Princeton

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 11^th, your 69^th 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.