{"id":6082,"date":"2013-06-19T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-06-19T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bullmensfiction.com\/?p=6082"},"modified":"2022-08-03T13:16:17","modified_gmt":"2022-08-03T17:16:17","slug":"bullshot-james-tadd-adcox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/fiction\/bullshot-james-tadd-adcox\/","title":{"rendered":"BULLshot: James Tadd Adcox"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong>PW:<\/strong> Does aging terrify you? Despite our best efforts, do we all become our<\/em><br \/>\n<em> father\/mother?<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>JTA:<\/strong> Ever since I was a little kid, my mother told me that I would go gray<br \/>\nearly. All the men in my family did. My dad was mostly gray by the<br \/>\ntime he was nineteen years old. I looked forward to it. I really<br \/>\nwanted to go gray at a young age, I wanted that contrast, a teenager<br \/>\nwith gray hair. I pictured how I would dress, to go along with my<br \/>\nhair: scarves, button-down shirts, black pea-coats, fall colors. It<br \/>\nhelped, too, that none of the men in my family went bald, so I didn&#8217;t<br \/>\nhave to worry about that.<\/p>\n<p>When I was around twelve years old, my dad stopped talking to me. I<br \/>\nlived with my mom, and normally I saw him a couple of times a year, at<br \/>\nleast. But then it stopped. I gathered later that there were some<br \/>\nlegal problems between him and my mother, something to do with money,<br \/>\nbut I didn&#8217;t know that at the time. Perhaps he was embarrassed: he was<br \/>\nhaving lots of financial problems at the time, not just with my<br \/>\nmother. I can understand how embarrassment stretches out like that,<br \/>\ncompounds itself: how one puts something off because it&#8217;s<br \/>\nuncomfortable, then discovers, before long, that the thing has been<br \/>\nput off so long that it has become impossible, psychologically at the<br \/>\nvery least. Anyhow, I didn&#8217;t see or hear from my father for six years.<\/p>\n<p>My first year of college it came to me like an epiphany that I could<br \/>\njust call him on the phone, that there was nothing stopping me. That<br \/>\nif I called him he would either answer, or he wouldn&#8217;t, and in any<br \/>\ncase the world would remain otherwise the same. So I called him. When<br \/>\nhe answered, his voice, at the other end, sounded exactly how my voice<br \/>\nsounds, whenever I&#8217;ve heard my voice on a recording. When we finally<br \/>\nmet, several weeks or maybe a month later, he looked exactly like I<br \/>\ndo, except with a full head of beautiful gray hair.<\/p>\n<p>I still have not gone gray, don&#8217;t have a single gray hair in fact, and<br \/>\nI am now thirty. I worry that by the time I do go gray, I will just<br \/>\nlook old.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The author of &#8220;Fit&#8221; on how, despite genetic tendencies, he isn&#8217;t graying<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[116,27,22],"class_list":["post-6082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-aging","tag-fathers","tag-mothers","writer-pete-witte"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6082"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17571,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6082\/revisions\/17571"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}