To the Boy in the Bucket Hat

Letter No. 1 of Letters to People I’ll never meet again

Dear Seventh-Grade Caleb,

First of all, what the fuck was going on?

Seriously. Between the questionable fashion choices, the emotional instability, and the deeply unfortunate realization that other people had opinions about us, I have several questions.

Although, to be fair, I don't think anybody really knows what the hell they're doing in seventh grade.

It's a strange age. You're not exactly a child anymore, but you're certainly not an adult. You're just this awkward little human being experiencing seventeen different emotions before lunch, none of which you can adequately explain. And somehow, you're expected to solve algebra equations in the middle of all that.

I think about you sometimes.

Not because seventh grade was particularly extraordinary. Quite a bit of it was painfully ordinary. But because it was around then that you started paying attention to things you hadn't thought much about before.

How people looked at you. What they thought of you. Whether you belonged.

And God, did you want to belong.

By then, life had already moved you around quite a bit.

You'd spent your first eleven years growing up in Richmond, Virginia, where things felt familiar.

Then came the recession in 2008, which, as it turns out, was not particularly concerned with the stability of our childhood.

Things got hard. We moved to a small country town before eventually finding ourselves in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in one of those cookie-cutter golf-course neighborhoods where every house looked like it belonged to someone with a boat and a suspiciously strong opinion about lawn maintenance.

It was a nice place, technically.

The sort of neighborhood where the landscaping was so meticulously maintained that you weren't even supposed to mow your own lawn.

Which, for a boy who loved getting his hands dirty, seemed like a rather ridiculous arrangement.

Our house sat near Jordan Lake, surrounded by golf carts, immaculate lawns, and people who apparently had very strong feelings about shrubbery.

It never quite felt like us.

But things were starting to feel normal again.

Well, normal-ish.

You'd gone from small private schools, where everyone was a little weird and nobody seemed terribly bothered by it, to an enormous public school filled with hundreds of kids who apparently understood a social rulebook you hadn't received.

You were determined to figure it out.

Which brings me to the bucket hat.

I remember a Saturday afternoon in the middle of a North Carolina summer.

June, I think.

The kind of afternoon when the air is so thick you can practically feel yourself breathing it. Birds were chirping, golf carts hummed somewhere beyond the house, and the sun had absolutely no intention of showing mercy.

You'd just finished mowing the lawn.

Most thirteen-year-old boys probably would've called it a day, but not you.

No, you had bigger plans.

Along the right side of our driveway was a narrow flower bed, already crowded with trees and bushes. Perfectly respectable landscaping, I suppose.

But you thought it needed something.

More flowers. More color. Something that might make the place feel a little less like every other house on the street.

So you put on your gardening gloves, grabbed your tools, and got to work.

The ground was practically concrete.

For all that humidity, the soil was so dry you could barely dig a damn hole. You'd press the shovel into the earth, struggle to break it apart, and then go right back to trying.

And there you were.

An oversized middle-school lacrosse shirt. Basketball shorts hanging below your knees.

Absolutely nothing matching. Your Justin Bieber haircut, which had seemed like a perfectly reasonable decision at the time, was now full of sweat and dirt.

And, naturally, the bucket hat.

You looked like the discount version of somebody with their own HGTV show.

But you were having the time of your life.

You loved that sort of thing.

Gardening. Painting. Drawing. Building something. Occasionally destroying something, which I suppose was just creativity without adult supervision.

Your mind was always wandering, imagining things, trying to make something out of practically nothing.

You were a rather peculiar little creature when left to your own devices.

At night, you'd lie in bed with a speaker playing your favorite songs, quietly singing along and imagining you'd written them yourself.

You'd watch concert videos on YouTube until you fell asleep, dreaming of what it might feel like to stand onstage with thousands of people singing your words back to you.

And when you weren't performing for an imaginary audience, you were having entire conversations with yourself, practicing things you wished you'd said or imagining how life might unfold.

Occasionally you'd make faces in the mirror until you started laughing at your own reflection.

An absolute lunatic.

And then there was the night your brother recorded you singing in bed.

Oh, God.

An audience.

An actual audience.

You were mortified.

Although I suppose that was a fairly predictable occupational hazard for someone conducting nightly concerts in a shared household.

But you kept singing.

And that Saturday, you kept gardening.

Moving from one flower bed to another, deciding where things belonged and imagining what they might look like once everything started growing.

Sometimes you'd straighten up just to admire what you'd done.

