So, I went to a James Taylor concert with my dad, who has been feeling depressed of late. When summer started, one night/morning at 4AM, just as I was about to go to bed, my dad came downstairs and started talking to me and told me how he was depressed, couldn't sleep, was having stomach troubles, was anxious about his career, etc. I really didn't know what to do. After that, whenever it was the two of us alone, he talked to me about his life and how he doesn't have anything to feel bad about, but he does anyway. I really don't know what to do with it all. I'm really terrible in serious situations where other people express sorrow under ordinary circumstances, so I completely out of my league with my dad talking about Paxil v. Prozac. On the way to and from the concert, the conversation was perilously strained and really all I can do in situations like these is nod my head along with him. I really wish I had the array of social skills necessary to deal with my depressed dad, but I don't think he has noticed how boggled I am. Anyhow, we left the concert a song or two after intermission since he was feeling crummy and sleepy.

To understand how weird all this is for me, you have to understand how emotionally distant he was throughout my childhood. I lack a whole range of social reflexes, because of the nature of my upbringing. Not that I usually mind, but circumstances like these that require listening and being supportive, they confound me. I'm just so awkward and out of place. All I do is occasionally mutter, "Uh huh."

It's just that my dad has never really communicated his feelings to me before. In the past, he would just give me vague speeches about life in general and stuff and that was it. I liked those speeches. Broad treatises on college and driving and friends and life and never putting a funnel in one's pants. At Governor's School, if he took me back from a long weekend, the drop off was so awkward. He'd just be like, "Well…" And that'd be it. It was a system; it worked. Now, I'm completely out of my league. I can't relate to normal people let alone my folks.

I'm afraid that everything that happens to my dad is some scary preview of where my life is headed. I was hoping the occasional funks of life would clear up, not become complex. I see my dad with my grandfather (his dad!) and it confuses me, start to finish. My dad has spoken with his dad, trained psychiatrist, about his worries. He correspondingly tells me if I ever feel depressed, I can come to him. *No thank you hand wave*

Orion, the mightiest constellation in the sky. Since my childhood, I've looked into the night sky in awe of him. Three shining points of light make Orion's belt easily identifiable. There was a time, when I was aware that Orion is the constellation with three stars in a row but still unsure which, out of the many other lines of stars, it is. Looking out the car window as we drove down the highway on an early winter night, I would try to guess which of the distant lights made up the belt of the celestial hunter. I looked from horizon to horizon until suddenly I saw them. There was no question about this line, it was too perfect, too brilliant, to be anything but the lord of the winter sky.

One week in Cub Scouts, I was taught the constellations of the winter sky. Orion's belt makes a line to Taurus, the bull, and Taurus leads to the Pleiades. After that on frosty winter nights, in the driveway with my father, I would learn that also neighboring were the Gemini twins, Cassiopeia, and the Big Dipper. We would huddle over an old field book with a map of the winter stars and watched as Canis Major slowly rose in the sky as the months sauntered past. Once, looking through an old telescope with my father, I glimpsed the rings of Saturn and watched as the moon was shrouded by an eclipse.

In the last days of summer before I began the sixth grade, our family went to my cousin's wedding in Erie, Pennsylvania. We stayed at a friend of the bride's house waiting for the big day. My dad took us boys out on the porch one night, where I saw something that city lights had heretofore hidden from us, the Milky Way. Gazing at the glowing band of fire stretched out by God himself at the dawn of time, I was awestruck. I saw more stars in that one night, than I had stargazing all the nights before. Continuing to look heavenward, we soon saw shooting stars, streaking overhead - dazzling remnants of some comet that only astronomers will ever find. It was sublime.

I was a Scout because my dad never could be, what with his being raised outside of the States. He grew up reading the Scouting for Boys manual, but there wasn't a chapter in the Rift Valley at the time, so he just dreamed. I'd go every week and tag along on camping trips. I rose to the rank of Life Scout, one small step from Eagle, but I never finished it. My heart wasn't ever really in it. My little brother though, he finished out last year. Beating me, again. Proving who's the better brother, again. Proving who's the son worth tears of joy.

They say Oedipus killed his dad and slept with his mom. As for us, my brother and I, we agree that our mom is a reverse role model. Everything we're not looking for in a woman. All the little things to avoid: Don't get a woman with bad self-esteem; don't get a woman who criticizes you constantly; don't get a woman who shops as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder; don't get a woman just because she's the first one to fall for your weirdo charm.

My mom started a furniture resale business recently, which makes sense because she was already buying furniture she wasn't going to use anyway. The woman used to spend more than $100/week at Goodwill, something I can't begin to imagine. Most of the kids agree that her business is a big part of what's depressing dad. He's worried about his place in the family on a subconscious level. When at last his weight loss and sleeplessness were brought to her attention and she started opening up to him, he started to improve. Or maybe it's just the medication. It's odd to think that my dad needs my mother's love and approval just to exist. Me, I'm bailing out her love in buckets before it sinks the ship.

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I still don't know the summer stars. I go outside, and all I can pick out are the ubiquitous Dippers. When it comes to charming the ladies, nothing beats looking at stars. My second girlfriend, I still don't know if she actually saw all those shooting stars, or if she just made it up. Either way, it was romantic at the time.

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My friend Seth, all I've seen of his dad is a telephone and an ATM. This kid, he'd get homesick if he didn't call his mom on occasion, but his dad… His dad's nothing but a bank deposit to him. Even in his photo album, the picture was of a ringing telephone.

My other friend, Joe Durden, his step-dad, he remade the world for that kid. Same with Shinji Ikari's dad. Those guys did everything for their sons but talk, relate, *shudder* share. They were too busy with the world to think about their actual kids. I think they liked the idea of Fatherhood more than the fact of their sons.

I used to have a pet hedgehog. I called it Ms. Maya Nettleship, after the first teacher I ever had a crush on. It was a cantankerous pet, constantly huffing and snorted, a curled up ball of spines. Eventually, I got it to calm down around me. I would crawl around in my hand, exposing its soft white furred belly to my gentle probing. People don't realize about hedgehogs that the quills put pressure on both ends. You guard yourself with your own pain. It's the Hedgehog's Dilemma; you hate loneliness, but to get close causes pain. I'm starting to think it's that way for everyone, fathers and sons.

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Neil, the relationships between father and son, brother and brother, husband and wife, these things are strange to me. I never know what to make of them. The moth seeks the pure moonlight and is burnt in a flame. And isn't that the way? Every damn time. You know that saying about how you hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways. To me as a kid, my dad was intimidating. Now, he's been reduced by time and errant brain chemicals and woman who's distant to him. And I'm afraid for my selfish future. And I wish my dad were strong and invincible, like all fathers should be. But no one's Superman. Not even my old man. Not even Orion. In the end, the greater hunter Diana killed him, angered by his sexual impropriety. She placed his constellation such that he would eternally be chasing and chased by Scorpio, the summer's defining constellation and Diana's instrument in his demise.

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Neil, it's said that my dad cried when I was born. Those tears were frozen into my name, a mixture of the names of my ancestors on his side. He thought it up when he was a kid himself, and saved it for his first son. And I'm never quite sure I can fill its shoes. All those Swedes, fathers and sons into generations receding, handing me my name like a gauntlet. It's a sad and beautiful world. And I guess my dad knows that too, as strange as it may seem.