Sunnyoutside Press, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-934513-28-6
Paperback, 150 pp., $18
In a courtroom, witnesses are required to take an oath: It’s too easy otherwise to imbue what one sees with what one hoped to have seen or what one wished had never happened. Bearing witness (never a light load) requires just the facts. It is Curtis Smith’s strength, in Witness, his collection of eighteen essays, that, as if sworn, he tells the unvarnished truth of daily occurrences from the first six years of his son’s life. Further, he never flinches when he discusses and analyzes those events and what they mean—both for himself, his son, and for the reader. He admits his fears and weaknesses, worries and hopes.
Smith takes as subject material the domestic and quotidian: toy giraffes, a Halloween devil costume, mollusks on a beach, frosted forests, Lester Young CDs, and Goodnight Moon. He describes having himself tattooed, picking his son up from daycare (and watching him fight with another boy), watching the boy fall asleep, looking at photos the boy had taken. Such experiences often pass us by unnoticed and unremarked, background noise as we struggle with paying the bills, getting ready for work, and making it to appointments on time. But it is such daily events that Smith finds the most important, the most defining, both for his son and, surprisingly, for himself: He learns as much about himself as he does his son. In “Psych 101, Revisited,” he writes:
Before becoming a father, I’d envisioned a child’s milestones differently. I thought of birthdays, heights notched on a kitchen doorway. I pictured first steps, first words, and true, such events are noteworthy, but they’re also expected, and what’s touched me most have been the surprises, the unexpected gems that have arisen organically from the chaos of his days.
These days are made up of the mundane, but by close observation, Smith discovers what it means to be a father: He worries―will his son be normal? Can he help his son grow without shielding him from the realities of life? He marvels at his son’s growth and change, at his own redefinition of himself as a father.
This isn’t to say that Smith’s collection is the literary equivalent of What To Expect—The Toddler Years. Smith also addresses serious matters: the murder of a former student (“. . . here’s where all the forces that separate us fade because in this stillness, we are ultimately united, each of us equal in the hush of death”), Lynndie England and Abu Ghraib, and flag-covered coffins, home from Iraq. They’re all related, in Witness, the personal and the public. And it is here where it does not matter whether the reader is a father (or a parent, for that matter). We all feel a tension between the experience of real life’s ugliness (the “unspeakable beneath” Smith notices) and the childlike innocence of what we hope for and dream about. It is no accident that Smith ends his anthology with the titular essay, “Witness,” about his own father’s death. We’re all someone’s child, and it is our childhood that makes us who we are.
At their heart, these essays are about one father’s love for his son, about a father hoping to guide his son into maturity. One image, however, stands above the rest―a father wondering about his son, how best to answer the questions he will inevitably ask. What matters isn’t the answer, Smith realizes, but instead the moment they share: “I kneel on the cold concrete and synchronize my breath with my boy’s, the two of us repeatedly losing and finding each other through the hazy exhaust of our all-too-human machines. Hello, my son! Goodbye! Hello!”
Visit http://www.curtisjsmith.com/ for more about this author
John Pahle teaches high school English near Ann Arbor, Michigan. His nonfiction has appeared in Arts and Opinion, Eclectica, BloodLotus, and the now-defunct CRAM magazine. He is currently writing a piece detailing the class, power, and gender issues facing a main clause and a subordinate clause trying to make a go of it.
