Fathers

The Capability

From Grampa to Dad the tradition as joker was carried on. Dads carried things, brothers on shoulders, bags of groceries and twelve roses for mom. Hardly anybody knew, but Dad did, that garbage collected even between the prettiest gold hills in Northern California. So when he came home with lamps and couches that were neat in the elderly sort of way, we were supposed to sit around the presents and guess at their prices, bidding upward seventy-five dollars. And when Dad came down with a receipt for just five dollars our hands came down with it, clapping against the surprise shouting out our open smiles. Graveyard shifts at the canneries pulled the shades on our house, making us whisper quiet and skirt tip toes around the edges of shadows. But come those hauling jobs, Dad packed us up in the truck's cab and drove us to the dump, past the stories and stories of crushed cans, and past the stacked white walls of abandoned refrigerators that made one think of a bum's version of "what's behind that door?" We'd watch through the back window, always knowing that Dad weighed in solid enough to move a truck, because we felt his every hop on and off that back bed. Dad in short sleeves, Dad with long sleeves, peeled back by the show of darkened muscles and everything darkened under his sweat and concentration, until all was shoveled clear off the platform and his eyes opened again, bright and blue, so suddenly we were wondering how the sky above so clean and blue could hover over a stink so wretched.

His Strength

Unlike Paul Bunyan and Babe, his blue ox, Dad sleeps just down the hall, in the other bedroom. On weekends he and his friends trot down the road with their saws and axes, while the ladies stay inside, stirring lemonade. Their boots land so heavy, a solid slab of road can't last and it gives to gravel. As Dad pushes through the thicket branches break back from his wooden shoulders. Then he stops. This afternoon trees fall and fall under him and his crew. The walls of the house shake around the ladies and children. The cupboards rattle and long, dainty needles quiver in their sewing boxes.

Dad can clear out a grove and take their shadows. That's how we see him standing, until the day he tumbles down the side of a mountain. He stumbles back up to us, holding his wrist delicately and his face is suddenly as pale as a woman's powdered cheek. He tells us in a pitched voice that nothing is wrong, but when he heads shaky for the bathroom Mom tells her small son to follow him in case he faints. Dad will pass out before he admits he's hurt. Apparently that happened when he was younger, but I just can't imagine it, because the floor couldn't hold him in a collapse and I don't know that the earth would either.

The Uncontrolled Unknown

With Dad driving we never needed a car seat, let alone a seat. Scarcely bathed if we had any say in the matter, my brother and I would roll around like dust balls in the wide open back of the Ford van. In Dad's world one never needed permission, helmets, vegetables, reservations or legal parking spaces. Being on time, a likely sign of pettiness, was irrelevant and created unnecessary stress. Even going to church we were sure to be fashionably late. I remember his saying, "Just relax." I remember his exclaiming, "Whoa Nellie!"

Dad set me on the fuselage, holding me between himself and the dirtbike's handlebars. We were behind the old farmhouse he grew up in and the yard had long since overgrown with bushes spreading themselves over each other and the trees drooping high above. Every now and then a peacock would approach, squawk and shake its feather figure at us, until it realized that we just weren't interested and stormed off like a bitter showdancer. The grass shoots, standing before us like a thatched wall, must have scaled seven feet. Without warning Dad rammed the throttle, and instead of turning to go around the overgrowth, we shot right through the green into more grass. We were blind at thirty-five miles an hour. We couldn’t see where we were racing until it had already slapped us in the face and pulled away under the tire treads. The dirtbike screaming, I laughed and laughed. Everything, everything was in my ears and eyes and in my hands, clinging for dear life, now only crazy green, Dad and the sweaty motorcycle that after a colic start had become an untamed wild horse. We turned and turned, even though at any swerve we could have crashed smack into the rusting skeleton of an abandoned tractor. After we broke through to the open again it must have seemed like the calmness after a seizure. Dad had taken me down and up in a lunatic dive. But then, since it was Dad I thought that crazy was simply craziness without any real element of danger. It was a three minute motorcycle tour of our insanity, something twisted in both of us, sharing it even at age four and thirty-one.

Giving

We live in a house built by Dad. Alone on the roof he put his own days together, hammering wood piece by piece until it was enough to give us a home. The free things he collected for us while on his travels piled up in our yard to the point we felt guilty for saying it was just too much. Still he couldn't do enough for us. He told us stories, and one frozen morning, in our cavernous garage he even brought my car back to life. During spring, when his nails were dirty from planting seeds he dreamed of raising herds of fish on the land, or he imagined himself and few partners producing lines and lines optical lenses for the blind. But over the years Dad also built a dam so big. So big, it towered in him and we could never tell how deep the water sunk on the other side.

