Fathers, Sons, and the Questions We Never Ask by Matt Fogelson. author, Restrung: Fatherhood in a Different Key
I missed the chance with my dad. I won’t miss it with my son
“What was it like to hang out with you in college?” my 20-year-old son, recently home from college himself, asked me one night this past summer.
The question stunned me. Not just because, as a substantive matter, I wasn’t sure how to answer it. But because I’ve long wondered the same thing about my father, who died when I was my son’s age. Unlike my son, though, I’d never asked.
After providing my off-the-cuff self-assessment (fun to hang out with, enjoyed beer more than weed); absorbing my son’s take on what I was probably like in college (“I’m guessing pretty anti-social, hanging only with your good friends and not putting yourself out there”); and having my wife confirm my take (“Papa was a lot of fun in college”); it hit me all over again that, the truth is, I didn’t know my father. Not in any fundamental way.
I knew him only in broad strokes. I knew his integrity; I witnessed it on our way home from vacations abroad when he’d painstakingly fill out the customs forms, going through each receipt from the clothing stores my mother visited and ignoring her when she said, probably accurately, “Jimmy, please, nobody writes down the real value on those forms.” I knew his character; I was the beneficiary of it in his quiet counsel to tell the truth about my involvement in a beer-drinking scandal while on a high school trip. I knew his singular laugh, the beautiful progression of it, the way it started with his entire body convulsing so intensely that he once fell out of his seat into the aisle at the theater, then devolved into a coughing fit that came in triplicate guttural hacks, and concluded with the wiping of the eyes and the blowing of the nose into the white hankie he always had close by.
What was missing were the critical details of his life, the things that made him who he was. What was he into as a kid? Who was his best friend? What sports did he play? Who did he have a crush on? What were his passions? What music did he listen to? And even more fundamentally than all that, what was he like? Was he the life of the party or was he quietly shy? A gregarious kid with lots of friends or a loner? Did he have a mischievous side or always play it straight? Did he ever let himself go, maybe even try pot, or was he too tightly wound? I didn’t know any of that—never asked. And he never said.
In Bruce Springsteen’s achingly revealing memoir—a book that from the day it was published I’ve parsed with the searching rigor of a Talmudic scholar, turning to it for parenting and life advice nearly as often as I turn to Springsteen’s music for emotional sustenance—Bruce writes about accompanying his dad to Long Beach, California, to visit the Queen Mary, the ocean liner his father shipped out on for World War II. He confesses that although his father’s experience on that ship was likely one of the most meaningful of his life, Bruce had no time for hearing about any of it; he just wanted to get out of there. “I’d pay anything now to be able to walk that ship with my father again,” Bruce painfully laments with the benefit of hindsight. “I would treasure every step, want to know every detail, hear every word and memory he’d share, but back then I was still too young . . . to recognize my dad as a man.”
Bruce was twenty-two when he visited the Queen Mary with his father. My father died when I was twenty-one. Perhaps at some point I’d have gotten around to asking him about his life, or maybe he’d have eventually volunteered some crucial snippets—maybe there’s some pre-ordained point along the continuum of the father-son relationship where such conversations are permissible. Maybe he and I just didn’t have enough time.
When my son asked what I was like in college, it struck me that perhaps we’d broken the cycle of emotional distance that is so often handed down from fathers to sons, like some unwanted Old World tchotchke.
That has always a goal of mine as a father—for my son to know who I am. What makes me tick. It’s why the night he was born I sang to him not “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” to help him fall asleep, but “Brokedown Palace” by the Grateful Dead, one of the songs I hold most dear—and continued to sing it, and other classic rock favorites of mine, at bedtime for the next fourteen years. It’s why for his bar mitzvah, I gave him a turntable and a trove of vinyl records that had been staples for me at his age. Not so that he would adopt them as his favorites, but rather, as I put it in a note to him, “so that if you ever want to find a little piece of your Pops, one day at college or wherever, you have it in this gift.” Something I never got from my father.
And it’s why I recently started a new tradition with my best friends to visit all our children at college. Between us we have ten kids currently in college with three more coming up through the ranks. Each spring and fall we’re planning to spend a weekend with one of the kids. I figured it’s a great way for us to get to know each kid as an individual, rather than as a sibling, daughter, or son.
But more importantly, it’s an opportunity for the kids to see their dads in their natural environment, with their oldest friends, drinking up the old, recycled jokes, basking in the warmth of a lifetime of friendship. And, perhaps, to ask questions about their dads.
Like what it was like to hang out with them in college.
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Written by Matt Fogelson, a writer and former lawyer whose true passion is music, primarily of the classic rock variety. His Substack, Fine Tuning, blends personal storytelling with a love for the music that makes sense of life, centering on new artists and the intersection of music and parenting. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Scary Mommy, and NPR and his upcoming memoir, Restrung: Fatherhood in a Different Key publishes on Feb 2, 2026.
