fatherhoodstory

[fatherhoodstory]

more time...

I've been writing this thing for the better part of ten years now. Stories of being a father, mis-adventures, love stories, loss, gain, a lot of it is in here, most just hinted at. It's been a shit-storm for sure, a decades long shit-storm of which I never intended to find myself. Who ever does though, knowingly? It comes like a sunny day, full of promise and you put on shorts and head out and feel good and all is right in the world. Then the clouds gather and the wind blows and before you know it you're hypothermic and huddled under a tree waiting for the lightening strike or falling cottonwood limb that will take your life. That's kind of how it is has been and the effect of it has left me wounded, like a veteran of war, sitting back against the wall always poised for some attack that may never come. No matter how much you think you might know or prepare, there is always something in life that catches you off guard and you have to wade through it the best you can. Cancer for instance, my sister with a life full of dreams and hopes that were suddenly put aside and survival became the only goal. I have lost so much already; my sister, great loves, money, time, huge parts of myself that I struggle to remember or maintain and here I am still writing in the early morning with a cup of coffee and a stack of books and little wood shavings stuck to my socks and loud trucks going by and music on the radio and the fire beating back the cold. So much has changed and also so very little it feels extremely slow and too fast all at the same time, like I could simply reach out through an open window and touch that place where it all began.

I won more time with my daughter but winning doesn't sound like the right word at all. I pulled, yanked, and wrestled with one foot braced against the wall like a dentist struggling to extract an abscessed and rotten tooth that has been allowed to stay too long in what should otherwise be a healthy, beautiful smile. It feels like I am winning my freedom, my anonymity, to be the parent I wanted to be from the start, albeit still slowly. There's a healing process after such a long and painful extraction, a time you can eat only pudding and soft cold things, before the meat and wine are allowed again. That's kind of where we are, in the beginning and I am treading lightly so as not to fall back into some trap I did not see. I'll never get back those years of pain and struggle, those are gone, and it feels strangely like I accomplished something monumental by just surviving.

I have friends that are in similar positions, against women who are far more vindictive and adamant they never see or have influence over their children. It makes me so mad to think that people do this to their children simply because they dislike or disagree with the other parent. Everyone suffers and only the system benefits. I could rant for days about it but this was not what this was supposed to be about. There may be a time for that, a space where I lay out the problems clearly for those who might find themselves in a similar situation. I heard it said somewhere early on that you never fully know or understand someone until you are sitting across from them in court. All the proclamations of love and promises of this and that forever all mean next to nothing as you sit with your mouth open in horror as some old man in a black robe tells you when and how often you will see your child and how much you have to pay for that privilege.

I wanted to sail, to travel, to run around and be free all these years. I had an idea of how it was going to be and then was forced to choose between that idea for myself and the reality of well-worn paths that were comfortable for another. And here it is now my yellow house surrounded by sunflowers and wood chips, like a boat navigating this strange sea I find myself still. I would have never lived in this town and still leave whenever I can. I try hard not to let it get to me. The loud trucks with oversized pipes blowing smoke as they speed up and down the street like savages. The youth and the privilege of growing up rich and white in million dollar houses with expensive cars and everything they ask for. But I digress.

There is love, always, and I sit here and read and try to write as was written to me in a notebook once to never stop doing. In the cabin, surrounded by stars and woods and mountains I had a dream not long ago and I was told that I would write myself out of this. That in the end of it the words would free me and I could live as I had always wanted. I don't know exactly what it meant but I have an idea and so I write and write as if the key is there somewhere in the words and the door will open one day to the love that I experienced so long ago when the sun was shining and you were young and we threw flowers in the street and laughed and that was it. Maybe that's all there is anyway, glimpses here and there between the sweat and tears where we sit and admire the life we have and the sunset and the wine and food with friends and loved ones. It feels within reach after all these years of struggle though, where those moments are more than the weight of the ones that have been. It's hard to let that go, to step out and see that things are not all that bad and what you've created despite all the pain and suffering and chaos is beautiful and filled with love and art and wildness at it's edges that hold the dreams that once were and will come again. The summer in Italy, the trees full and the heat intense, the river rushing blue and clean to the valley below and nothing but a road ahead and time and love. It all has to end, sometime, for everyone. Youth, summer, but it continues still, despite you or us or war or death or pain. It is there and once you were there and you can remember it and carry it with you and that means something.

And so, it continues, and there will be bikes and mountains and time spent together there, more time now, more freedom until it all explodes like a supernova and we go our own ways into the rest of this life with memories full of love and adventure and take what we have learned and spread it around like soft butter on warm sourdough bread just out of the oven. Cracks will be mended, time will heal and life will move on as it always has and I will keep writing and remember and hold you close until I can hold on no longer and then I will let go.

The words will remain, somewhere, like Salter said "There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real"

[fatherhoodstory]

10

This will be the first year since you were born that I have not seen you or spent time with you on your birthday, your actual birth-day. As you get older I guess that just becomes the way of things and we can mark this tenth year as a sort of rite-of-passage, not just into your double digits but into your power, your understanding of things. Though I am sad, as this year and every year after changes things more dramatically from us all being young and doing all those things we did only for the first time, I know that one thing grows stronger still, love. I remember laying in bed just after you were born and staring at you while you slept, you and mom laying side by side tucked into the covers like angels. I didn't think I could ever love anything or anyone more in all my life but I was wrong, that love only grows as you do, becoming like all the mountains that reach up into the clouds, their heights snowcapped and unseen by only but a few. Every birthday you have and everyday I get to see you or spend time with you, that is a gift you give to me, love, and the understanding that despite all other things that may happen in life, it continues to grow, forever.

