The Tape and the Tower

The summer between sixth and seventh grade, my father drove me to Chicago.

It was a father-son trip, and it had an official purpose, though no one named it out loud. That was how my parents handled preparing us for adolescence: indirectly, earnestly, with wheels turning under the message.

The sex talk was in there — that is the part that makes the story — but the tapes were bigger than that. What happens to a body, yes, but also how to navigate life as a teenager, and how to do it as a Christian. The whole passage into that next country, narrated in advance by a man neither of us knew but both of us were apparently expected to trust.

They did not sit us down at the kitchen table. That was not their way. Not his, especially. My father was not a kitchen-table confessor. He was not a man who easily entered a room carrying a subject like that in both hands.

Instead, my mother took my sister to Appleton, to the big mall, a shopping day with a cassette playing in the car: Dr. James Dobson explaining what was coming for a child entering adolescence.

And my father took me to Chicago with the same tapes.

One tape after another, the whole drive down and back.

Neither of us said a word about them.

He put the tape in. Dobson talked. The highway went by. The tape ended, and he put in the next one. The cornfields and billboards slid past the windows. The car filled with the radio-broadcast authority of evangelical parenting. Bodies. Urges. Temptation. Responsibility. Purity. Manhood, as explained by cassette.

I understood, without being told, that this was the talk.

The tapes were saying what he was not going to say.

He was probably open to questions, if I had ever been brave enough to ask one. I was not. I was a boy in a car with his father, and the air between us was already full of enough impossible words. So we rode together through the cringe — and it was cringe, deep and full-body, the kind that makes your bones want to leave your skin — while that calm, certain voice explained bodies and urges and adolescence as my actual father sat two feet away with both hands on the wheel.

We let the tapes do the talking.

Then we never mentioned them again.

It belonged to a whole category of instruction from those years. The evangelical world we lived in kept trying to teach us difficult things sideways. There were other sex talks in Sunday school. There were warnings about dating, bodies, music, culture, lust, rebellion, the world. There was the workshop some of the men decided would be good for us kids, about subliminal demonic messages hidden in music and advertising — an evening spent learning to fear records and billboards, as if Satan had a marketing department and a backmasking budget.

Adults circled the things they could not say plainly. They handed us tapes and diagrams and warnings instead.

I can laugh about most of it now.

It is stranger to think about from where I stand today, no longer a born-again believer, looking back at two parents earnestly arming their children with Dobson tapes for a world they saw through that lens. The awkwardness has a second layer now. The theology. The fear. The gender scripts. The assumption that adolescence was a border crossing into danger and that the proper equipment was doctrine, modesty, restraint, and a reliable Christian psychologist on cassette.

But I want to say this plainly, because it is true: I appreciate what they were trying to do.

They saw a hard passage coming for their children, and they did not ignore it. They knew something was changing in us and that it mattered. They may not have had the language I would choose now. They may not have known how to speak from their own bodies or their own uncertainties. But they found the best tool their world offered, and they put real miles behind it.

My father took a day, a car, a city, a motel, museum tickets, elevator fares, restaurant meals, and two hundred miles of highway, and arranged them around a conversation he could not bring himself to have.

That counts for something.

But here is the thing about that trip, the thing that has outlasted the cringe.

It was not really about the tapes.

The tapes were the cover story, or maybe the toll paid at the border. What the trip actually was, truly, was a good time between a father and a son. A father wanting to show his boy the big city. A father who had watched that boy draw the Sears Tower over and over — from the street, from a distance, in perspective, working out how a thing that tall behaves when you look up at it — and who decided the boy should stand under the real one.

I had done my homework the way I did homework for the things I loved, which is to say obsessively and without being asked.

I had read everything I could find about the tower. I had drawn it again and again. I had studied the bundled-tube structure without knowing that phrase would stay with me. I had built it too — a cardboard Sears Tower, my own version, the nine bundled columns rising to their staggered heights on a bedroom floor in rural Wisconsin. Tape, cardboard, pencil lines, a child’s best approximation of grandeur.

And then I was standing in it.

That is still one of the great miracles of childhood: the thing you have loved in miniature becoming suddenly actual. The paper dinosaur as skeleton. The map as landscape. The cardboard tower as steel and glass. The drawing becoming a place with doors.

We took the full tour. We went up to the Skydeck. I loved every part of it, but what I remember loving most were the maps.

Up there, they had maps of the city so you could stand at the glass and match the skyline to its names. And I already knew the names. Standard Oil. The Hancock. Down along the lakefront, the Shedd Aquarium and the Field Museum. Buildings I had only ever seen in books and drawn in pencil were suddenly real and arranged below me in their actual positions, the whole city like a model I could finally see to scale.

I had spent years drawing cross-sections and cutaways, wanting the walls removed so the system was visible.

The Skydeck was that wish granted.

The whole city sliced open by altitude.