And if you were particularly pleased with yourself, you'd stand there a little longer.

Nobody had to tell you it was good.

You liked it.

That was enough.

Until the boys showed up.

Two of our neighborhood friends came over, and naturally, your brother came running outside, ready to go wherever the afternoon was taking them.

One of the boys asked if you wanted to come along.

You said no.

You were gardening, for God's sake. There were flowers to plant. A very important horticultural operation was underway.

Apparently, this was hilarious.

One of the boys started making fun of your gardening and that ridiculous hat.

I don't remember exactly what he said.

But I remember what you did.

You stumbled over your words.

Looked down.

And lowered yourself back onto your knees.

A moment earlier, you'd been fighting with the dry ground, determined to get your flowers planted. Now you were kneeling in the same place, hoping the conversation would move on without you.

You looked toward the other boy.

The one who called you K.

Only your brother really called you that, but you never minded hearing it from him. Somehow, it felt natural. Like he'd been part of the family all along.

He didn't say anything.

And I remember wishing he would.

Eventually, the boys left.

You stayed where you were.

Then you took a deep breath, pulled off the hat, and threw it aside.

Of all the things you couldn't control that afternoon, apparently the bucket hat was one of the few things you could.

You went back to the flowers.

Which sounds wonderfully confident, doesn't it?

A young man refusing to compromise his happiness for the approval of his peers. How inspiring.

Somebody call the motivational speakers.

Except that's not entirely what happened.

You'd kept gardening.

But you'd taken off the hat.

And it would be a long time before I understood why both of those things mattered.

I've been thinking about that other boy lately.

The one who called you K.

God, he was short.

A tiny little man with the confidence of someone approximately six feet taller.

Everyone teased him about his height, including himself. He'd laugh along, grinning that enormous grin of his, without seeming terribly concerned about what anybody thought.

His laugh was contagious.

He had a way of making people feel included without turning it into some grand gesture.

If everyone was getting together, he'd come looking for you.

"K, we want you to come."

Sometimes you said yes.

Sometimes you didn't.

And the next time, he'd ask again.

There were afternoons upstairs in our den, playing ping-pong, watching sports, and talking about school or lacrosse.

Your brother would do something completely ridiculous, as older brothers are apparently contractually obligated to do, and the two of you would fall apart laughing.

You could talk about almost anything with him.

You could also say absolutely nothing.

Either was fine.

For all his confidence, he wasn't perfect. He teased you for being a dork. Sometimes he'd laugh along with other boys when you wished he wouldn't. Occasionally, he'd brush off something that mattered to you.

But then another afternoon would come, and there he'd be, asking you to join everyone again.

You admired that about him.

His ease with people. The way he could laugh at himself. How little his height seemed to bother him, even when everybody made it the subject of conversation.

You looked up to him.

Which, given his height, must have been rather exhausting.

And then there was the fact that you thought he was attractive.

Well.

That certainly complicated matters.

Not because you were madly in love with him. You weren't.

He felt more like a brother in many ways. Someone familiar. Someone you trusted.

But you were beginning to notice qualities in boys that you didn't yet know how to describe.

Kindness. Confidence. Someone who could laugh at himself without needing everyone else to approve.

You liked being around him.

And you liked that he wanted you around.

Perhaps that's why you looked toward him that afternoon in the garden.

You'd seen him make room for people so many times.

For a moment, you wished he'd make a little room for you.

But the next time you saw him, nothing had changed.

You still played ping-pong. You still laughed at your brother. You still talked about school and lacrosse.

And when everyone was making plans, he kept asking.

Sometimes the people who matter most to us have absolutely no idea which little moments we've carried into adulthood.

I wonder if he remembers any of them.

Of course, the garden wasn't the only place you were trying to figure yourself out.

You wanted to be like the other boys.

Or at least convince them that you were.

You played lacrosse, swam, and loved shooting hoops. You also liked flowers, art, singing imaginary concerts, and having lengthy conversations with yourself.

You contained multitudes, darling.

Unfortunately, most of those multitudes were having a nervous breakdown.

And then, of course, there was the whole liking-boys situation.

Which, frankly, was rather inconvenient.

Not the liking boys part. That was actually quite nice.

It was everything that apparently came with it.

Most of the boys were beginning to develop a rather enthusiastic interest in girls.

And you were developing a rather enthusiastic interest in the boys who were developing an interest in girls.

A truly spectacular arrangement.