Ten is a big one and many things will change in your life in these next few years, in all our lives I imagine. To think that in eight short years you will be off on your own adventures in the world...WOW, but please, take it slow, there is no rush to grow up too fast.

You are with me now, reading on the couch as I write this letter, as usual. I love that you read, that we read together, that we can sit at the library (our favorite place) for hours as if nothing else mattered in the world, lost in our stories. This is a story you know, you and I, mom, Jesse and Michelle, Kiki, my sister, all of your friends and family too many to name, the Five Dragons that live atop the mountain, Beatrice the Bicycling Butterfly, the Pumpkin Princess. It is your story. It may not always be as exciting as the stories you read in your favorite books with having to clean your room, brush your teeth and going to school every day stuff, but it is indeed your story and as fas as stories go, watching you grow these last ten years I know for a fact when you are much older and begin to look back on your life, it will be a story that will be hard to beat. A story filled with joy and sadness, adventures too many to list, surprises and tragedy, but above all else, love. That, I believe, is the most important part of any story, no matter what else happens...did we love and were we loved? No matter what you do in your life or where the world may take you, you already have the makings of the greatest story, because you are loved by so many and love in return.

I know it hasn't been easy and truthfully the good stories are never easy. What builds a good character is the challenges they face and the strength it takes to overcome them, to work through the hard problems and find solutions. I see you doing that every single day and it makes me so proud to be your Dad. I love your story and that I have been chosen to be a part of it these last ten years. I hope our story and my part in it will last for many more years until I am an old man with white hair and bushy eyebrows and we can sit together and watch the sunset while you tell me of all your adventures and about all the things you love most in the world.

Happy Birthday my girl. I love you.

Papa

[fatherhoodstory]

summer’s end

I still dream about you at random, smiling in a long black dress maybe you wore once or twice sitting in the grass and sun of a long ago summer. Sometimes you come close and we talk but almost always you remain at a distance, aware of me, but unconcerned. This time it was your wedding on some riverboat casino cruise and you were surrounded by your friends and new family who were quite drunk. I was pulled into a card game I did not understand while being bombarded with questions as to who I was and where had I been. A speech was being made across the deck, one I couldn't hear. There was laughter, smiles, and those sympathetic looks at odd angles when tender speeches are made and you saw me then and moved towards me as if in a dream which it was. You told me through tears that you could not have children, that you had lost one already. It would not have happened that way if you had stayed you had said but you did not and so turned and walked back to the party and were smiling again.

I awake in the night as I almost always do now. I no longer fight it and get up and walk outside in the cold under a full moon to piss in the October snow. There is a buck with a full winter rack standing in the driveway in the moonlight, black eyes glowing, staring. It can't see me where I stand in the shadow of the house so does not move. For a minute I think I am still dreaming but my toes are cold and I whisper a greeting and the buck turns and walks calmly down the street, hooves clanking to a slow beat.

I think about the lonely winter desert and driving home when I was young and a way station far between nameless towns where a few lights are visible in an otherwise empty black. A native man was at the counter when I entered and not another soul alive or awake in all the world it seemed. We talked but I can't recall a word. He emptied the contents of a crumbled paper sack onto the counter. A sandwich was ripped carefully in two, a bag of almonds, one of dates, all split evenly. It was in that dark time of the world, when the sun is long down and far from rising and so he shared what he had as if the food was warmth and I was without clothes. I had never felt that alone before, so remember it now laying awake in the dark. Still a teen I did not yet understand the frailty of life and the depths of loneliness or heartache or pain. It is all still fairly new then and you think that you know because there has been nothing else yet to show you otherwise. I ate the sandwich and drove across the void, the world defined by the space illuminated in the headlights, only the black and stars above. The space capsule glow of the instruments, speed and time and pressure. The few radio stations that reached that far into the dark were screeching doomsday sermons of blood and fire and redemption between the static. It must be some other strange planet, inhabited by fearful alien creatures, but it is our planet, where I drive across an empty plain on the fumes of the long dead and buried, unearthed and burned again. There was nothing to know then but the miles ahead, a long and endless road. Even now, surrounded by the same dark of night and the deep love of midlife, I can easily reach out and touch that void, that place one had to seek out to find then but is now always within reach.

It is light now and I wait for you at school and for twenty or thirty minutes I linger. There is a hug, we talk about the book you are reading, tune the ukulele, maybe play a song. I watch you laminate a self portrait in an empty classroom, the resemblance surprises me.

And on those mornings when there is no school or you are gone and there is nothing for me to do I sit outside, cold in the quiet even as the first rays hit the yellow of the house from behind the mountains east. Between cars the birds take over, a jogger’s footfalls down the alley unseen, beer cans litter the sidewalk from a party somewhere while I slept, young kids hollering drunkenly to the night. My small place of solace in a world of chaos. A coal train moving slowly west sounds the horn like a funeral procession for what remains of our world. The crow calls out for breakfast or to the sun for which we are all slaves. It is a meditation. The sunflowers hang down, the petals of golden light now dry and faded. The ones I cut stand beheaded, alive still but unsure of what to do without the weight of their tops bending them toward the dark rich soil where they must lay their seed. The traffic increases and with it the thoughts of things undone, promises made, dreams of women gone forever, a stack of unopened mail by the door, wood to cut, water to carry. Who wanted all of this I wonder, who’s fool scheme might this be? I feel out for the void and it is there neither beckoning or turning away. It remains above all things an obvious truth. I am here, this is life, there are things that must be done, here and there between it is peace.

