visiting my dad

Jun 30, 2011 17:34

At 12:30 I’m searching desperately for my keys. I look in the refrigerator, my laundry hamper, inside candle holders; they are hiding in the paisley of the kitchen table cloth. I grab them and run on the door to meet my father for lunch down the street.

Looking up from his menu, my father sees me and says to the waitress, “she’s like a ray of sunshine in here!”. She smiles at him, pours water for me, and goes to wait on the table by the window. My father is wearing a button down shirt, open a button at the top to show that vulnerable part of the neck, inside our collarbone, where you can see his pulse.

Yesterday, my mother left on a plane to Italy to teach communications to college students for five weeks. I got a call from my sister while they were going to the airport, both of them shouting directions at each other, “It’s us!” they both say in between “right!”, “left!”. The car is rumbling in the background, and I can picture my mother with a baseball cap on and her red lipstick pointing to my sister and saying, “here, here, this way”. My father orders, then tells me, smiling ironically, the last thing she said to him: “I hope this is a very productive five weeks for both of us”.

“I might have lost the dog,” he confides, taking a bite of his black bean burger. “He was in the house, then I took him for a walk, then I might have let him out. I can’t know for sure. I didn’t want to know if I’d lost him, so I didn’t check before I left”. I laugh. He pauses long enough for me to see he has a piece of bun on his lower lip. I make a motion of brushing off invisible crumbs, and he misses it with a napkin. “I need a job, but I have to take care of my father,” he says as he takes a sip of water.

He drove back from our family reunion only days before, and he’s been taking care of six year old cousins, attending to his recently widowed father, and cooking meals for fifteen of our forty extended family members non-stop. He leans back in his chair after paying the check, and sighs. Our eyes meet, so similar: blue and tired, and he nods, time to go.

We walk to the gymshoe, a car named because of both its smell and its reebok-like proportions. When we get in, my dad drives me a block to my house, almost hitting two pedestrians, and then parks with the engine still on. “Wait,” he says, before I leave. “I have to show you this song. It’s number four on one of these CDs.” He begins shuffling through the six or seven mixed CDs I have in the car, with names like “spring 2011”, “driving to philadelphia”, and “jam out”. “This guy is really unhappy,” my dad explains while searching. “He’s in a tough relationship,” he finds the CD and puts it in. “If I could play a song on guitar at the reunion, this would be it,” as the song starts, he mumbles under his breath, half laughing, “I relate to it”.

My dad doesn’t sing often, my mother rolls her eyes when he does, especially in the car. On love drives, my dad might wait for her to sleep, then begin singing every other line of a song. Two years ago, my mother sat us down, after dad confessed his addictions to my sister and I, and she told us that she might not love him anymore. We sat there, picking our fingernails, looking at the fake log in the fireplace, smoothing our Easter best on our laps. My mother meets me for breakfast weeks ago, and tells me over eggs, that she doesn’t know what to do. “He’s closed up,” she says. “He’s in his own world, he needs to get a job, get on track”. She looks down at her eggs and sighs.

There is a picture of my parents thirty, forty years ago. They are running down dunes, one after the other: tan, slim, young, and so happy to be following the others fast feet. The sand is hot, and they are both smiling before they hit the cool water.

I sit in the passenger seat as my dad rocks back and forth, a gesture he’s known for, and sings:

I sense a runner in the garden
Although my judgment's known to fail
Once built a steamboat in a meadow
Cos I'd forgotten how to sail

I know the runner's going to tell you
There ain't no cowboy in my hair
So now he's buried by the daisies
So I could stay the tallest man in your eyes, babe

I sense a spy up in the chimney
From all the evidence I've burned
I guess he'll read it in the smoke now
And soon to ashes I'll return

I know the spy is going to tell you
It's not my flag up in the pole
So now he's buried by the lilies
So I could stay forever more in your eyes, babe

I sense a leak inside my phone now
From all the lies I have told
I know he has your private number
And soon he'll make that vicious call

I know the leak is going to tell you
There ain't no puppy on your leash
So now he'll fertilize the roses
So I could stay the king you see
In your eyes, babe

So now we're dancing through the garden
And what a garden I have made
And now that death will grow my jasmine
I find it soothing I'm afraid

Now there is no need for suspicion
There ain't no frog kissing your hand
I won't be lying when I tell you
That I'm a gardener I'm a man
In your eyes babe

We joke together afterward, and talk about this guy burying people or mistakes to fertilize flowers, we say how screwed this guys relationship is, and we laugh; our eyes are both glistening. I tell my dad I love him, I embrace his broad shoulders with mine. He’s driving to care for his father in Detroit, and I’m due at work in an hour. When he drives away, I don’t think about addictions, or Easter Sundays, lost dogs, wallets, phones, resumes and contacts, or plane tickets.

I think of my parents: my mother in that white pantsuit, my father with a blue button down. They are in each others arms, and they are dancing in a garden filled with flowers.

Absolutely filled.
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