First Person Possessive

On Wednesday nights, Dad would pull up the driveway in his Carolina blue Mercedes and honk the horn, cigarette perched in the corner of his mouth, hairy forearm hanging from the car window. My brothers and I would run down the front steps shouting, “Shotgun!” tugging at each other’s collars, attempting to hold the other one back. 

He would take us to the Village Inn Pizza Parlor on Battleground Road, where they played silent films on a canvas in a dimly lit, wood paneled dining room. By the flickering light of some bygone silver screen stars, we’d devour a large cheese pizza and drink pitchers of Coca-Cola with crushed ice and talk about nothing in particular and everything in general.

“All these youngins yours, sugar?” the waitress would ask, surveying me and my three brothers like we were a certain sign of his virility.

“They sure are, honey,” Dad would reply.

That was the year language changed. “Our home” became “The house.” Possessive adjectives were too hefty to place into a sentence. Dad left Mom for a woman who was all of the things that she was not, blonde, young and childless. But, Wednesday nights and alternating weekends were ours, possessive. If he wanted to flirt, he could do it on his time, singular.

“I look just like my mother,” I said to the waitress.

The midweek meals and weekend sleepovers dwindled when my older brother went off to college. The last time we participated in a Wednesday night dinner, a Formica table divided the space between us at a McDonalds, while Dad drew down a cigarette. We spoke of nothing at all until he asked, “You about done?” and I replied “No, but we can go now.”

When Dad became ill, there was a sense deep down in my marrow that I needed to say something to him. The old, if you need to say anything, you better say it now, feeling. We’d be sitting in the afternoon sun on the brick patio, just the two of us and I’d rack my brain trying to fish up something worthy to say. Some timeless version of I love you, or I forgive you. I’d look over at his chemo withered frame and hairless head, but the words I was trying to push out would be sucked back in by a tide of embarrassment too strong to ford.

Funny, the things you remember when someone up and leaves; a cluster of red and yellow petals swirling in the sunlight on the front porch, the stench of stale breath and sweat soaked linens, a pair of skinny, pale legs twitching a death jig in a rental hospital bed and a smoke colored moon drifting through an inky black sky.

The last time I said anything to Dad was moments before he left. I sat in the coveted spot by his head and my brothers at his feet, as we counted the seconds between his final breaths.

“It’s OK, Dad, you can go now.”

That’s all I said.

Because the most important words I could think of to say were the ones my father was waiting to hear.

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Best Father's Day Gift Ever

 

 

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Fathers Be Good To Your Daughters

 

When my daughters visit, they deposit little pieces of themselves all over our apartment: bras on the back of the bathroom door, empty glasses in the sink, and pretzels on the floor. When they leave, things go missing, like my heart....

I wish you all a Happy Father's Day.  Please stop by and read my father's day piece over at The Huffington Post:  Father Seeks Father

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Summer Fields

My father had a farm in North Carolina that was reachable only by an unpaved road in a town aptly named Summerfield.  It was the type of sleepy town that Hollywood would make all of North Carolina; long green fields edged by leafy oak trees and tall pines, tobacco barns made of log and chinking, sagging under the weight of a century and the slow moving sun lording over all. I was twelve then and time was a vast amorphous thing like the pillar of clouds on the horizon. There was plenty of time to figure out who I would become and where I would go.

The farmhouse was a 1920’s era cottage at the end of a long gravel driveway.  Out back was a large barn, a chicken coop and the remnants of a vegetable garden where enormous sun flowers appeared magically that summer.  The previous owners left pieces of themselves behind; a tobacco barn filled with tools, chickens in the coop, preserves in the root cellar and perhaps most strangely, eight bison in the fields. 

My father bought the farm when he was dating a woman who owned a farm herself and knew a thing or two about horses.  While my father may have been the first to fall in love with her, I and my three brothers were not far behind. When you love someone, you want to become them in a way.  So, we added horses to our farm, bought cowboy boots and when one of her Siberian Huskies sired puppies, we brought home a soft bundle of fur so black that the only name he could wear was Midnight.

The only blemish on the farm was a family that lived in a mobile home at its edge.  On the weekends my father, the attorney turned cowboy, would pick us up in his blue Mercedes and drive us from the city to the farm.  Each time we passed the mobile home a fat little boy would run out into his yard and give us the finger.  No doubt he did not cotton to the city-slickers in the blue Mercedes turning up dust as it sped past their metal home.

You learn about life’s rhythms on a farm.   Things grow and things die. Our dog Midnight grew fast and loved having the run of the place. Then we noticed that the chickens began disappearing.  “Must be a fox,” my father told us. But soon the neighbors living in the metal home complained that their chickens were disappearing too and that our dog was the reason.  “The sheriff says I can shoot him and I will if I catch him again,” the neighbor said.