[fatherhoodstory]

seasons

There was a field here once, and a pond of warm water that bubbled out of the ground just up the hill. Closer to the source, the water trickled down the slope through a natural trough and was warmer. We made rock and mud dams there to form pools big enough for one, or two. At times the elk would be grazing in the field and we would sit in our pools and watch them through a curtain of rising steam and giant snowflakes that fell thick and slow. I’ve written about this place before, when things were different, volatile and uncertain, yet somehow easier to understand and navigate. I remember the stars that night, brighter from the cold, and the outline of her body against them. The darkest of matter is always between the light. There was a warmth and anticipation of love then that illuminated the mundane. Before all that though it was ours and you would swim in the small pools we built, your tiny hands searching the bottom for rocks to throw for splashes and laughter. The plastic dinosaurs you would carry circled us in the pool, grazing mostly, others taking dips when you allowed. It is all different now. A facility, locker rooms, concrete and gravel walkways, and various sized pools of different temps fill the field. The pond is gone, or divided, but you can still see the trench where we would sit. The willows remain, the flow of water out of the earth now just working its way down the slope to join the cold river below. We had it to ourselves during those tumultuous early years, and the memory of it I carry still. I can see it from where we are sitting, across the river in other pools we built with shovels and dig bars, the hippy dips. It is snowing this morning and the wind comes in erratic bursts from the mountains above. In those moments of calm when the steam settles, I can hear the two of you and remember the simplicity of love.

The wood is stacked in neat rows around this old cabin. It is covered with canvas tarps and blanketed in what was winter’s first real showing. The rhythm of this life; the garden, the summer, the wood, the hunt, the hot springs and the bike, the quiet and harshness of winter. Around and around, year after year. You get older. I get older. People come and go, some say things before they do, others just fade away and are forgotten, a few remain in memory, fewer still we call friends. I decided long ago that you were the most important one, and whatever it takes of me I will not leave, not yet. 

I wake up early and shovel the snow off the sidewalks, throwing it out into the street. People speed by on their way to work, or school, most of them looking down at their phones, oblivious. Sometimes I throw a shovel of snow on them, to wake them up, or slow them down. Mostly they just give me the finger and speed on. It has snowed almost every day this month, with brief glimpses of sunshine between storms to remind you that there is light, somewhere. I go to your school after, my coffee in that tattered eskimo cup, and wait outside to see you. Sometimes you don’t show, and I wait just the same. I know the teachers now, the other parents. As different as we all are, we do have one thing in common, we all love our children. Some of them ask me what I am doing out here and I tell them. If I don’t do this I won’t see you and I just want to see you. They don’t understand, they see their kids, so they just shake their heads and say nothing. 

When this is all over, which it will be soon, at least you’ll know that I showed up everyday that I could. I ask you from time to time if you still want me to come in the mornings, and you do, for now. Some mornings you almost ignore me and I ask you questions about the book you’re reading, if you slept well or had any dreams. Other mornings, I just hug you and tell you I love you before I go. I hold onto these days, these moments, hard as they are, and let them go reluctantly and only because there is no other choice. 

I think about my sister at times, your beautiful auntie, mostly at night when I am alone and staring at the wall. There is a picture of her there, she is smiling, and if i think about it long enough I can hear her laughing. I feel her presence as I have every day of my life. She is still there somewhere waiting for me to call and check in. Where exactly did you go sister, that part of you that made that smile? They say heaven. I don’t have an idea of what that looks like, maybe it’s different for everyone, but if there is such a place where we go, and that place has a happy hour with a view of the mountains or the cosmos, that’s where you are, and I will see you there. 

-13 today. Below zero it’s all the same. 20 feels balmy, like a heat wave. The sun is out but provides no heat so low in the sky. I look at it anyway and think about the ocean, somewhere warm and without all this. I have other lives to live before I go, ones without you. The idea of that frightens me. I will miss you, and in a way all of this. To focus on one thing, the most important thing I would argue, gives you a certain purpose and meaning that nothing else does. I remember when I wasn’t a father, barely, and how selfish it all was. Parenthood reminds you that you are insignificant and giving yourself in the service of others is the only noble thing to do, whether they be your own kids, someone else’s, or strangers who have no one else. Live for yourself and you shall die in vain, live for others and you shall live again, or so says the song. Though I can’t imagine doing any of  this again. 

[fatherhoodstory]

ashes to ashes pt.2

Driving has always been cathartic, the movement somewhere, the changing landscapes. Leaving always felt good to me, knowing that things will not be the same when you return, if you return. It was late June and things were finally starting to warm after a wet spring. Everything was green, the flowers blooming, the rivers still high and fast. I listened to music with the windows down and the sun burning my left arm that hung out the window doing airplanes against the wind. I thought of my sister and how much she would love to be sitting shotgun, not a care in the world. I imagined she was, if the space that now separates us is permeable, which I know it to be. We sang together like we always did, to Cat Stevens...

trouble....oh trouble set me free, i have seen your face and it’s too much too much for me.

