We see him run into the wall of Timmy’s rational, level-headed argument for more screen time. We see O’Brien reviewing Tad’s homework and getting whacked around by Timmy in ping-pong. The filmmaker spent four years dropping in on the O’Brien family-Tim, his indomitable wife Meredith, and their two smart and sensitive teenage sons, Timmy and Tad. ![]() That quality is lovingly captured in the thoughtful and intimate documentary, directed by Aaron Matthews, which shows O’Brien struggling to finish his last book as he appreciates family life. What is taken for granted in peacetime, as in youth, suddenly becomes so precious it makes you cry, and if there is any redeeming virtue to growing old, it is the pleasure I take in what had once seemed ridiculously ordinary.” “While I certainly do not enjoy old age any more than I enjoyed war, I do feel an intense, almost electric awareness of the physical world, as if everything on the planet has been magnified and brilliantly lighted. “You come to value things that never before had such crushing value,” O’Brien writes. The specter of death gives the book urgency, but so does the immediacy of life. “They’ll have some-I don’t know what the word is-some sound of my voice to remind them of the man they knew for a little while.” It’s a collection of essays for his sons-about his life and the lessons he has learned about war and writing-a memento for them when he’s gone. ![]() O’Brien’s acquaintance with the fragility of life moved him to write Dad’s Maybe Book, his first book since 2002 and the only one he has written since becoming a father. And when he became a father for the first time at the age of 56, O’Brien, an incorrigible smoker, feared that he would not live long enough to see his two sons graduate from college. ![]() As a soldier in Vietnam he stepped lightly, terrified that he’d step on a land mine that would turn him and his squad into red mist. As a teenager, O’Brien hid all the sharp kitchen knives under his mattress, convinced that his father was going to kill him.
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