good ones! I feel sad when I meet supposedly great Christian men—those who lead charities, pay for kids in the Philippines to see dentists, and offer the best advice to strangers—with children who despise them or live lives intended to nullify all the principles they were raised on. I don’t blame the kids but wonder, instead, if their dad really walked the talk.
In her eulogy of me, I don’t think Alba will mention any of the points I put in my bio. Because I don’t really care that much about all the hours my dad worked, the money he made, or the respect his colleagues have for him. What hurts to this day is that he was never around to talk to me. He didn’t take an interest in me beyond what he was supposed to teach me as a man. Will being successful will be enough for my kids? I doubt it. I think what’ll matter more is that I was a source of trust, warmth, guidance, and friendship. It counts nothing toward my career or any of the dreams that remain of writing fellowships and living in Buenos Aires or trekking to the base camp of Mount Everest. Still, I think the time I spend wrestling with them at night, reading them books, answering Alba’s never-ending questions (so much like her father, that one), or going on silly little adventures in the backyard will make the eulogy, not how many books I sold.
I could write another 2,000 words on this, but I’ll leave it here for now, along with the lyrics of Rector’s song. See you next week.
“What Makes A Man”
Well my father
He’ll never see his name in lights
Worked at a desk his whole damn life
Didn’t chase his dreams, gave himself
So me and my sisters would be all right
Sometimes I wonder
What they’ll say of me when I am gone
When my daughter’s living on
Will she care if strangers thought that I was famous
Or just that I was never home?
Is it the things you’ve done, the places that you’ve been?
Chasing down some dream you’ve been imagining
Or is it making peace with who you are and where you stand?
I’m trying to find what makes a man
If I’m honest
I am plagued by the fear that I am not enough
So I work hard to measure up
I’ve run a million miles, climbed a mountain-high
And felt the same when I was done
Is it the things you’ve done, the places that you’ve been?
Chasing down some dream you’ve been imagining
Or is it making peace with who you are and where you stand?
Oh, I’m trying to find what makes a man
Is it power?
Is it fame?
Is it money?
Is it just a game?
Is it always wanting more?
Or is it in finding peace in what you had all along?
Is it the things you’ve done, the places that you’ve been?
Chasing down some dream you’ve been imagining
Or is it making peace with who you are and where you stand?
I’m trying to find what makes a man
I’ve been trying to find
What makes a man
I’ve been trying to find
What makes a man