I parked the car at the foot of the Sawtooth mountains, a jagged wreck of a range, and spent the better part of an hour getting the bike packed and ready. There’s always too much, many things were left behind, and the bike is always heavier than you thought it would be. It takes some miles before you get used to the weight, things fall off and bounce down the road, bottles not secured, a loose sandal. There is a lot of stopping and adjusting no matter what you do. Those first ten miles away from the car and I can feel the weight of those other things retreating. That is the beauty of the bike, of pedaling towards something far away and unknown. When I return to this spot I will not be the same person, no matter what happens, the grind relieves you of everything you bring; food, water, fat, and those heavy things we carry that we must eventually put down, to continue, lest we are prepared to lay down with them.

Most of the time

I don't even notice

She's gone

Most of the time

And it unfolds there in the silence. The miles of open spaces, rock and grass, mountains of green, all at the slow speed of the grind. It’s all too much to take in and I spend a considerable amount of time looking down at my legs and the strength there, the machine and I, one unit, melded for a singular goal...to proceed. I climbed two passes that first night, finishing the last descent with a headlamp in the dark. It was cool, but not cold, the forest was dark and unfamiliar outside the scope of my light. I sang just loud enough for any bear or moose or deer to think twice before wandering out into the road. At that speed even a squirrel could  prove disastrous. I set up camp along a creek about a half mile from the road and made food in the quiet under the stars. The first night is always the hardest, to sleep, the wild expanse above and around you. You are on alert and also in awe. I woke multiple times and stared into space, the forest silent save the river sounds, which are like voices, a language of water and rock you can only sometimes understand. The routine is the same; eat, fill water, and ride. There are hot springs here, many of them, and swimming holes deep and blue surrounded by cliffs and white sand beaches, tall trees. I didn’t think of dropping my sister’s ashes until I got to the middle fork of the Salmon river and spent hours riding along the banks completely alone save the occasional Nez Perce family, camping and fishing for salmon along the banks and bridges. I would come to a spot so remote and beautiful that I would stop and pull out the blue velvet bag that held what remained of her. I would cry with the bag in my hand and hear her voice, clear as day, like she used to do when I took her somewhere filled with strange people or off the beaten path, deep in the woods...

”Don’t leave me here brother”

...and I would continue riding. The riding was easy here and you had time to look out at the river, it’s many folds and drops, trees ripped from the earth and deposited like a twig atop a rock bigger than a house that had been there for longer than any memory, save those of the earth and the water. Those miles were some of the most beautiful for me, the most healing. I had time to think, and I digested the death of my sister like a cow chews cud. The part of it all I was having so much trouble coming to understand, and if not understand, accept. Did that really happen? Yes, it did.

I landed amidst the storms forming up and out of the gulf. We slid in between two cells, lighting all around us. My sister had already left Houston, barely surviving the first-class plane ride back home, a place she wanted to be in the end. It was just my father and I, carrying out the motions. There was a job to be done, tasks to complete, and that had some comfort in it. I had been here about a month before, when there was still this inkling of hope remaining. But even then, sitting with my sister on the bed, she turned to me and said “I’m dying brother”. I knew it, we all did, it just wasn’t something you said aloud. Death is like that, the elephant in the room, and is only mentioned when there is no room left to breath, or cry.

We ate spaghetti, my dad and I, in some sad apartment complex near the medical center. The furniture was worn and uncomfortable, the art, one piece per wall or so, was picked carelessly from the shelves of the nearest big box department store. I guessed Target. They were occupied with mostly medical staff, researchers, orderlies and their families, many from India, some with turbans, a dark purple or red. Then there were those getting treatments and their families. A church had purchased a slew of these apartments and kept the rents low for the unlucky and those that cared for them. It was humid and raining, the night air charged and heavy. I could feel the weight of the fork as we ate in silence. The same spaghetti I’d always eaten with my family, the recipe never deviating. A big jar of jalapeños, the green parmesan container. That’s not parmesan I thought but said nothing while I dulled it out. We ate because we had to, we ate to have the strength to do the things you must do in those times. Those are meals consumed with shock and sadness.  

The river came eventually to a fork, lost the smooth pavement, and gave way to dirt and rock, slowly rising towards some distance pass. There was no one here but me, the water, the sound of the bike, my breath, the sun, trees, birds, hawks, fish, and other creatures I could not see. It went on like this for many more miles before the road began to climb. Once in a while through a break in the trees you could see the pass, or at least where you think it might be. It was a long way up and still far away, the hardest climb according to the map. Maybe up there I thought, and vowed to listen while I climbed, to watch the signs.

My sister was sitting on a bench in a zen garden she liked near the medical center. The ducks in the pond were deformed from some ailment, or maybe internal squabbles that had turned violent, and they were hungry. I had snuck in on a morning flight and grabbed one of those unsound city bikes from a rental rack and was speeding across the park to surprise her. I saw my dad first, standing, obviously looking around for me, her husband Doug sitting next to her on the bench. I came in hot despite the “no bikes” sign and skidded to a stop right in front of them asking if anyone knew where the shitter was. My sister was so offended by the interruption she did not recognize her brother was the degenerate who had dared do such a thing. She was always fierce, when she needed to be, these last two years especially. There was a time when I was being chased by some older kid who I had probably offended, he was going to smash me to bits and I ran for the house. My sister must have seen him coming and intercepted us near the door, charging past me as I fled, sending him fleeing back in the direction he had come throwing blows and yelling, “that’s my brother!”

I didn’t recognize her either at first, the cancer eating away at the very center of who I’d always known her to be. But then her face shifted to joy from anger and tears flowed and she sort of collapsed in surprise and a bit of relief that her brother was here. It’s all good. We embraced and I could see that my dad was crying, her husband walking off pretending to be on a phone call was doing the same. We sat for a while and talked, she was tired, maybe we should eat I said. This was just before the wheelchair, where she was still determined to walk as much as she could bare.

