PART I
Some years ago, in a long conversation with my sister, I told a story about our father:
It was the late afternoon of a summer day. I was living at home again, now with my wife and our cat Pinky. I had retreated from a terrible job and Dad took me in again, took us both in without hesitation—and also the cat, “fixed” by one of my wife’s cousins out in the barn where the litter was born. Our family had cat prejudices, but Pinky effectively worked his charm on me and immediately set about applying his same irresistible personality to my parents. I was in my later twenties and still looking for a path forward. In the near term however, I was more concerned with finding a job, any old job.
Dad came home a bit early, changed right out of his work clothes, and set about doing yard work. He could do that, go from one job to another, change gears, not pause after his work day, not sit down and have a beer, not while he had something else to do. It helped that he’d been wearing office shirts and neckties and working at a civil service job the last ten years, as opposed to the job he’d held until I graduated from high school.
But then I never saw him droop or drag, no matter how hard he worked. He did fall asleep on Sundays, watching baseball, and sometimes after supper, so I must have had a kid’s blitheness. I took napping to be a family trait: A photo from eight years earlier, showed Dad on a sofa holding his first grand child, my sister’s. Uncle Vic sat on his left, Uncle Pete on his right. All three of them are slouched down, their heads thrown back, resting on the upholstery, eyes blissfully closed, mouths open the better to snore. The baby in Dad’s lap is sleeping too.
His chore clothes were casual wear from stores now. The GI work fatigues he would don for housework—which is what you do outside, like painting and roofing and tearing off rotten woodwork—what’s done inside is, ok, housework too, but mostly it’s house cleaning—those old duds from WWII had finally worn out. In fact the uniforms all kinds of people had worn had finally disappeared. Gas station attendants, mailmen, delivery people, they had all finally forgotten their war. Or, the war had finally forgotten them.
Dad now looked fresh and presentable as someone in a television ad, where the exhaustion and wear of labor never appeared, where people never drooped or dragged.
I hauled the lawn mower up from our cellar while Dad attacked the hedges with a pair of hand shears. We were out of sight of each other in a minute, but I could hear the sound of his shears, snap-snap-snap, working another step and another step toward the front. Meanwhile, the old-fashioned hand mower’s cylinder of spinning blades made a pleasant, almost musical whirring when pushed. Our implements kept no rhythm—my sporadic pushes, Dad’s intermittent chopping—but in my mind those sounds of us working at our task, this ordinary domestic job, made a harmony that endures in my memory to this day.
Our back yard was tiny so I finished with the grass well before Dad got around all three sides of the house. I got out a hand shears and started cutting back an enthusiastic bush perpetually wanting to take over half our little patch. I edged a little bit.. Yard work was never my favorite activity but I always saw its necessity:
Our property extended about two feet beyond the house’s west side, and on the east we had a driveway the length of the house that was so narrow it wouldn’t permit car doors to open. House on one side, hedge on the other eighteen inches, two feet wide. Beyond those bounds the neighbors’ houses had only three or four feet of their own. If we didn’t trim our hedges they’d interfere with their access to their own very, very small yards. In fact our house was one of the few up and down the street that even had room for hedges. There had been no place for active play, around our house’s four sides or on our street.
For some reason I was the only person I know of who felt claustrophobic in these confines.
I hadn’t put all that out of mind, on that day Dad and I worked together. But, it was several thousand days later, and I’d been through and stopped in a couple-three dozen states. I’d stepped above or out of the flat-world point of view that confined the former me. I might not have gone about my learning in the smartest or best way possible, I knew that. There was nothing special or superb about it, or tragic or maybe not even insightful in going from place to place where I was on the fringe of another group of people, and they sometimes welcomed my interest in them and sometimes didn’t. But I got to see the people I meant to see and listened to everyone willing to talk. Maybe not anything commonly passing for education—just me working out my own curriculum.
I put the lawn mower and the shears away as Dad was coming down the home stretch, and I started to rake up, going all around, gathering grass and twigs into piles, in turn bagging them.
Meanwhile Dad opened a lawn chair before the garage, and opened a beer. The garage was at the back corner of the lot. The only person who could have seen him would have been our cross-street neighbor who I’ll call Graber, and the next time I came around from a far corner of the house, there was Graber sitting next to Dad, and he had a can of beer too, and they were engaged in a cheery garrulous conversation.
