The Martin Guitar

She was what you would call a “character” if you were being kind, something else if you were not. We didn’t use the B word back then, lest we find ourselves gagging on the curious flavor of Irish Spring soap. Manly yes, but I did not like it. We called her Ginny, which was her name, a nickname for Virginia, the virgin grandmother. Grandma, Granny or Nana was too soft a moniker to stretch over that tough exterior, arms always crossed, black patent leather purse in the crook of her arm, plain woolen dress and dark plastic eyeglasses resting on the end of her nose. Her fire red hair was the one colorful accessory, a warning of sorts. Hugging her was like wrapping your arms around the wrong end of magnetized iron, you always felt as if you were being repelled.  

“Great heavens above,” she used to say, cigarette perched between the tips of two fingers, which she held above her right shoulder, à la Bette Davis.

She could bend that phrase to suit almost any emotion, shock, disbelief, disappointment. But whenever she said it, it always felt as if she was summoning an army of angels to judge my sorry, sinful ass. And I was a sinner, because every time she asked if we still had that Martin guitar, I’d lie and say “Oh yes!”

“It was your grandfather’s guitar and then your father’s, you know that don’t you?” she’d continue the interrogation.

“Yeah,” I’d reply.

“Yes ma’am,” she’d correct me.

She’d take a puff of her cigarette, narrow her eyes and say “You’re too skinny. Doesn’t your mother feed you?”

My mother sold that Martin guitar years earlier for the express purpose of putting food on the table after my father, Ginny’s cherished only child left us. But the phantom guitar remained. Sometimes my brothers and I would embellish the story and breathe a little more life into the fable. “We just had it re-strung,” we’d say or “It sure does sounds pretty.”

“It’s valuable. Don’t let your mother sell it,” She’d command.

Though we were children, my brothers and I understood that somehow my grandmother knew the guitar was as gone as my father. But we clung to the numinous fantasy, in part because we feared her reaction and perhaps more so because as long as the guitar remained, there was a piece of my father in the house.

We probably would have gotten away with the ruse had my grandmother chosen not to make a rare visit to our home after the divorce. It was strange to see Ginny out of her environment of stiff Victorian furniture and oriental rugs without “the help.” She was like a piece of antique furniture appearing all the more displaced in a room of orange shag carpeting with a brown corduroy upholstered sofa where four misbehaving boys were scattered about the floor like throw rugs as our mangy dog, Tiger farted.

During dinner, we attempted to steer the conversation from tumbling down the road we all knew it would eventually take. My older brother Chuck regaled us with his adventures in Boy Scouting and the call of the wild. My younger brother John secreted away the obligatory three bites of vegetables into his glass of milk. Matthew, the youngest, batted his eyelashes that were as thick as a girl’s and then, without thinking, I offered to play a rousing rendition of “Hot Cross Buns” on the piano.

“What?” I asked when my brother Chuck kicked me under the table.        

“Why don’t you get the guitar and make it a duet?” Ginny asked.

My mother scanned our faces and then asked Ginny to join her in the kitchen while she washed the dishes, relieving us from our usual post dinner clean up. We sat in the den in silence just as we did while listening to my mother’s one sided phone conversations begging my father not to leave. “You never could make my son happy,” we heard Ginny accuse my mother in the same kitchen where my mother sobbed over many a phone call from women confessing to affairs with my swarthy, handsome father.

And then, Ginny appeared in front of us, like one of those birds popping out of a coo-coo clock her body stiff as a daguerreotype portrait.

“You don’t have the guitar anymore do you?” she asked.

“No ma’am,” I said as her eyes became watery and red-rimmed.

Shortly thereafter we heard the tires of my father’s car pull up the gravel drive and then Ginny was gone. If I had been a good Christian boy I might have felt guilty, but I didn’t. I was just so relieved to be rid of that God damn, worthless guitar.

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Riding in Cars

I am marking a line in the middle of the car seat, karate chopping it saying “Here. Here. Here,” down the blue naugahyde. This is my side and that is yours. When my younger brother John’s toe illegally crosses the border I karate chop again and alert the National Guard.

 “Mom! John’s on my side!” 

My mother turns her head to regard my father’s profile without removing her sunglasses. She grabs a loose strand of hair twisting in the breeze from the open window and guides it behind her ear. Her shoulders slump. My father flicks the butt of a burnt out cigarette through the open window and performs a karate chop to the blinker.  For the rest of our annual drive to the outer banks of North Carolina, I sit alone facing backwards with the brown paper grocery bags crowding me on both sides in the way back seat of the wood paneled station wagon. I watch the world recede, rows of tobacco plants flickering by.