Want to ride the bike?

I can’t ride a bike brother.

Sure you can, the seat is soft and huge, for Texas-sized butts. You sit on and hold the bars, I’ll hold the bar and seat and walk alongside.

Don’t drop me.

Never.  

We went to lunch I remember, in some swank hotel by the park. While we waited for the food I ran to the museum down the street and borrowed a wheelchair. We all sat there and ate, much like we normally would. It was like some strange vacation with a dark, sad undertone. It was the natural history museum we went to that first day, after lunch. She was tired and though she was reluctant to use the wheelchair, for fear of what that meant, I assured her it was fine. I can remember only the butterflies from that museum, and the Herzstein Foucault Pendulum that hung 60ft from the ceiling, knocking down a circle of pins as the earth spun around it. We sat there, you in the wheel chair, me beside you on the floor sipping water, the world spinning with us, around the sun, through space, the falling pins the only hint of movement. The butterflies were enormous, the room somehow hotter and more humid than it already was outside. They were wildly colorful and would do erratic circles around our heads. 

That climb was hard, they all are. It was made much worse by the work they were doing to maintain the road. There were two guys out there, somewhere above me, one was in a grater, a big piece of machinery with a large scraper blade that smooths things out. The other was in a truck with a sort of large metal rake behind it to scatter the bigger rocks and pull them to the side before the grater arrived. Before all that, a truck had come, or another tractor, and dropped fresh sand for the grater to smooth out. That’s what I was riding in, a few inches of soft sand. To the right or left would be a strip of the old compacted forest road to ride on when the sand got too deep or the road too steep. But then there were the rocks piled indiscriminately in those sections from the big metal comb. Usually you can just put your head down and climb, think about things without too much thought to the road. Instead it was a constant struggle to continue moving forward without hitting a rock, or dig into the sand and fall over, all of which I did many times. It was no less beautiful and save the guys up ahead of me somewhere working, I saw not a single person as I climbed. I could see the summit now, more or less. Two hawks were circling near the top, riding thermals. A few times I stopped and thought about spreading the ashes into the creek that ran violently down the mountain beside the road. She would enter the water here and be mixed with rock and sand, joining the Salmon in the valley below, to marry the Lemhi, then the Snake, to the Colombia and eventually into the sea. But still I could not and on I climbed.

After spaghetti we said our goodbyes and I loaded the remainder of the things into the car to begin the drive. It was 930 or 10 when I left Houston with my sister’s dogs and some other stuff they had brought here. I promised myself to drive as far as I could and never return to this hell-scape called Houston. My mom had told me earlier that her dad had died here, in one of the buildings near where my sister had been getting her treatments. She couldn’t remember which one exactly, but one of them she had said. She was 15 or 16, he had come for a routine surgery to fix something. He had called and said he’d be home tomorrow and never returned. This place is cursed.

I got to the top in the afternoon. I had passed the workers in the truck and tractor in the last mile. The guy in the tractor had leaned out the window with a cigarette hanging from his lower lip and said...”been making your life hell I bet” with a smile. Nah, not really. Uphill is always my favorite part. The hawks were still circling in the winds up high over the pass, and you could see off both sides of the mountain into the wide valleys separated by this upheaval of rock. This is the spot I thought, setting down the bike and removing the bag. I knew what lay ahead, having done this route a few years before. There wasn’t a chance I’d leave her in anything beyond here, remote and beautiful as it may be. No, this was the last spot, the highest climb. At that moment I heard the approach of engines, and within a minute two side-by-side Razors sped up over the hill driven by very large, very white, very proud, Americans. They had open bud lights and a flag hanging from the back. They stopped briefly to hoot and holler above the sound of their engines, keeping a weary eye on the loan biker sitting in the sun with a small blue velvet bag. This was not the place. I could hear my sister again after they sped away, saying...

Not here brother, don’t leave me here, no one knows me here and no one will visit me.

Where then Katie I started asking aloud into the wind. Where do you want to go because you can’t stay with me. Not there.

Take me home, was the response I heard or felt or sensed.

Home? Virginia home, where we were born?

Yes. Take me to mom and dad, they can put me out in the garden with a bench and sit and remember.

I drove into a storm, approaching it in the night in an already heavy rain. You could see the dark mass between lighting flashes in the distance. This was Texas, my sister and I had grown up here, for a little while. This was tornado country and I felt out of place, naked. I was determined to get as far as I could and drove on as people started to pull over and hide under overpasses. The road rose up to an elevated section with no exits and the storm hit me there. With the first gusts of wind I was sure I would be sucked up like Dorothy and tossed into some other part of state. I turned the music up so I could hear it above the rain, the windshield wipers on full tilt could no longer keep up with the torrent. Then it began to hail and I thought of my dad and how pissed he’d be if I didn’t die, but pulled up in his brand new car with a thousand golf balled sized dents. I wouldn’t be able to see the tornado if it came, it was all blurry, like opening your eyes underwater. Shapes could be seen, street lights like lighthouses, the tail-lights of other cars, some stopped in the middle of the road now. I found an exit after a while of white knuckle driving and then a parking lot with an awning. I pulled in as the hail began in earnest and the wind shook the car.

