“Jesus Christ, how goddamn difficult is it to park
the goddamn car straight?”
Those were the first words he had spoken to me since I
had seen him the previous Sunday. Rather than reply, I just turned around
and left. The phone rang as soon as I got in the door back at home.
“I’m sorry, Tuck,” he said. When I didn’t
respond, he added, “I over reacted and I’m sorry. Would you come back
over for dinner? I’d like to see you.”
After a moment, I said, “Okay.”
“Okay, Tuck.”
Like the autumn and its changing personality, Dad is
sometimes refreshingly brisk, sometimes too cold, sometimes surprising in his
warmth. Autumn used to be my favorite season until occurred to me one day
what it represents. I used to think of the fall as cool relief from
summer’s sticky oppression. But then I realized that autumn lacks
something that I desperately need in my life - hope. Autumn offers no
hope. Of yesterday it teases, of tomorrow it taunts. Leaving you to
sweat in recollection and shiver in foreboding. All of its promises are
cold, the autumn.
I’m sorry, Tuck,
he had said then. Man, I loved him for that phone call. More
than that even, I felt he loved me. And now, as I watched him lift
himself out of his car, I felt it again. With the aid of a cane I had
never seen him use before, he walked to Ethan’s grave and stood in front of the
headstone and I wondered at the man’s thoughts.
He walked around to the other side of the headstone
and I could see him reading the engraved line from the Thomas Campbell poem.
To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.
He was crying now, but just a little. The tears
came and went like a spring shower. After years of seeing the lightning
and hearing the thunder, I finally felt the rain.
He walked back around to the front of the headstone
and cleared away some leaves and twigs with his cane. Then he reached
inside his jacket pocket and -- to my utter astonishment -- pulled out an
envelope. Dad lived in a small town a few miles from Willow Grove and
apparently they, too, hadn’t gotten word of the Grave Letters phenomenon.
He bent down and placed it under the statue of the weeping angel that stood
guard at Ethan’s grave. Head bowed, he stood still in front of the
headstone for a moment, then coughed hard a couple times and returned to his
car.
When he was gone, I went over and opened the letter.
Tucker and Tammy,
They say that everything happens for a reason and I
suppose there’s probably some truth to that. I’m sure you’ve been
searching for one. I just wanted you to know that if you haven’t found
it, you are not alone.
With Love
A Friend
The short letter drained me and I headed back for
town. I considered taking the Mr. Innocent letter with me, decided
against it. I would gamble that it would either still be there the next
day or Mr. Innocent would pick it up and write me back.
Seems to me that nobody is more
responsible for the man that a boy becomes than his father.
The
mother makes the person, the father makes the man. Whether through his
presence or through his absence, the father makes the man.
Most sons I’ve known carry the belief that
they are like their father. With that belief
comes
pride and honor, shame and embarrassment and a host of
other embattlements that confuse and conflict. From child to youth to
adult, the son idolizes, resents,
becomes
the
father.
If you are a father, you are someone’s born hero.
Someone wants to believe nothing but the best about you. If you are
severe, it is because sometimes
a man
must be so. If you are unforgiving, it is because there is strength in
the judgment. The man that you raise will become the man that you are.
I suppose it’s inevitable then
that all fathers eventually fall from whatever
heights they have ascended to. The day comes when the son sees the father
for everything that he is, all things good and bad, but this is okay.
Learning the faults of our fathers while already knowing our own, frees us sons
to love our fathers a little less and ourselves a little more. There is
magnificent beauty in the father-son relationship.
And
magnificent tragedy.
Sometimes I feel like I don’t know my own dad any
better than Ethan got to know his. As a young boy, it was my dream to
grow up to be just like my dad. As a man, it is my worst nightmare that I
have done just that. But having children of our own makes it both easier
and tougher to love ourselves. Easier when we see the beauty within them,
harder when we se
e our own flaws mirrored
back.
On Saturday mornings,
Dad used to get up early and sit at the desk in his home office, which
was where I slept when staying with him on weekends. As I lay in bed
trying to sleep, he would drink his morning coffee, smoke his morning
cigarette, and handwrite his task list for the day on a yellow legal pad.
