CityView Magazine

10 | July/August 2015 My favorite wake-up call in the pre-dawn comes by text from my swell pal about 10 minutes before my alarm goes off. I already tumble between sleep and consciousness, having looked at the time thrice in the last two hours out of fear of oversleeping. So the text ding jars me up in bed, grabbing for the phone as if something is wrong. The message is short with the intent of driving me into the dark-before-dawn, bound for some prearranged destination: "It's a man's morning!" McFadyen's Musings BY BILL MCFADYEN The Making of Men M y male peer group has had about 35 years to accom- plish being a man. Some golf. Some hunt and fish. Some run marathons. Some do all of that and more. Some just watch television. Most have sired children, which is pretty easy ac- tually. e ones endeared to truly hard work take a serious role in guiding that offspring into adulthood. e sorry ones adopt the easy work and just sire more. Colin Cowherd on ESPN Radio has be- come my favorite social commentator. He said recently, while disparaging Johnny Football's entourage, that men tend to hang out with versions of themselves. So most of the guys with whom I regularly consort know from one day to the next what their children are doing and most of them re- quire at least tacit endorsement of those adolescent activities. Since this is CityView's Men's Issue, I confine my parenting corol- lary to making men of boys. (Blessed with a daughter, too, I save that musing for the issue on Perseverance through Confusion and Self-Doubt). My first ideas for becoming a man came from the pages of a book. The Old Man and the Boy, a Carolina classic, by Southport- native Robert Ruark, compiled in 1953 from magazine articles about his young life in and around the briny water at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. As "the Boy" in the sto- ry, Robert Ruark had my help reeling in eve- ry fish, pulling every trigger, training every bird dog and eating every meal. I had two "Old Men" in my life at that point. I had my grandfather, Scott McFadyen Sr. and my un- cle, Reg Barton showing me how to do those kinds of things. My grandfather died when I was 13. My uncle is still alive and came out to admire my garden just the other day. When I finished the book, I started it over again. ere is no tally of the times I have picked it up since then. Before Grand- daddy died, I wrote a report on the book for Miss Gay Watson, my junior high Eng- lish teacher. She sent it in to the Board of Education for a creative writing contest. It was my first published article, I suppose. e mass production of it was probably on one of those hand-cranked mimeograph machines in some teacher's lounge, one of the ones with the blue ink that ran all over everything when you changed the paper on the drum. at compilation of young local authors made its way into my mom's hands somehow in May of 1974, just about a week aer Granddaddy was buried. I think my brother read my thesis aloud at the first family gathering aer the funeral. A framed edi- tion of that book report stayed on Mom's wall wherever she lived thereaer. In 1991, she brought it to my newly acquired home on Middle Road. It hangs there still. No doubt, I wanted to be the kind of man that young Robert was becoming in the book. I saw romance and self-gratification in catching fish from small boats, having my own bird dog, creeping out of the house ear- ly on cold mornings, cooking what I killed. I have done and still do all those things. Eventually, we boys are turned loose upon the world, free from the watchful eyes of our Old Men. It takes so very little to ruin ones self when the Old Men are not watching. My hero, Robert Ruark, drank himself to death. He might not have called it tragic, as he had been all over the world doing things he wanted to do all along the way. It was tragic to me, though, for all the lost words he could have written in his six- ties and seventies. e realization came at some point that the true hero, the real man, in that book Son Jamie with Uncle Reg & Bill

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