Disconnection

If I look up to the sky I see Dad. His hair is graying like the clouded day in his eyes. Only by proximity do his hands and knees seem large, but his face was always so far I'm losing it now more so than ever. Dad's forever in the other room, at his other home, I mean, job. Mom says stuff like, "Back when you were just a spark is your Father's eye," and I wonder if I could ever be more than a speck. So am I just too small, or is he just too big? We're all hollering from down here. We don't squirm, because we've had too much sugar. We flap our arms for attention, to fly up to where you're looking.

Zeus

Our house was an island and nightly a storm gathered over it. My father, Zeus perched on his throne, struck me sharp with a bolt that was black and leather. His voice brandished the danger of all weapons, cutting to and through bone, then blunting to break the joints in the walls of our home. A fault line deepened where his lips crushed together, and his brown neck flushed red with magma rising inside up to his face where it hardened to stone. Frustration became lead weight that gathered in his fists so he could swing it at whatever blame. Some books say hurricanes pick power up off the ocean's surface, but there wasn't anything liquid blue in my Father. He was earth erupting.

Argument to Stay

Fashion designers conceived white undershirts and chemists brewed shaving cream specifically for Dads the same way I cut out his birthday cards. Underwear and socks were boxed with his efficiency in mind. Dads smelled like cologne first. I do believe their pores began secreting the musk the night they decided to marry our moms. Then the essence was bottled and marketed, becoming the most popular product in the billion dollar smell industry. Baseball was also obviously invented with a father in mind. Since a game of catch requires two, at the start this clearly implies a father teaching his son or daughter. And cameras were created to cope with their growing up, when Dads had to sit in the stands, or when they were at work that afternoon, or for when the kid actually became a professional and the only way for the father to keep up was via television or the papers. This also explains the development of satellite technology, the invention of Lazy-boys and barbecues, the introduction of Lamaze classes, the establishment of national parks and tandem bikes. This is what the patriarchy gave rise to, not just power tools. All this and my homemade drawings were produced for fathers and in hope of their success. So don't come home from work grouchy. Don't decide you're too old, too tired, and don't die.

In Heaven?

A family that wasn't my own invited me skiing. They took me to a place that was white and icy, where one late afternoon moved weird like a dream. I was too warm on a mountain that was too cold, and blunt gray dulled the edges of everything. The wind blowing strong must have swiped away any hope for trees growing on that summit. My girlfriend and I stood at the edge of an immense field of snow spreading before us, bald like the moon against the clouds. On the other side we saw a lone speck, her Dad. We needed to get his attention so he could take us home. She cried out to him. "DAAAAD!" She yelled a few more times before I joined her. I screamed, "Dad!" Then I cried out "DAD!" At that point I realized that it had been over a year since I last shouted, "Dad", that so much time had passed since I last called out to someone as such. A muscle in my throat longed to be stretched. I started screaming "DAD" over and over again, more than anything else, to hear it off my chest and out my mouth. I didn't cup my hands to direct the sound. I wanted it everywhere, all around my head and above. If there was ever a day I wished my dead Dad were an angel sitting on a billowy cloud in the sky it had to be that one, when I was so high I might have reached him.

Someone called on the phone a few months afterwards, asking for my Dad. I said he wasn't there. They asked if he would be home soon. I said, "No. He's dead." If they had asked me where he was, I would have answered, "In a box." Where is he, what is he now? Dad is no longer a single entity. His body has likely broken down cell by cell. Entropy has scattered his leftovers among my own remains, so now he's only a series of collections. Memories, more each day, making me wonder if I've created some to minimize my sense of loss. Dad is a collection of myths, all things I wanted him to be and the assortment of memories of who he actually was. He's the string of words in all the songs that remind me of him. Every now and then he's the handwriting I run across at home as I search through files for a birth certificate. He's my thumb, my Basque jaw, my eyebrows, chin and shoulders. Dad is a collection of photos, but if I stacked them all together in one life volume and flurry flipped through like a cartoon, it'd still never, it would never match up to him alive.

These fragments are based on a series of interviews with friends about their Fathers, as well as thoughts about my own Dad.