He was quiet and the noise of scribbling pen and flipping papers never woke
me. It was always the burning smoke from his Winston’s that choked me
awake. He’d take a break from his scribbling, run his hands through his
thick black wavy hair and make squeaky little sucking sounds on his cigarette,
drink his coffee, and quietly set the cup back on its coaster. When he’d
go to the kitchen for a fresh cup of coffee, I would sneak out of bed and read
his list to see if there was anything exciting on the agenda for the day.
Usually there was not. His typical list would look something like this:
Deposit check and get cash from bank - $100
Wash car (Tucker)
Turtle Wax for car
Toothbrush, medium bristles
White socks (crew, not tube)
The list was for his eyes only, so why the hell he had
to remind himself to buy crew socks and not tube, I’ve never understood. What’s
really maddening is that now I make my own lists and do the same damn thing.
Cola (Diet Coke, not Pepsi)
I also see my father’s hand in the words what I
write. I have much poorer handwriting, but at times the curves and angles
come together in such a way as to make me think that his living ghost were
guiding my hand.
I wish my wife and kids had known
Dad when he was quick with life. Not the too-old
fifty-four year-old that he is now, saddled with a bad heart and worse
lungs. I wish they could have known him when he was funny, though never
as funny as he thought he was, which of course made him
more
funny
.
When he was fiery and strong and he
wanted things from this life.
I wish they would have seen him when
he stood tall with his dark hair brushed back, thick black moustache neatly
trimmed. How he polished his cars with pride. How he walked his
just-mowed lawn shirtless, smoking a cigarette and looking over things to make
sure everything was just-so. He always had a straight-back confidence
that I envied. It’s what made him a good salesman (and it’s probably what
made him a bad husband). He spent his days showing customers and
colleagues how he belonged in their
world, that
he
could thrive there, even if inside he didn’t truly want to be there. He
would dine and
schmooze
wealthy clients during the
week, and sit on a barstool down at the local pub when he was home.
Surrounded by farmers, truck drivers, mechanics.
Men who collectively didn’t own as many ties as he had to pack on a
typical business trip.
Dad’s love for me
has always been a hard love. It’s Old Testament, and while I’m sure that
this fear-based, distant love must have hurt him at times, it was the way he
knew and I’ve learned to appreciate it. I have spent too much of my life
being ashamed of my dad. He smoked, he drank,
he
always laughed too loud for me. He cheated on Mom and caught my shame
because of it. But in this one short letter I learned more about my
father than I had learned in all the conversations we ever had. I know my
dad is a good man. And I know he loves me.
Because
fathers love their sons.
Then Grandma got sick.
She had been having abdominal pain for a few days
before Aunt Paula and Grandpa were finally able to convince her to go to the
hospital. When she finally did go, the doctor decided to keep her
overnight for observation. When he was unable to diagnose her symptoms,
he had her stay another night. And then
another. After four nights, they performed exploratory surgery and still
they found nothing. It was this nothing that would soon kill her.
After surgery,
they
checked her into what they called a rehabilitation center for one week of rest
and recovery. I had never actually been inside a rehabilitation center,
but in my mind I had images of stroke victims learning to talk again or
amputees getting used to their new prosthetics. That is not what this
place was. This was a place they put old people they didn’t know what
else to do with. This was purgatory.
A place for
those who were closer to death than to life.
With Grandma away, Grandpa had assumed the breakfast
duties.
“You know you don’t have to do this, Grandpa,” I said
between bites of bacon one morning.
“What’s that?”
“Making these big breakfasts every
morning.
I usually don’t eat breakfast at all.
“Oh, I don’t mind. Kind of makes me feel, oh, I
don’t know – normal, I guess. Having breakfast is normal.”
I nodded. “Bacon’s good,” I said.
“Yep.
And everything
else is either undercooked or overcooked. I
ain’t
had much practice at this in the past,
oh,
say
fifty-five years or so.”
“Wow, fifty-five years. Is that how long you and
Grandma have been married?”
“Yes sir, fifty-six in September.”
“That’s amazing. Good for you guys.”
I bet fifty-six years looked smaller from his
end of it.
“Hey, Grandma was telling us the other day how the two
of you met.”