It was about that time that we discovered my father owned a gun too, kept on the shelf in the closet.  We begged him to show us how it worked and one night he stood on the back porch, aimed the pistol at a tree and let it fire.  The sound was terrifying. In that moment I wished that I had never heard it.  More terrifying than the sound was the thought that my father might have enemies that required him to possess a gun.

Shortly after that the neighbors caught Midnight in the chicken coop and let their own gun fire.  I mirrored the fat boy’s middle finger greeting every time we drove past their metal home after that.

Fall became winter and my father’s relationship with the farm woman died with the cold weather.  He met another younger woman who preferred the city and left the farm behind.

Standing on the edge of the farm thirty seven years later I see that it has remained entirely the same.  The mobile home still stands at the edge and my hatred pierces through the fog of time. But other things come through too; the memory of the warm eggs we’d collect from the clucking chickens, eating sunflower seeds on the front porch, catching frogs in the pond and watching the grass in the fields move like water under a warm summer breeze.

I think about the things the owners left behind and wonder what we might have left.  Does the laughter of four boys sit in the dusty corners of the rooms?  Do the current owners wake up at night to the phantom shot of a gun and look through the window at a shadow of Midnight running through the fields under the full Carolina moon?

We get back in the car, drive down the unpaved road and head back to town.  My daughter turns to me and says “Your life was much more interesting than I realized.”  I laugh and say “There are so many other stories that I have to tell you.”    She smiles and says “You should tell them all to me.” And so I have begun to leave those behind as well.

*For the next ten weeks, I will join a group of people who all want to leave their stories behind in a Memoir writing class.  Please be patient with me as I juggle my time spent at work, in class and on this blog.

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Never can say goodbye

My father never could say goodbye. You know the feeling: Someone across the room that you really don’t recognize waves and smiles at you. You return the smile and wave eagerly thinking “Oh, hello…you!” Then you realize the intended recipient of the wave is behind you. It’s embarrassing and awkward. Just like conversations with my father on the telephone. One minute he was there. The next minute, I never really knew when, he had finished and hung up. No goodbye. Red-faced, I would keep on talking just in case anyone within earshot could hear me. “Oh, yeah, uh-huh, OK Dad, sure goodbye!”


He was not being rude. He was just efficient. I guess that’s just about the nicest way to say it. His efficiency extended to how he addressed each of his five children, all boys as “Son”.

“Son, this is your Dad. Just calling to see if you’re still alive”

I suppose the Dad part was redundant. But you have to admire the efficiency of not having to remember our names. On the rare occasion when he did try to call us by our name it was as awkward as his telephone conversations. He would go through the list: “Chu, John, Matt, Bill…” After each name, he would realize that it didn’t work, blink and snap his fingers. Put a beat behind it and it was a name calling scat routine.

And if he had issues with remembering our names, it paled in comparison to the list of his “lady friends” names. Being the cunning attorney that he was, he found a way to identify them all without admitting the guilt of not remembering their names. The waitress, the girlfriend, the wife, the lady with the husky cigarette voice and fire red nails all had the same name: “Sweetie”. It was necessary because he always had one waiting to enter center stage as the other one exited. Performing a Scat of girlfriend’s names was not acceptable.

I did not have the type of lady friends that my father had. My friends, who were female, actually were my friends, which was a source of constant worry for my father. While I could admire the wrapping on the package, my father enjoyed what was inside the package much more.

I did have two female roommates in college. It was a “Three’s Company” type of arrangement, but with a twist. I was the gay man playing a straight man. Because my father provided a monthly stipend based on half of the apartment costs, it only made sense to take in a third roommate without telling my father and spend the leftover money on beer. This was my college finance major in action!

What I didn’t count on was my father calling the apartment and talking to my third roommate, a blond bombshell. When Karen told me that she spoke to my father I felt like the gig was over. “But he seemed really sweet.” Karen said. “He called me sweetie!”

 

I called my father prepared to admit the scam.

“Hey Dad, so about Karen…” I started.

“Son, you never told me about her.” He said.

“I’m sorry I should have told you I had another roommate.”

“Yeah, sure son, another ‘roommate’” He chuckled. I could almost see the invisible air quotes he was making. This was not the reaction I expected. He suddenly sounded like Dean Martin. I half expected him to say “You old dog, you!” Then it clicked. He wanted to believe so badly that Karen was my live in lady friend: a real lady friend, happy ending and all. Who was I to deny him this one small pleasure?

Many years later he lay in his bed and waited for all five of his sons. After we all arrived, he quietly slipped away. A year after he died I was determined to visit his graveside and tell him who I was: disclosure and closure. I searched the cemetery for hours in tears looking for his tombstone. While I knew exactly where he was buried, I could not find him. Later I learned that my brother had neglected to order the headstone. Even in death, my father never could say goodbye.

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