Three
I was going to say I stumbled over a word when I read my step-dad’s eulogy but that wasn’t it. I actually got the full sentence out. But then something hit me, or I mean, I had that strange feeling of something coming towards me and pulling away at the same time, like the ocean on your feet at the edge of the beach. I had to stop talking for a moment. Was it grief, pure and simple? I’m not sure, but it was something like it, with the same sneaky appearance.
Whatever it was, I couldn't speak for a moment. I had a sudden pinwheel of images, him waiting for me at the station smoking in his truck when I stepped from the train onto the platform; sitting next to me in a tiny chair for a fourth grader at school on Father’s day; winking at my 3 year-old son when I said, please don’t take him to McDonald’s. How much he loved Sinatra and Mr. T and sitting on the porch at night listening to the baseball game on the staticky radio. He loved babies, especially mine, and never spoke down to them, but like they were his friends. He especially loved it when they were naughty or used the word Shit! correctly. “Tell your mom what you just told me,” he would say, smiling.
None of those memories were what did it though. I think it started to happen when I was talking about how he lied on his application about his age so he could join the army when he was 16. How he had told me that the first and only time he shot someone, his hands were shaking so badly he hit the guy in his shin. How out of 800 soldiers in his battalion, only 3 came back. And then I stopped. He had only mentioned it once when I interviewed him for a school paper, told in the context of how lucky he was. But this time, when I said it out loud in the echoey church, Three, it suddenly dawned on me. He wasn’t the lucky one. We were.
Star
I think of my dad leaving a restaurant, head-down, folding his cash, walking like an athlete, toothpick in his mouth, sliding into the driver’s seat, reaching under for the keys, driving fast on the highway weaving, accelerating, hovering here and then moving there like a hummingbird in traffic. I saw a psychic once who described that very thing. She sat in her chair like he had taken over her body, kind of pantomiming the whole driving, weaving thing and then she looked at me and winked and clicked her tongue and said Hey Deirdie, just like him, and it took the air out of me. If anyone could find a way to be out there doing his thing as a spirit it would be him. He carried a lot of light. Light like a beam. It was almost impossible not to smile when you saw him. He had darkness too, but that’s not what fueled him. My dad had nine kids and how could we possibly be close or know each other, but we are and we do and it’s mainly because of him. In some ways I know my dad more through all my brothers and sisters. Each of us is like a very different but very specific part of him. Is it always this way with fathers? Maybe so.
If my Dad was a song what would he be? That’s a hard one, would he be jazzy? And if so would he be Miles or Monk? An angry burst or a slam and butterfly on the keys. Maybe a show tune, both song and dancer. I think of him as the leader of a marching band but also as Gene Kelly, hand on a light-post swirling and letting go into a tap dance. Then I think of him too as rock and roll, playing drums, sweating, lost in rhythm and energy.
We took him to see Steely Dan before he died. My brother helped him up each step through the crowds and wafts of weed smoke. He was beyond happy. If you asked each of my siblings for a snap of my dad, every one would be different, specific to a particular relationship. We knew him, after all, at different periods of his life: beginning, middle and end. Hearing what each other said, we might respond, He did? He was? But every one of us would mention Steely Dan. Something about it is the song he would be, the blend of contrasts, the dark and light, the presence and the poetry.
Beautiful. I love the way you began this, straight into the story, no preamble. It seemed to tell me something about the impact of your dad on other people; immediate, irresistible.
Lovely...