The descent from the pass was slow and technical. There were large holes in the road keeping you from gaining any real speed. Just when you thought you were safe and would let a little off the brake you would hit a hole and nearly be bucked off the bike. I laughed on the way down, knowing my sister would have killed me if I ever took her on something like this. There were sections that were pleasant, everything was always beautiful, but it was no pleasure ride, this whole thing was a slog, painful, designed to induce a great amount of suffering and ass pain. This was never about bringing my sister’s ashes here. This was about breaking through the pain I was carrying long enough to hear her, to let her tell me where she wanted to go. Even though I was nearing the halfway mark of the route, I was already making plans to pull out. My ass was so sore I could no longer sit on the seat without first enduring what I could only imagine felt like dipping your ass into a cauldron of liquid lava. Most of the rest of that day was spent up and out of the saddle, a standing peddle. I stopped for a burger in McCall at some rooftop bar filled with heavy set tourists. I had nothing left to prove here and made plans for a buddy to pick me up the following day another 100 miles or so south. He manned a fire-lookout tower that happened to be on the route and tomorrow was his day off. I rode on through a hot summer sun and no breeze. I passed a farm where people were gathering around the barn, a band was setting up in the shade, food was being cooked. I thought about stopping, mostly for the food, but didn’t feel like talking. There was a hot springs that was closing when I finally arrived tired and wind blown. They let me soak for thirty minutes before ushering me out the gate, which I was thankful for. There was one more big climb ahead of me and considering I had nothing else to do and felt more or less refreshed from the soak, I pulled out my headlamp and began to peddle. There was no one save me on the mountain that night, or so it seemed. As the sun set and the colors blew up the sky my world shrank to what my light would illuminate, the dirt below me and the dark forest just to the sides. It was steep and everything hurt, but it was the perfect finish, passing steaming piles of bear shit on the dirt road and saying “goodnight bear, goodnight moon, goodnight mouse, and goodnight to the old lady whispering hush”. I made the top in a thick black night with no moon. It was still and quiet, not a wind or a leaf to blow in it. In the morning there was the descent that went on for what seemed forever. I had climbed higher than I thought and returned to earth slowly with the cool of morning seeping up from every wet ditch and dark place. We met up along the river later that day and swam, had a beer, then another. The day shined and it felt good to be in the company of a friend after all those days alone. It’s always hard to pull out of a ride, to get off the bike, even when you know it’s the right move. Something tells you to keep going, to never get off, to keep peddling. As we sat around the fire later that next night, outside the tower atop the mountain, I thought about all the places I wanted to go still, to ride my bike, the many mountain ranges I’d never seen. I knew I would never be back here, this was it.

In the morning, after the storm it was cold and windy. I pulled over somewhere and jumped in the back and slept a few hours. I still had a long way to go and knowing my sister could pass any moment I sped on. There is nothing in west Texas. Small towns scattered in the mesquite brush, invisible lives lived away from things, in another world. My sister texted me as I neared El Paso, stopping to eat tacos next to the border wall. She asked where I was, how the dogs were. She was already so distant, taking a long time to respond if at all. We talked about the storm and she said I was brave for driving into it, that there had been 20 tornados that had touched down, causing death and destruction. I didn’t tell her that I had hoped to be thrown into the night, disappeared altogether. It would be easier than what I was speeding towards. I told her I loved her and drove on.

She was still there when I arrived some 10 hours later, having done the 16 hours almost straight through, like the old days. She was so happy to see her dogs, and me. She walked into the living room that afternoon, or maybe it was the morning of the next day. She was happy to be home and sat in the living room talking, as coherent and funny as she had always been. I didn’t realize it then but that was her last time out of bed, the final push of energy before the quick decline that follows. There is a name for it, but I don’t remember. We were gathering, everyone that loved her, like we had only five years ago when I had married her to the man who still stood beside her, who promised to do so in front of me, until death. This was no celebration of life, but a gathering to insulate and protect her from what all of us knew we could not stop. She asked to play the piano and sat on the bench, unable to read the music. She asked for pickle juice, something we both drank when the cramps set in on long runs. It was like she was gearing up for the big race, legs cramped and tired, she was nearing the end. Everything went quickly then, the pickle juice turned out not to be the best idea and she suffered greatly because of it. We were told to give her anything she wanted. I would have given her my life then, for it to stop, for her to rise from that bed and be strong again, to hug her children and kiss her husband. To be able to live many more years doing all the things she loved, to watch her children grow and become even more beautiful than they already were. To be an aunt to you. 

The rest blurs and fades into a mist. I took notes knowing I would not be able to remember everything. I read them for the first time since I scribbled them down between tears and typed them out. They are raw, but scabbed over now, healing. I will finish with those.

-The days pass and I have a better sense of things and I hate it all. This place, the sickness that eats my sister, the pain we all carry as a result. Why? Why her? It is past that now, past the questioning, past the hope. Now comes the gathering. It is all so shitty; this city, the traffic, fucking Texas and the trash, this apartment for those that grieve, another for those that die. There was a sock under the bed, a pair of glasses, no longer needed or simply forgotten in the sorrow of some other family, or one before them. My sister is not the same. She has one foot out the door now, her spirit fades. She does not want to die, part of her still can’t believe this is happening, that this is how it ends, slowly in pain. Things will never be the same for any of us, my family, those that love her-

-I haven’t seen my sister much these last couple days. She is in the hospital now, a guinea pig for the scientists who have given her little hope other than providing data, or a possible treatment for someone suffering many years from now. She is strong at heart and still holds out hope in these last treatments. Her body is frail, weak, and sick. This whole place seems sick, car horns and gunshots late at night. Despair and chaos all mixed together with all those who dream of living a good life with hope for the future. I will never return here after this. I miss the mountains and the deep places that lay hidden among the rocks and folds, places visited only by animals and wind. I want to go home and take my sister with me. I want to lay her down along a stream in summer and let her rest there for a while-

