Daddy

 It’s hard to talk about my father. He was a quiet man, a distant man, a troubled man. Maybe not the latter. He never let on what he was feeling. Dads were like that back then, as we were all about to experience, the family and me.

There were three people in my family. My father, my mother, and the children, who were reflections of the former. Throw a rock in the pool of my family’s water and you would hit one of us.

No, it’s impossible. To talk about my father, that is. Try as I may, the words do not come out. Not ever. Not anywhere.

Not, YURRrhhhhhHaaa! I can’t think of the word. It’s excruciating.

Excruciating. Now there’s a word for you.

My father was there. Excruciating. That is all. He was there.

He was a good father. A fair and a just father. And a distant and a remote father. A caretaker and a long-sufferer. And he was the father that wasn’t there, to be quite frank. He was absent. Period.

I saw my father through the lens of the rest of my family. And I came to consider him as just a picture on the wall. With occasional feeling. But that is unkind.

Now is the time I should say something good about him. OK. He was a good technician. I learned how to use a slide rule from him.

Seriously. He taught me how to use a slide rule, a skill I possess to this day, I think. Though don’t ask me to find pi or the square root of negative something-or-other, or whatnot. Supercomputers notwithstanding. You know, why the fuck? We can just ask our thinking machines to do all of the thinking for us. What’s the problem?

But when the apocalypse happens, I can tell you how to multiply two by four using a slide rule and come up with something that might make a pyramid, maybe. Sure. Why not?

I remember him sitting next to me on a bench in our back yard showing me how to use a slide rule. “You put the X scale on the Y and the Pi position over the, whatever. Fuck it, it just works if you do it as I say,” he would say. “And two times two equals four. You see?” Or so I remember. And I saw.

Years later in high school I remember saying, “Hey! I know how that works!” when the subject of slide rules came up in physics class. “Yay!” I absorbed something from my father.

I remember his shop. Or even earlier than that, I remember the garage. When I was a child. All memories are childlike. And I remember them all. I remember them as a child, as once we all were. With the perseverance of memory.

I was two or zero or nothing years old-age doesn’t matter when you are that young. I just… was. And that’s all. I was standing in the driveway. The outside of our house and garage. In a little village called Taftville outside of the city of Norwich, Connecticut. I was maybe three years old. Four, tops.

Though at the time I didn’t know all that, it just felt like the outside. And I felt connected. I don’t know how. I just were, was, am? there. That’s all.

I was being there. It was a factoid that I didn’t understand at the time. And I continued to fail to understand it. Constantly. That’s what it’s like when you can barely speak a language, let alone communicate in it.

But I was in the moment, anyway. Aren’t we all, everywhere, and all at once? In the moment? And I remember. I am sure you do as well.

My father was painting a tricycle. A three wheeler. It was blue and he was painting it red or maybe it was red and he was painting it blue. I don’t remember which. It didn’t matter. It was something and he was painting it something else. That is all I remember.

What mattered is what he did next. He took the pieces of the tricycle, freshly painted blue or whatever, and hung them on hooks between the studs of the garage where he was working. Just like that. Ha. Like he owned the place or something.

And I thought, “My God. That is the best thing in the whole universe,” which, at the time, I had little concept of but knew it was grand, anyway. It had to be. I was in it and so was my father, who was the bestest being ever.

And my family was inside and watching Howdy Doody on the black and white television set. And my mother was making macaroni and cheese for dinner. And my father was working miracles in his shop and coming home on the weekends and taking us out to the cottage or off to the grandparents’ farm or maybe even for extended visits during the summer, why not?

Why not, indeed? I loved that old place, spooky and creepy though it was. Everything you love has to be a little bit spooky and a tad bit creepy. It’s just gotta!

It was home.

I guess I really haven’t said very much about my father with this essay, except that he was a man of science and reason. And maybe a bit aloof. A Midwesterner from Kansas. A Baptist. A Christian. I guess I am just too much like him.

Thank you, Father.