Dear Dad,
It’s been almost seven
months and I rarely think about you sick anymore. Mostly when you come to me
now, you are tan, energized, sinew and muscle, your face reflecting one of a
myriad of expressions from my youth: Your burst of elation behind a softball
fence after Amy or I strike out the clean-up hitter. Your pursed-lip pause, preparing
your delivery before you relay a joke. Your singular focus while scooping buttered
lima beans up to your mouth or scraping the extra tomato sauce off a pizza. Your
engrossed scrutiny of the Bear’s offensive line in the Red zone with that brief
flicker of your eyelids as you straighten your glasses above the nose.
I can conjure up your
sounds and smells with wine-glass clarity. Other memories materialize
surreptitiously like a bur, adhering to my clothing, attaching to me without my
even being aware. Like the morning in the cemetery when you taught me to drive
in the portly red cargo van or the afternoon we peered out at the Grand Canyon,
dizzy from its magnitude. Each recollection finds me like a lovely accident, a
trigger from a time elapsed; a brief hiatus permitting me to wade in
wistfulness for a while, leaving me homesick for you to return to us.
I hear the pad of your
worn running shoes on the pavement next to me as we jog. Your breath spewing
out in forceful gusts, your body consuming, disposing, recycling air. I hear
you calling me ‘Emmy’ from the bottom of the stairs at home. You were only person
who ever called me that. I miss it….the sugar-dusted
endearment, the soft familiarity of your greeting. I hear the jangle of your
laugh as it rumbles out of you with abandon, striking a high note and then
dissolving into a cough, like it caught even you off guard. Then the smile, still
lingering on your face: an offering of respect to whatever earned your
amusement. I haven’t heard that sound in such a long time. You stopped laughing
years before you left. It’s stubborn to
access, to really pin it down, but I resurrected it on my walk the other day
and it stopped me cold. Reliving your laugh made me sob.
I smell you too. Not
the soured medicine scent that sat with you in sickness. That blows past me
like some stranger tipping a cigarette out a passing car. What lingers are the
smells of my childhood. The warm, stuffy foulness of the single bathroom we all
shared down in Marco after you exited clutching the newspaper and whipped on
the exhaust. (It was always ill-advised to follow you if reading material was
involved.) I can still smell the bar soap
on your skin after a shower, even though you’d be sweating through your shirt
five minutes later. I smell ham frying, crackling and sizzling on the kitchen
skillet with the Villager’s white lunch paper slapped on the counter, the
expiration date several days past. I smell charcoal from the barbeque. Chlorine
from the pool. Pert Plus shampoo. Wood dust from the hardware store. The fragrance
of old flannel while hugging your neck.
You weren’t fancy. I
could pick your tatty toothbrush and greased comb out of a lineup with ease. We
all could. You didn’t need much for yourself, but you longed to give us
everything. And you did. You found mom. Right there, that was everything. You
couldn’t have chosen a better mother for us. You couldn’t have gifted us a
better life.
You injected us with
confidence. You were relentless when it came to practicing sports, but you made
sure we reached our plateau. For one brief snippet of time in our little corner
of River Forest, I could actually say I was the best at something. You infected
us with hunger, the drive to excel. I know with every fiber of my being that
had you not gotten sick, Bridget would already be catching with her glove. You
would have been blown away by the athletic prowess of your grandsons, pacing proudly
on the sidelines of Brady’s soccer games, perched on the bleachers at Jack’s
wrestling meets. And 3-year-old Grace, well, you’d chuckle when she’d argue
with you over how to grip the t-ball bat. You’d be endlessly amused at her
bossiness.
As we tour your
University campus, misty with rain, I picture you here, darting under archways,
turning corners, hustling to wrestling practice, running laps in the football
stadium: A shadow in constant motion at an age younger than me now. Your
original self in this place. Before Mom. Before all of us. Before air-conditioned
student centers and WiFi. But, I attended your reunions, chubby-cheeked in tiger
apparel and then later, lean and awkward in bright orange shorts. The last one
I came to, I was pregnant with your granddaughter. Over the years, I detected the
pride in your voice. I know you were happy here. Happy enough to pretend to
tear up my Stanford tuition checks. I suspect you found your stride: You left
home. You made friends. You exceled. You grew into yourself.
I am humbled to walk
over this old colonial ground. Many feet have tread here. I wonder if any of
our footprints lined up, yours and mine. If I have, at any point today, managed
to step, even partially in your big shoes. I have peace that you trust our judgment
to leave a bit of you behind in this dirt, a home that once absorbed your salt
and your sweat. We leave you in dust to settle where you might, to mingle with
the sanctity of this place, its storied history. We leave you to soak into the
earth, to grow with the bark of some tree, a blade of grass, a seed of a
dandelion. Just as you once grew into a man here.
As we move on and
forward as a family, toward September 11th, your 69th
birthday that will never come, toward holidays without you flanking the dining
room table, the firsts will all be tender, skin grafts over a burn. The
subsequent years are destined to be less raw. In my grief, I am meanwhile savoring
the moments that visit me, sometimes as ephemeral and fleeting as a hummingbird
in a garden. Graceful moments that both assault and comfort me at the most random,
arbitrary occasions: Embracing the jarring reaction a can of Coke provokes in
line at the Jewel, the tears that are triggered by an orange shirt passing up
and away by escalator, the heartache of an empty clay baseball diamond at
sunset.
I have encountered you
on walks, while driving in the car, in my tumbling thoughts before sleep, as I
chop vegetables, and while staring out of airplane windows, wondering where you
are. Where you went. Distantly aware you are somehow in all these places,
everywhere at once, coiled and ready to remind me the next time I smell burnt
ham that you are far, but not so far.
Love you, Dad.