-There is no fairness here, no sympathy, no quarter for those we love. There is life and there is death, what comes between is suffering mixed with love. I laid with her today and she was dying. Where she is going I can not follow, not yet-

-Days are numbered here. Death is at hand. We are gathered and frayed, trying desperately to keep things in order. Our grief becomes us, engulfs us, making everything difficult as we ease the dying part. There is a lot of busy work, cleaning, food left at the door, far too much for any of us to eat, especially my sister. She is past the point of food, though she still tries. The sun rises on another beautiful day in the desert, oblivious to the suffering of those beneath the heat. There is confusion and chaos with those of us she is leaving behind and we scramble trying to alleviate the pain and discomfort that we can’t fix. It feels now that the good ones are taken from us early, when we are still sound and able to care for them. Those of us left to endure in their absence must suffer on without them. There are no more words now amid the tears and noise of mourning. She throws up now and the sounds of it run deep into my bones and I stoop over the sink to cry. My sister so sick and suffering and I am unable to do anything to help. Run to the store, fetch more ice, popsicles for her dry throat, something to ease the transition from dark to light, to get us through the morning, the minute, another day. Whatever time we can steal back from death we will-

-The food we eat like soldiers taken briefly from the front, quietly and fast, shell-shocked. It is tasteless, the act reduced from pleasurable to mandatory, a duty. One of us is missing and can no longer eat or sit with us. In this time of caring the food serves no other purpose than to give us strength to endure, fuel for the fire, grist for the mill-

-They are coming, from the east they are coming. They are coming, from the north they are coming, They are coming, from the west they are coming. They are coming, from the south they are coming. Our father, her children, those who come to hold the space, to love, to gather in her name-

-She no longer responds right away and I tell her I love her, that she was the best sister a brother could ever have. She whispers she loves me, her eyes never opening. My hand is on her head, so frail and cold, and I push the warmth and life in my body to hers, the love of a brother all I have...take it sister, take it with you, gather up your things for the trip, it has been a long road and you are almost home. You will be ok. We will be ok. As always you go first, with courage and strength-

-It is easy to forget about the dying among all the life and things going on. She is no longer sharing in the food we make and eat, the food left in piles by the door, her appetite replaced by nausea, sleep. I sit in the sun and nap, in her hammock that she will never sit in again. Two of her kids are here, the youngest. We stay up late on the porch telling stories and laughing. I have known them all their lives and they are all wonderful humans, smart and funny with dreams they work hard for. She raised them well, and a lot of what I learned about being a parent came from watching her raise them as they made their way through the years. Love, unconditional love, that’s what I learned. And here now in the end, these final days, that same love is returned to her by all those she gave it to. Her fear and pain is eased by the touch and presence of her children who lay with her, her dogs, her parents, her husband, the father of her children, me-

-A little drive north away from the heaviness of it all. It follows, in every song on the radio, in every glint of sunlight through the window, in every breath. The memories stretch over the landscape and sink me-

-My sister passed tonight and took with her a part of me. We were all together, she waited for all of us to arrive, to settle in. We all hand hands on her. I held her feet as one that comes to worship. I never took my eyes from her face, her eyes holding mine. I laid with her in those last hours, talking, laughing. I miss you already my sweet sister-

-The first day without her. Hearts are heavy as we carry on. You aren’t in pain but we miss you. Even in your worst pain you made us smile. In your weariness you gave us strength. What a goddam heavy blow-

-The end. Death has come like a hurricane, slowly gathering its strength somewhere far off while the sun still fell on our simple lives. The wind came first, just a breeze, it felt good after the sun, like things would be ok. Brighter days were ahead. Then the dark clouds gathered, the rain following. Building slowly, there was time to prepare, to board up the windows, bring in the porch chairs, seek higher ground. Nothing can prepare you though, not really, for in the storm we are brought to face the moment, without distraction or thought of past or future, problem or plan. Your one task is to witness, and if you survive, to straighten things out after, to live a little longer

My sister’s gone and I can’t go with her, I am needed here, I’ve got to stick around.

Images, scenes play out over and over. The way she moved in the end, her eyes rolling back, her lungs unable to take even one more breath, our mother cradling her as she had so many years ago as a baby-

-Then there was after, months, spring still but on the verge of summer. The rains come, snow in the mountains. It will be green, beautiful, the kind of summer in the mountains that my sister loved. She is with me still, her ashes, some of them spread about the garden, to be carried up by the roots of hundreds of sunflowers, feeding them, feeding me. Around and around we go. It hasn’t been easy. Things are different, a lot of things I cared about no longer matter at all. It will be easier now, in a way, there is less worry- 

-The ashes are at my parents house in Virginia, a part of her resting there in the soil of our birth. Life goes on and the tears still come. There is love though, so much more than I had before. It threatens to make me mad, a crazy mad that has you speaking to flowers and conversing with squirrels. I am not afraid of anything anymore, not life, not the coming of new love, not death. Everyday I think about Katie and how everyday is a day she would have loved to have, to travel, to run, to walk or talk with her friends and loved ones, to paint or play, to sit outside in the sun, to drink a beer and sing songs late into the night, to love her husband and see her children grow and marry and have children of their own. We who remain have no choice but to live well, it is a duty, we owe her that. So carry on and make love.  