He WAS on my side.

The week after that vacation my parents marked an imaginary line down the middle of our lives.  “Here. Here. Here.” This is my side and that is yours. My father claimed the pretty young blonde and my haggard mother got four rambunctious boys. 

We all shifted positions.  My older brother Chuck moved to the front seat with a red haired boy’s determination, occasionally firing warning shots in the form of a stuck out tongue or middle finger. The battle would escalate until my mother would glance in the rear view mirror and catch me retaliating by attempting to flip my brother the bird, holding all of the fingers on my right hand down, except the middle one with my other hand. I learned to watch the road pass behind me without ever knowing what was coming up ahead of me.

On the rare occasion when I am in the driver’s seat now I am filled with anxiety about what COULD be down the road.  What if there is no parking?  What if the traffic is bad?  Oh, I hate turning left on the Harvard bridge. 

We are driving down Mile Road, the marsh sparkling on either side of us.  I am in the front passenger seat, Paul as always is in the driver’s seat and a fresh set of troops are in the back.

“Dad, let’s go to the beach closest to the restrooms.  I’m on my period,” a command comes from the back seat.

“Your father is on his exclamation point,” Paul shouts back, referring to my constant issue of warnings.  Watch out for this car! That person isn’t looking! There’s a parking spot!  Everything around us a clear and present danger.

When I issue one more piece of advice Paul turns to look at me without removing his sunglasses.

“What’s your job?”

“To sit here and look pretty,” I say staring ahead.

Isak Dinesen said “God made the world round, so we would never see too far down the road.”  It’s a quote that appeals to me, even if I cannot seem to embrace its full meaning. Paul angles the car into an impossibly narrow parking spot.

“Have I crunched you yet?” He says.

“Not yet,” I say and I know he never will.

But that doesn't stop me from worrying about it.

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My Father, Myself

Some men learn by following a father’s example. And some men learn by not following a father’s example. I learned how to be a father by doing both.

My Father-circa 1963



My Dad had one name for all five of his children; son. I’m not sure what he would have done if one of us was a girl, although my brothers often debated the point with me. Who could blame them? While they were busy reading the sports page and farting, I was eagerly helping my mother understand the importance of proper furniture placement to create engaging conversation areas.

“Now see the way this sofa is pushed up against the wall? It says doctor’s office waiting room. If we place it like so and cozy up these chairs then what we’ve got is an arrangement worth talking about!”

My father would stare at me speechless. But thinking about it now, he really didn’t have much to say to any of us. When he came home from work he would plow through dinner in five minutes, gulp down a glass of Scotch and smoke a pack of cigarettes. His quota of words was used during the work day.

“Son” My father would say and all of us would respond “Yes?”

“Get your Dad the newspaper.”

Myself-circa 1983

Starved for his affection we’d punch each other in the arm and run to be the first to get it. At an early age we learned that his quota of affection was also being filled elsewhere. When I was twelve my mother came into the living room sobbing and said “Your father wants you boys, but he doesn’t want me anymore.” I remember feeling devastated, but mostly I remember feeling surprised that he wanted me.

I soon learned that what he truly wanted was women, and lots of them. Something I couldn’t quite grasp. They were blonde, brunette, tall, short, shapely and slim. But there was always one on the side waiting to replace the current one. At my wedding there were two ex-wives, two ex-girlfriends and a current girlfriend on his arm. When I exchanged wedding vows I also vowed never to be like my father.

For twenty years I did what my father could not. I stayed married and never had an affair. Blessed with two daughters I lavished them with affection. It was all going according to plan. But as time wore on, my quota of words began to fill up. Until there was nothing left to say but "I’m gay". When my marriage ended I was broken, like my father.

I picked up the pieces and tried to reassemble them into something attractive. I attended a gay father’s support group and was picked up by a man at the first meeting. The fact that he collected vintage washing machines and proudly displayed them in his basement really should have alarmed me, but I decided to find it cute and quirky. The fact that he attended a gay father’s support group and was not actually a father? Fine by me. What really should have alarmed me was that I was too fucked up to interest even him for very long. It was over within a few weeks.

And then I met Paul. On our first date, he pulled out three perfectly crisp photographs of his children from his wallet and placed them on the table. I opened my wallet, flipped through old receipts, peeled the sticky photographs out and proudly displayed them. It was the first time all of our children would be together in one room. The second would be at our wedding.