You'd heard the jokes. The comments people made about gay people when they assumed nobody in the room might be gay.

Sometimes you laughed along.

Sometimes you didn't.

But you listened.

And when the boys started talking about girls, you knew how to participate.

"Oh yeah, I like her. We talk a lot."

Perfectly normal teenage-boy behavior.

Except you knew you were pretending.

You watched your brother especially.

He was your role model, and he seemed to move through friendships with an ease you couldn't quite understand.

You borrowed his expressions. Followed his lead. Tried to figure out which parts of being a boy you were supposed to have mastered already.

Of course, I know now that he must've had his own uncertainties.

But he was your older brother.

You figured he knew things.

Around certain people, you were outspoken, ridiculous, and affectionate.

Around others, you spoke a little less.

You'd think about what to say before saying it. Sometimes you'd decide it was better not to say anything at all.

I remember one afternoon when one of your brother's friends came over.

He was loud, energetic, and possessed the sort of confidence that seemed to require everyone in the room to acknowledge his existence.

You found him exhausting.

You also thought he was attractive.

Which was annoying, because apparently your taste in boys had absolutely no interest in cooperating with your opinions about their personalities.

He was changing in your room before going to play golf.

You were watching television.

Or at least you were supposed to be watching television.

You looked over.

He noticed.

And he called you weird for looking at him.

Well, that was unfortunate.

For once, you had absolutely nothing clever to say.

I suspect the television suddenly became a fascinating piece of entertainment.

And there was another boy at school.

He was gay. Open about it. Sometimes dressed in girls' clothes.

He was sweet to you.

He liked you, actually.

But you kept your distance.

Not because he'd done anything wrong.

You'd heard what people said about boys like him, and you were terrified they might start saying those things about you.

I wonder whether he noticed.

Whether he understood why you never quite let him get close.

You weren't cruel to him. But you weren't particularly welcoming, either.

You'd watch someone laugh at himself for being short and wish you had his confidence.

Then you'd see another boy being himself in a way you couldn't imagine doing and pretend you didn't notice.

An extraordinary amount of effort for someone who just wanted to get through seventh grade.

I wish you'd been kinder to that boy.

Not because he could've taught you some wonderful lesson about courage.

Maybe you would've discovered you had absolutely nothing in common.

Maybe you would've become friends.

You never gave either possibility much of a chance.

There were people you dismissed before they could form an opinion about you.

And there were afternoons you turned down because you weren't sure who might be there.

You could meet somebody for eleven seconds and decide you had absolutely no interest in knowing them for a twelfth.

A rather impressive talent for someone who wanted so badly to be liked.

Still, I don't want to give the impression that you spent your entire childhood conducting emotional risk assessments.

Because there was that one night.

Oh, God.

The ding-dong ditching.

What the actual fuck were we thinking?

There were four of you, I think.

Four middle-school boys with absolutely nowhere important to be and somehow even less common sense.

And somebody had the brilliant idea to start ringing people's doorbells and running away.

A truly sophisticated criminal enterprise.

Now, ordinarily, you weren't much of a troublemaker.

You were the kid who spent his Saturdays planting flowers and imagining he'd written chart-topping songs.

But that night, for reasons I still can't quite explain, you thought:

Fuck it.

And off you went.

One house.

A doorbell.

A sprint back across the lawn.

Then another.

You'd barely made it out of sight before someone started laughing, which naturally made the rest of you laugh, which made running considerably more difficult.

It was spectacularly stupid.

You loved every second.

Until somebody called the cops.

Oh, wonderful.

Apparently, the residents of our lovely golf-course neighborhood were not particularly appreciative of four idiots terrorizing their doorbells.

And just like that, the night took a rather dramatic turn.

At one point, one of your friends found himself being chased by dogs.

Actual dogs.

Not metaphorical dogs. Not some exaggerated expression of childhood panic.

Dogs.

He went running through a stream trying to escape, emerging covered in mud.

Meanwhile, somewhere out on the golf course, a police car was looking for you.

You ducked behind a hill as its lights moved across the grounds, crouching low enough that nobody could see your heads.

There you were.

Thirteen years old.

Hiding from the police on a golf course.

Because you'd rung somebody's doorbell.

I mean, honestly.

Eventually, you made it back to your friend's house.

All four of you out of breath.

One of you covered in mud, looking like he'd just returned from a military operation conducted entirely in a swamp.

His mother took one look at you.