“Oh, was she now?” he said as he scraped runny eggs
into the garbage. Then he put four more slices of bacon in the frying pan
and turned back around toward me.
“And just what did she say – that I was an old
grouch?” He smiled his grandfather smile and I wondered when that had
come to him. It’s not the kind of look a man is born
with,
it’s the kind that’s earned.
“No, not at all.
She
said it was a double-date with John and Marge. It was Marge that thought
you were an old grouch. Grandma said she thought you were handsome.”
“Well, I suppose they’re both right,” he said with a
wink and a laugh.
“I would give just about anything to be able to watch
the replay of that night. To see the two of you first meet.”
Grandpa stood facing the stove, paying too much
attention to bacon.
“So, what did you think of her?”
“Oh, she was about the prettiest thing I’d ever laid
eyes on,” he said, not turning around.
Left hand in his pocket, tongs in his right, he turned
the bacon, looking at things I couldn’t see.
“Never expected a second date, but I asked her
anyway. She said yes and we went for a picnic.
This
time without that chatterbox Marge.”
A picnic.
I could see
the red and white checkered blanket, the woven basket, the sandwiches wrapped
in white linen.
“We were in a play together, too. She didn’t
tell you that, though, did
she
?”
“No,” she didn’t.
“A play?
Like a play
play
?”
“No, of course she didn’t. That was before we
ever went out.”
“Wow, a play. I never really pictured you as a
thespian, Grandpa.”
“Well, hell, I wasn’t always bald and fat, you know
.”
“What play was it?”
“You know, I don’t remember what the play was. I
worked backstage anyway – props and stuff, you know – and your Grandma had a
small part. The only thing I really remember about any of that is your
grandmother. I was two years older but still couldn’t muster the courage
to ask her out.”
“How old were you?”
“Well, now, let’s see. I was 18 I think which
would have made your grandmother 16 at the time. She went to Creston and
I had gone to Glidden, so seeing her at that community theater was the first
time I’d ever seen her.”
“And you didn’t ask her out?”
“No, sir.
But imagine
my surprise a year later when my buddy John talks me into going on a double
date with him and his gal Marge and that little gal from the community theater
shows up.”
“Did she remember you?”
“Oh, heck no.
And I
didn’t tell her about it either.”
“You didn’t tell her that you
remembered her from the play?”
“No,
siree
Bob.
Not that night. Not ever.”
“You never told her?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“I guess maybe after a while of hearing her tell the
story of how we
met,
I didn’t want to make it
something other than what it was to her. Seemed like destiny the way she
told it.”
He put two more pieces of bacon on my plate. “I
never wanted to be anything other than the man she thought she met for the
first that night with John and Marge. Now, how’s that bacon?”
I was
not the
man Tammy had married. I stopped being that man when that man lost his
son.
The new me
took
a leave of absence from work so I could stay home and drink because being drunk
helped. When sober, my thoughts were scattered, like a thousand numbered
index cards spilled on the floor. And me picking them up one by one,
trying to find some sense in the million combinations. I’d replay the
night at the hospital with Ethan and feel the tears build. I’d think of
his suffering and my breath would quicken. I imagined what Tammy and I
were doing while our little boy was dying inside of her. What kind of
mundane bullshit were we discussing as his heart stopped?
Is that what you’re wearing?
What should we have for supper?
Wait till I tell you what Dave in accounting did
today.
Whatever it was, I hope we weren’t laughing. I
hope he died in our sleep.
One thought lead to another and to another and there
was no end, but the drinking helped. I drank to suppress it all and then
– once numb – drank more to let it ease back out
of me. Not all at once as it came when I was sober, but
little-by-little and under my control.
A turn of the
valve.
Drink a little, hurt a little, slow down, drink less, feel
it coming, drink more, knock it down, drink more, keep it down, drink more,
can’t see straight, drink more, vomit, cry, pass out.
I’d get drunk and write poetry. Some of the
poetry was ok, a lot of it sucked, all of it helped
. The alcohol dulled the pain and allowed me to
express it all at the same time. I let the tears flow freely: onto
the paper, smearing with the ink and mixing with the words; or into my drink
where I could swallow them back into me.
