3:35 p.m. - 2005-09-22
My Fathe's Birthday Rant
Eighty five years ago today, my father was born. Today was the day sweet Eliza first kissed her baby boy. So many mysteries. So much I'll never know. His own father, so suddenly gone at thirty three. Two yellowed newspaper clippings. One in French. One in English. No explanations. A nervous disorder. Some prolonged illness. Unspecified. Letters found, mere fingers pointing at a sliver of moon. Not the moon at all. And so, this boy was raised by doting women who called him "Junior". Granmere Nancy, who painted still life oils, macabre with bloodied rabbits and silver trouts on ornate platters. Two aunts. Nellie, tall and dark. Mariette, short and stout with a cat named Mickey, who pulled a string that shut off the light over her bed. And sweet Eliza, who saw only the good in everyone without even trying. She worked in millinary, surrounded by hats of all shapes and hues of sepia and Kodak cream. Hats that forever flew down the same street in frozen frames. All legend. All true. Photographs of Junior dressed as an Indian, hoisting barbells with his toothpick arms, petting a black dog who knew well this boy I discover only in fragments and second-hand tales. How did he feel, growing up fatherless? How did he feel when Eliza remarried and a son was born? How did he feel? I string him together like an antique bracelet, each link precious, intrinsic to the whole. Who was this man for whom I pined like a discarded toy for some forty years? This honorable man who never forsook me, but never quite suspended his disbelief either. In high school, he was none other than "Snooping Ambrose", who wrote a gossip column for an independent rag that almost put his school paper out of business. I long to know him. This mischievous one who lived long before I ever looked into his golden brown eyes. Long before he became the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny all in one. Long before he took on all my dragons. Imps residing in the medicine chest. Friends running off, leaving me in tears. Father Hoban, yelling about Friday's chicken broth for his feverish girl. Long before he taught his grandson to read at two, hosted a party for a stuffed wombat, Zak. Who was this boy who painted his car after an Andy Hardy poster? Who courted the girl across the street, his "Bunny", my mother? Who sent her coded letters from the war? Who defended his country, his family, without a second thought? Who could fix everything from radios to skinned knees to broken hearts? What made him who he was that makes me who I am? I long to hear him singing, "Tangerine ... she is all they claim". See him scratch his head like Stan Laurel over the breakfast table. Know that he is just outside, changing the oil on a slat of cardboard there in the driveway. And all is well. Knowing that all is well because he is there, in charge. Did he know me at all? Did he ever suspect that my world spun in his golden brown eyes? That all and all for nought were for none but him? Had he read King Lear? Did he know that my heart purely loved him, all evidence to the contrary, that I am dear Cordelia? That I love him still? What were his dreams? The ones he accomplished, the ones he set aside? He will never write that children's book, never read the complete works of Shakespeare, never move to an Appalacian mountaintop to rock on a porch with a blue tic hound. He will never repair another appliance, walk barefoot on the shiny lanolium, listen to Sinatra. He will never know about the war in Iraq, the record rainfall or the morning glories draped along the back wall. He will never know how much I loved him.
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