She wanted to know what the hell had happened.

A perfectly reasonable question.

But nobody could get an answer out.

Someone started laughing.

Then someone else.

And before long, all four of you were falling apart, struggling to catch your breath, still terrified by the possibility of what might have happened.

I'm sure his mother was delighted.

There you were, sweaty, muddy, completely ridiculous, and laughing so hard you could barely stand.

For once, there was absolutely no question about whether you looked cool.

You didn't.

Not remotely.

But I would give quite a lot to hear that laughter again.

Eventually, we left Chapel Hill.

You were ready.

There had been good memories. Wonderful people. Friendships that mattered more than you probably realized.

But there were also things about those years you wanted to put behind you.

The uncertainty. The embarrassment. The exhausting business of trying to work out who you were while everybody else seemed to have an opinion.

You wanted another beginning.

And you got one.

Although I still think about those afternoons.

The ping-pong games upstairs.

The golf course.

Four boys racing back to a house, absolutely terrified, only to spend the next several minutes laughing about it.

And that boy who called you K.

It's been eleven years since I've seen him.

Which seems ridiculous, considering how vividly I remember the feeling of being around him.

I wonder what he'd think of the person we've become.

Whether he'd recognize the kid who laughed with him upstairs in the den.

Whether he remembers coming over to ask you to hang out.

Probably not.

We were thirteen, after all.

There was quite a lot neither of us knew.

Sometimes I wish you'd told him how much you appreciated his friendship.

Not necessarily that you found him attractive. I don't know what either of you would've done with that information.

But that you liked being around him.

That you admired how comfortable he seemed in his own skin.

That you were grateful he kept asking you to come along, even when you turned him down.

And sometimes I wish you'd simply said yes more often.

Gone out with the boys.

Played another game.

Spent another afternoon doing something stupid enough to remember years later.

Of course, there were also afternoons when staying behind was exactly what you wanted.

I think about that, too.

The difference between choosing to stay and being too frightened to go.

I'm not sure you always knew which was which.

I'm not sure I always do now.

And I suppose there are things we'll never know about the people we once cared for.

Not because anything went wrong.

But because life kept moving.

And so did we.

My God, have we grown since then.

We've become more open. More honest. Considerably less concerned with arranging ourselves into whatever version we think other people want.

Not perfectly, of course.

We're still human.

And human beings are remarkably talented at complicating even the most straightforward situations.

Especially when feelings are involved.

I think you'd be proud of us.

Not just of the places we've gone or the things we've accomplished, although I suspect you'd have approximately seventeen questions about those, too.

But of how much easier it's become to simply be Caleb.

We have friends who know us. People who love us. A life filled with the sorts of things you used to imagine when your mind wandered off during algebra.

We're still writing. Still creating. Still making things out of practically nothing.

We even get paid to do some of it.

I know.

Absolutely outrageous.

Although I suspect you'd have one piece of advice for me.

Slow down.

Because somewhere between thirteen and twenty-seven, life became a rather impressive collection of plans, responsibilities, ambitions, expectations, and occasionally spectacular emotional catastrophes.

You would've hated the administrative responsibilities alone.

And not long ago, things got particularly difficult.

There was someone I cared about.

Someone whose presence in my life brought up feelings I hadn't experienced quite like that in a long time.

I was happy about it.

And frightened by it.

An impressive combination, really.

I found myself replaying conversations long after they'd ended.

Thinking about what I'd said.

What I should've said.

Whether I sounded too eager. Too distant. Too much like somebody who had absolutely no idea what he was doing.

Sometimes I wanted to explain myself until there was no possible room for misunderstanding.

Other times, I wanted to say nothing at all.

I'd sit with a conversation that had already ended, finding new ways I could've handled it.

And then I'd do it again.

For a man who spends so much time writing, you'd think I'd have learned that not every conversation needs another draft.

Apparently not.

And one day, while doing this particularly exhausting little routine, I thought about you.

Standing in the garden.

Stumbling over your words.

Looking down.

Then returning to the flowers because you didn't know what else to do.

Different circumstances. Considerably better vocabulary.

Same nervous little heart.

I had to laugh.

I'd spent so many years believing that growing older meant leaving certain things behind.

Apparently, some parts of us are more determined to stick around than others.

I hadn't thought about you properly in a while.

And suddenly, there you were.

Not in the way you used to look, or the way you talked, or that godforsaken hat.

But in the feeling.