Graber had taken half the duplex across the street, after I went off to college. I’d met him in a friend’s house, an uncle, while I was in grade school; he hauled both of us along on family picnics. He was kind of old then, I thought—my friend was one of those later-life kids—and he was stout. It struck me as a long coincidence that, when I came home from college or wherever I’d been recently, he’d moved across the street from us. But I’d run into some much stranger coincidences, and after all Graber and me and my family lived in a city woven together for several generations. I kept turning to find another connection pulling on me I didn’t know I had.
Graber had worked with a whole network of Dad’s uncles, cousins, and friends at the power company, going back to the 20’s and 30’s. In the interim between him moving across the street and me moving back in, I’d only waved to him a few times and said hello and a few comments.
The guy sitting there with Dad looked resembled the guy I remembered as a kid, but now he was much thinner, and he was definitely old. His facial features had sort of given way to a nose that now looked more prominent—faces sometimes changed strangely, seen after a long interval of growing up. It has something to do with the change in the line of sight, from looking up to looking face-to-face. It had more to do with the change in understanding.
I listened to him and Dad as I went about the cleaning up. He was talking like someone long in retirement. “Everything changed when they rented that new garage,” he said. “You never saw the office people any more.” See? There was a before and an after. Usually, After lacked something good of Before. It was only then that I noticed Dad’s shirt. I stopped and took it in.
Had he been in the shadows or something? Had I been asleep?
“You know,” I told my sister, “Dad started wearing some wild colors in his later—”
“What do you mean?”
“Well….” I thought the change he’d made was plain as day. “Look at the car for instance. I never thought of Dad going around in a fire-engine red car.”
“He wanted to have one new car in his life,” she said, “and that was it. His first new car.”
It was about twenty years old at that moment, sitting outside my apartment. I’d taken possession of it the year Dad passed away. Within a month I had to replace the fuel lines; that set me back $900. “That car is so Not you,” the guy in the next apartment told me.
I was going to mention how he got a whole rack of neckties in that later job. I was going to say they were beautiful; I loved them—I’d taken his ties when we split up his things; they were what I was wearing to work. I was going to say how surprised I was, seeing the change from the drab of my childhood.
Instead I said, “We were driving to your place that Easter after he got it.” Mom & Dad up front, us two in the back. Why take two cars? Dad and I agreed. My car was a clunker anyway. It gave Dad the heebie-jeebies to get in it. “I looked at the speedometer. He was doing seventy-five!” It was startling to me, to see that.
But not to her. I could see her shrugging as she said that on interstates now everybody droves at that speed. They did—at least, I mean, it was nothing unusual. It was just that he’d been, for me, a very careful person. I think, what it was, I hadn’t been there for long spells at a time, and my returns home had been, well, brief. So I was, that day when we were doing the yard work, living with a book of impressions formed by unformed me. And years after that, talking to my sister, I still hadn’t re-adjusted certain perceptual dials.
Moving right along, I told my sister how Dad had come home and changed out of his work clothes and and he and I set about doing the garden work.
“So Dad and Graber were sitting there in front of the garage with a nice cold beer you know, just shooting the breeze. Graber was saying how Old Uncle Vic”—that was how we designated the person “our” Uncle Vic was named after—for some reason we didn’t say the more common “Great Uncle”— “how he was always getting on everybody’s backs, making them hurry, making them go around picking up cigarette butts the minute they got a break, no matter how hard they’d been working.
“Dad said yeah, he’d been that way to him too, as a kid. Dad had to polish his old touring car before Old Uncle Vic would even give him a ride.
“‘But you know,’ Dad said. ‘I found out something along the way that I’m really good at.’ And he kinda pointed his finger down at the ground, for emphasis. ‘And that’s what I’m doing right now, right here.”
There was a pause at the other end. Then she said, “I’m sure our father was capable of more things than that.”
Her measured words sounded severe; I was taken completely by surprise. “I see I’m going to have to practice telling that story so it hits the right note,” I said. “The point was, Dad was saying how much he was enjoying himself—you know, being present.” We pretty much didn’t say being present in our family. “In the moment, I mean. Here and now.” Here and now—that got it right.
She seemed to accept it, anyway, that final adjustment.
We talked a good while longer before saying good-bye. That moment stayed with me, slight but persistent, like one of those almost-invisible plant spikes in your skin. My sister had, on several occasions, been someone who tuned me up with a few words. In answering her I thought I’d used the right voice: The one she’d spoken to me in at several memorable occaions, which I think came from our mother, and her way of loosening a tight situation.
But….