The more time I spent with Paul the more I realized that he was the father I wanted to be: self-confident, loving, patient, funny and authoritative. Eventually, I became that father. It was no more evident than the day I received a text from my daughter “I want you to know that you are my hero. Sis and I have been talking and we both want to marry someone like you or Paul”.

This father’s day I’ll reflexively think about giving Dad a call and then remember, oh, he's gone. Deep down, I know he loved me. I just wish he could have learned what Paul taught me. In order to properly love your children, you have to love yourself.

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Maggie's Love

She is no longer a part of my life. After so much time together, it seems strange to have forgotten about her. In order to survive the divorce, I had to leave pieces of my life behind. But when my daughter Katherine sent me a text message last week “Maggie is so sick” I had to choke back tears. When you adopt a pet you make an investment in future sadness.

Like most families we had our share of pets. Some were short lived. When my daughters were young, we bought two hamsters. They would sip from their water bottle exposing their nasty yellow teeth, run on their squeaky stationary wheel and burrow into the same cedar shavings that they urinated in. There was very little interaction between the girls and the hamsters. Most of the interaction that occurred was between the two hamsters, so that six weeks after we bought them, we owned eight hamsters. It was very much like an episode of “16 and pregnant” because mother hamster, who we will call Ashley, was too young to raise a family and became a tragic role model for our young daughters. As angry parents do, we separated the two sex-obsessed teenage trouble makers.

One morning the girls came bounding down the stairs, excited to see Ashley and her babies. But Ashley crushed by the heavy responsibility of parenthood became cannibalistic. All that was left of the babies was one lifeless, headless body in the corner of the cage. While our daughters were in school that day, we set Ashley and her baby daddy free in the field behind our house.

After that experience my wife and I decided that a dog might make a better pet for our children. We reasoned that the girls could learn responsibility by feeding the dog and when the time came, they would learn an important lesson about death, hopefully more natural than being eaten alive.

Maggie was a pound puppy. My wife travelled up a winding mountain road in the hills of western Virginia after reading an advertisement in the paper for a free, sweetly tempered dog. Unfortunately Maggie was also prone to car sickness, so that when she travelled back down that winding mountain road, she vomited the entire way. She was timid when I met her. Her black and tan head cowering and her tail lowered. She stood about eye level with our daughters, who she would run from; scared silly by a six year old and four year old girl.

We fretted over our decision. Here was another poor pet choice, like the hamsters. It was clear that she had been mistreated by her previous owner and we wondered if she could ever recover. We decided to give her a week.

Each morning I would let her out of the back door and watch her run to the far corner of the yard. As the end of the week approached Maggie must have understood that her fate was close to being sealed. While I sat on the sofa watching TV in the evening, she placed a paw next to me on the seat cushion. I looked at her big brown eyes and patted the cushion next to me. Slowly, cautiously, she climbed onto the sofa, and then quite incredibly, she placed her head on my lap. “Such a good girl” I said while rubbing her soft head and just like that, we fell in love.

Her metamorphosis from that moment on was astonishing. She greeted me happily when I came home from work and stood still, looking quite miserable when the girls placed homemade newspaper hats on her head. She would chase the girls around in a circle playfully crouching down on her front legs with her rump high in the air, tail wagging mischievously. When she caught them, she would lick their faces until they laughed uncontrollably. We were all surprised the first time we heard her bark when the doorbell rang. Not only did she become our cherished family pet but also our loving defender.

It makes me smile to think of Maggie panting and vomiting in the back seat of our car on our annual five hour trip to the beach; me taking curves gingerly so as not to upset her tender stomach. Each of us so in love with her that we could not bear to leave her in a kennel. She became a fixture in our lives and a symbol of that early happiness.

When we moved to Massachusetts, I often wondered what Maggie must have thought, jumping into the car just before we left and ending up in some foreign yard in another part of the country. Her adjustment was far easier than ours; the girls, now teenagers struggled with all of the changes, but Maggie's love was a constant. Our marriage was not.

Then one day, Maggie jumped into the car again and through my tears I watched her, the girls and my life pull away. In those early days after they left, I would reach for her head instinctively and call out “Maggie, I’m home!” when walking through the door, shocked by the silence.

There is a survival instinct that buries the emotional feelings with bitterness when you go through a divorce. When my cell phone rang last week, I looked at the display and saw my ex-wife’s number. She’s looking for money to pay the vet bills I thought angrily.

“Maggie can hardly walk and her eyes are twitching uncontrollably.” She said.

And that was all it took. I wrote a check to pay for Maggie’s final care. The investment in sadness matured, but the happy memories were strong enough to tear a hole through the bitterness. And just in time, because the bitterness was starting to eat me alive.

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