The wanting.

The worrying.

The hope that someone might see you exactly as you are and still want to stay.

I used to think about those years and wish you'd done things differently.

Wish you'd spoken up more. Told people how you felt. Worried less about whether they liked you.

I sometimes wondered what your life might've looked like if you'd been a little braver.

And if I'm being completely truthful, part of me still wonders.

Why didn't you go with the boys more often?

Why did you spend so much time worrying about what might happen instead of enjoying what was actually happening?

You were thirteen, for God's sake.

You should've been having the time of your life.

But then I think about the conversations I still replay.

The affection I sometimes hold back.

The things I want so badly that I begin trying to hurry them along, as though life might cooperate if I could just find the correct combination of words.

And suddenly, I don't feel quite so qualified to lecture you.

You were thirteen.

You were experiencing things for the first time.

And despite how frightened you sometimes were, you made friends. You loved people. You created things.

You also made some impressively questionable decisions involving doorbells and law enforcement.

There were afternoons you missed.

And there were afternoons you lived so completely that you're still laughing about them fourteen years later.

I suppose that's childhood.

You were learning.

You didn't need to have everything figured out.

God knows I still don't.

And there's something else I've been thinking about.

The garden.

The funny thing is, after all these years, I still garden.

I still love getting my hands dirty. Still love planting flowers and watching something grow.

And when life gets noisy, when my thoughts get ahead of me or my feelings become something I can't quite make sense of, I often find myself outside.

Sometimes I go for a walk.

Sometimes I listen to music.

And sometimes I put my hands in the dirt.

There's still something about it.

The ordinary business of planting something, tending to it, and having absolutely no control over when it decides to bloom.

You can prepare the soil. Make sure it has enough water. Give it sunlight.

And then?

Well, you wait.

Which is a concept I've found considerably easier to practice with flowers than with people.

But we're learning.

And I think about how much you understood that without ever putting it into words.

You weren't gardening because you wanted somebody to admire you.

You weren't thinking about how it might look or what it said about the person you were becoming.

You just liked planting flowers.

You liked creating something beautiful.

And for a little while, nothing else required your attention.

I think I've spent quite a bit of adulthood trying to find my way back to moments like that.

The kind where you're so absorbed in what you're doing that you forget to wonder how you're being perceived.

Where something can be wonderful without needing to become an achievement.

Where you can simply enjoy being alive.

And the strange thing is, for all the wisdom we like to imagine comes with growing older, you were rather good at that.

At least when you weren't busy having a complete emotional crisis over middle-school social dynamics.

I wish I could tell you that I remember every detail of those years, but I don't.

Some faces have faded. Entire afternoons have disappeared. There are conversations I would give anything to hear again, even if they were probably about something as profoundly stupid as what everyone was doing that weekend.

I don't remember every joke the boys made.

I don't remember exactly what we talked about upstairs in the den.

And I couldn't tell you what happened to half the people we knew.

But I remember the feeling of being you.

All that creativity.

All that awkwardness.

All that love you had for people, even when you didn't always know what to do with it.

And I think about that Saturday in the garden.

The heavy June air.

The golf carts somewhere beyond the house.

The ground that wouldn't cooperate no matter how hard you tried to dig.

The boys leaving.

The ridiculous hat lying off to the side.

And a thirteen-year-old boy putting his hands back in the earth.

I wonder sometimes what I'd say if I could sit beside you that afternoon.

There are probably a hundred things I could tell you.

About growing up. About love. About all the wonderful, complicated, completely unexpected places life will take us.

I could tell you that one day you'll have friends who know the things you're afraid to say out loud.

That you'll fall in love.

That you'll get your heart broken.

That you'll survive things you never thought you'd have to.

And that, somehow, through all of it, you'll remain the same sentimental, slightly ridiculous human being you've always been.

But I don't think you'd need to hear any of that.

You'd probably be far too busy with your flowers anyway.

So maybe I'd just sit down beside you.

Pick up a shovel.

And help.

Because the truth is, I rather liked that kid.

Even with the ridiculous hat.

Especially with the ridiculous hat.

And the funny thing about remembering you is that it makes me wonder about the boy who came before you.

The one in Richmond, before the moves, before the enormous public school, before you started worrying quite so much about what other people thought.

The little boy who didn't yet know how complicated being a person could become.

I haven't thought about him properly in a while.

Perhaps I should.

Until then, K, keep planting your flowers.

Love,

Caleb