From up there, Chicago became readable. Streets became lines. Buildings became parts. The lake held the edge. The museums sat where the map said they would. The trains stitched the city together. Scale, distance, structure, movement — all of it was below us, not as an abstraction but as proof.

The farm was large in one way. The city was large in another.

I stood at the glass between those two understandings of the world.

We went to the Field Museum too. And the Planetarium — I am fairly sure that was this trip and not the family one, because it was so plainly for me. Astronomy was one of my orbits, the interest that faded and returned like a radio station on a long drive, and it had lately taken the form of model rocketry.

Dad had helped me with the rockets in fifth grade. They were my science fair project that year. We built and launched them with the seriousness such things deserved. Glue, fins, engines, parachutes, countdowns. The small drama of ignition and recovery.

And back in third grade, I had built my own planetarium — a big wood box painted black on the inside, foam balls for planets suspended in their little ordered distances — made for no reason except that I wanted it to exist. I wanted a universe I could enter, or at least one I could kneel beside and peer into.

So the Planetarium was the tower all over again.

The boy builds his own version out of whatever the house has on hand, and then the father takes him to stand inside the real one.

That was the pattern I did not know I was living inside. I made the small thing first: the tower, the rockets, the box of planets. Then my father took me to the large thing, not to correct me, not to show me how small my attempt had been, but to let the attempt open outward. To let the cardboard and glue become a doorway.

We stayed in a cheap motel out on Lincoln Avenue and took the El into the city each day, which was its own wonder. The train itself. The stations. The platforms. The ride in. The city arriving not all at once but in pieces, stop by stop, steel by brick by billboard by window. I had grown up in a world where movement mostly meant car, tractor, bicycle, foot. The El felt like infrastructure made visible, like being carried by the skeleton of the city.

And we went out to eat. A couple of times.

That may not sound like much, but our family hardly ever went out to eat. A restaurant meal was a rare event, and here we were having them in Chicago, in the middle of a trip that already had a motel and museum tickets and tower admission in it. It felt enormous to me then.

Looking back now, I understand it differently.

This was probably an expensive trip for our family. Not impossible, maybe, but not casual. Not the sort of thing my parents did without thinking. He had budgeted for it. He had decided it was worth it. He spent money on gas, a room, food, admissions, transit, and time away from home because something in him believed his son needed to see the city.

Here is what surprised me most, though I would not have had words for it at the time.

My father was not out of his element.

I watched for it, the way a kid watches. A child knows when a parent is uncertain. We feel it in the shoulders, in the voice, in the extra glance at the sign, in the way the hand tightens. But I saw none of that. He moved through the Loop the way he moved through a barn or a hayfield — like a man who knew where things were and what came next.

He handled the El, the streets, the crowds, the tickets, the timing, all of it, like he had been there many times.

Maybe he had.

I never asked.

That is one of the strange things about parents. They seem, when you are a child, to begin when you begin. You know they had lives before you, but you do not really believe in those lives. Not in detail. Not in subway lines and old neighborhoods and private competencies. My father had a whole relationship with the city I knew nothing about. He had a fluency I had not seen because I had only known him in the places where I needed him: the farm, the house, the church, the road.

But there he was, fluent in Chicago too.

A pro in the city and a pro in the country, and it did not seem to cost him anything to be either one.

And the whole time, he was doing the thing he always did, the thing I am only now beginning to understand at fifty-one, with a six-year-old of my own.

He was fostering my curiosity.

He did not lecture me about architecture. He did not quiz me on the tower facts I had memorized. He did not make me perform my interest for him. He just took the boy who drew skyscrapers to the place where the skyscrapers were, and stood beside him at the glass, and let the city do the teaching.

That was his gift.

He understood, maybe without ever needing to say so, that curiosity does not always need instruction. Sometimes it needs proximity. It needs someone with keys and a driver’s license and enough money for admission to put you next to the thing that has already been calling to you.

That was his way with the hard talk too, I think.

The tapes get judged harshly from here — outsourcing the sex talk to a radio psychologist, the silence, the cringe. Fair enough. I understand the judgment. I share some of it. But the shape of it was the same shape as everything else he taught me.

He did not explain.

He put me next to the thing and stayed there.

The seagull. The chickens. The brakes. The rockets. The tower. And once, a cassette deck and two hundred miles of highway.

He could not say the words, so he drove me to Chicago and played the tape.

And around the tape — before it, after it, above it on the 103rd floor — he gave me the city, the train, the restaurant meals we could barely afford, the museums, the planetarium, and the tower I had built out of cardboard standing real against the lake.

I remember almost nothing Dobson said.

I remember everything else.

Maybe that was the actual talk. Not the tape’s information, but the trip’s arrangement. A father spending money he had to think about. A father riding an elevator a quarter mile into the sky. A father standing beside his son at the glass so the boy could look down at a world larger than the farm, larger than the church basement, larger than anyone back home was letting on.

You are going to grow up, the trip said.

Here is how big the world is where you will be doing it.