The first poem
came
after a phone call one night with my old college roommate Chris. He and
his wife had had a son two weeks prior to our losing Ethan and it was his
talking about the baby not sleeping through the night that sparked me. I
said nothing to him, but with time and vodka the words flowed from me like
water over jagged rock.
Your little boy cries too much.
My little boy makes no sound.
Your little boy sleeps warm in his crib,
Mine lies cold in the ground.
Your little boy woke up today,
My little boy never will.
Your little boy laughs and plays,
My little boy lies still.
Your little boy makes you proud,
And just as proud am I.
Cause while your little boy is learning to walk,
My little boy can fly.
My little boy can fly.
The night before I left for Willow Grove, Tammy found
me in Ethan’s room.
“Hey,”
she said
softly, arms crossed and leaning against the door frame.
Normally it was me checking on her, usually finding
her on the phone or – if not on the phone - by herself in Ethan’s room
crying. Sitting in the rocking chair in the corner and staring at the
empty crib. Her arms wrapped around an ungifted Teddy Bear and that giant
empty sorrow that I couldn’t chase away from her. She embraced it,
favored it and would not let me take it away from her, however desperately I
tried. However badly I needed to be able to. It hadn’t taken too
long for me to stop trying. It’s harder to feel helpless that way.
“Hey.”
“How
ya
doing?”
“I’m just fine, Tam.”
She looked down at the empty glass next to me.
“How many of those have you had?”
“One fewer than I need,” I said.
And then added, “So far.”
She moved away from me and sat down on the loveseat by
the fireplace. I thought about how we had sat there together the night
before losing Ethan and I recalled everything from that one night in my
previous life. How she was wearing the black turtleneck sweater I had
given her for Christmas. How the flicker of the flames were reflected in
her eyes. How the light from the fire seemed to settle over her in a soft
orange glow. How our four hands caressed her belly.
“Your mom called earlier. She said to tell you
she loves you.”
I nodded. “You two have a nice talk?”
I grabbed my glass and went to the kitchen before she
could answer. She followed. She leaned against the fridge with her
arms crossed in front of her and watched me make another vodka tonic.
I turned around and took a long sip. “You want
one?”
She shook her head. “Your mom would like to talk
to you, too, you know.”
“I’ve got nothing to say to her.”
“What does that mean?”
I unscrewed the lid to the vodka and splashed more
into my glass, filling it back to the rim. “I didn’t mean it that
way. I just don’t really want to talk to people about it. I have
nothing to say.”
“Well, sometimes it helps to talk.”
At this I laughed.
“Oh yeah?
Tell me, what does it help, Tam?”
She didn’t answer.
“My brother called yesterday. You know what he
asked me?”
She shook her head and I took another drink.
“He asked me how you were doing. Sure, at first
it was like, ‘How you doing, bro – holding up ok?’ in that macho bullshit
way. I said I was fine and that was the end of it. That was the end
of me.”
Everything swirled around me now. I kept trying
to refocus on Tammy, but my eyes couldn’t catch her.
“Well, he knows that you’ll talk when you’re ready
to,” she said. “And he knows how strong you are.”
“HA! Is that right? Well, tell me, Tam -
how strong am I?
Strong enough for this?
Strong enough to lose my son – is that how strong I am?
Who the fuck is that strong?”
“No. You’re not that strong, Tucker. I
know you’re not.” She moved toward me, but I pulled back.
“I think I hurt less than you, Tam. I can’t
imagine hurting more than I do right now and I hurt less than you - the whole world
says so.”
I drank down the rest of my drink and put the empty
glass on the counter next to the near-empty vodka bottle. “Now, what the
fuck
am
I supposed to do with that?”
On the way home from visiting Grandma one night, I
stopped in for a drink at Joe’s Place, one of Glidden’s oldest drinking
establishments. I nestled up to the bar and waited for my vodka tonic
like a baby robin waiting for mama to come back to the nest with a juicy night
crawler. Dad took me here once when I was in college. It was the
only time the two of us ever went out drinking together. I sat on this
very barstool and
-
for a while anyway – went
drink for drink with that father of mine – the war veteran, the womanizer, the
life of the party. I wanted to find something of him inside me that
night, but all I ended up finding was a stupid college boy who couldn’t hold
his liquor.