[fatherhoodstory]

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust...

This was the photo I posted saying goodbye to social media in July of 2020, before I got the call that my sister had been diagnosed with stage 3c ovarian cancer. I had just finished this epic bike trip and was more or less done posting my exploits on the interwebs. And then the news. Nothing has been the same since. I jumped back on, hoping that engagement in this space could rally some support, and some funds to help her get through those first treatments, and chemo. We did that, thanks to all of you reading this, we gave her some breathing room. We raised enough money to get her some alternative treatments and alleviate some of her worry. My running exploits and those of you who ran with me encouraged her to no end to keep going despite the pain. I got injured myself, pushing too hard and carrying all the weight of grief I seldom show to anyone. That injury forced me to postpone the run I had planned in Zion and my sister and I, my daughter, our parents, her husband, and some of their kids were able to spend that week together camping in the desert under a blanket of stars, laughing around the fire. We ran together, my sister and I, slowly and very shortly up this dirt road and back again. I think we both knew it was the last time we would run together, and it was. During that trip we sat out in Canyonlands NP one day, deep in the Utah desert. It was spring cold, but warm in the sun. We hiked up into these red rocks and all spread out in the sun, loosing shirts, taking off hats, rolling up our pants and letting the sun soak deep into our bones. My sister cried then, tears of joy for what she was seeing and feeling, who she was with. It was all so beautiful a moment and one I will never forget. 

When Katie first told me she had cancer I told her that when she got better we were going on a bike trip together. I had been on quite a few at that point but never with her. She was a runner, a hiker, but having followed from afar my adventures up to that point, she was ready to try. I told her how easy it is to just cruise and camp, go wherever you want with no schedule or destination. Had she survived I would have taken her on the route I was doing in the above picture, a 520 mile loop through the backcountry of Idaho, with 50 hot springs along the way. Yes, I explained to her that there was a fair bit of climbing, but figured we would just get her a cool electric bike and she could just watch me suffer. 35,000 vertical feet of climbing in 520 miles isn’t that bad I remember telling her. She laughed. She was down, of course she was down! Me and my sister on bikes in the backcountry for a week or so, having survived ovarian cancer...damn right she would have come with me, no question. That’s who my sister was, and I held that vision in my mind and in my heart for so long, seeing us there, her smiling in the sun. 

Now here I am. I have a little bag containing what remains of my sister, the ash and dust from the fire. I held her foot for so long the night she died my legs fell asleep, salty tears drying in streams down my face. I stood slumped over as they wheeled her out into the dark, a shirt draped over her she had told me earlier in the night that she wanted to wear tomorrow, and it was tomorrow. I haven’t been doing well since that night, or those last few weeks really. It is still not easy for me to talk about or write about my sister without sobbing, which I am doing now. I don’t see a therapist and really don’t have that many friends to talk to these days. My therapy has always been the grind, going up mountains, jumping into alpine lakes and deep cold rivers. That is where I find peace, and a sliver of hope to continue to live a good life without her here to cheer me on. 

I have been planning on taking her ashes and doing that bike route, the one in Idaho we were going to do together if and when she got better and had the strength. It’s been on the calendar for a while now and of course everything is tight, money and time. It’s easy to find an excuse not to do something like this, really easy. But i’ve got a little window where Delilah is with her mom and the weather looks mostly favorable. In fact, there has been a lot of late season moisture in these northern mountains this year and the wildflowers are in full bloom, the grasses green, the creeks and rivers full and cold, the hotsprings always warm and inviting. It’s as if they are calling and I must go, one of Katie’s favorite quotes.

I’ll have to average about 80 miles a day through pretty rugged terrain to get it done in time to pick up Delilah, and though I am in decent shape, I expect it will be an absolute grind, mentally, physically and spiritually. I will take my sister’s ashes with me and when I feel the moment has arrived, I will let her go in the wind atop some high mountain pass, or perhaps in some green meadow with mountain views all around. I don’t have a vision for that now, only the overwhelming feeling that somewhere out there is where she wants to be.

I look at it more like a pilgrimage at this point, something that I hope will help with the grief I have been carrying, a chance to travel alone and speak with my sister in those quiet mountain places we both love. I will be ok. These things happen, to all of us, and we get through them however we can. This is my way. Blessings and love to everyone for their love and support these last couple years, it’s meant the world. 

[fatherhoodstory]

Checking in

I still think about her often, in those times where I need someone that understands, or at least accepts my oddities. I believe she did. I like to believe she did. There are still pictures, as if those times of love were not so distant. Deleting them seems useless now, as I would regret it later when I needed to remember that I was loved. It’s the memories without pictures that keep it all so close, and those remain intact. There have been others of course, unmentionables, forgotten almost completely. What endures though is the little, the one who demands my presence and attention, the one, like all the good loves, who will never love you to the extent that you love them, yet you are required, for her sake, to give everything of yourself; your time, energy, your love and wants, for theirs. Obviously this is not a life sentence and there will come a time, which now seems to be beginning, where I will not be needed, at least to the same degree as before, a sort of parole period where I am allowed to view life again as I had imagined it would be when I was young and free. It is frightful, for many things have changed since you’ve been away, my head has been buried in the struggle of single parent life. 

Women seem wicked, when you’re unwanted.

Streets are uneven when you’re down

Some things are only understood with age and experience and then only briefly. The fragility of it all, the whole thing teetering on a knife’s edge while we toil away at our things, our dreams, love. Sickness and disease has come calling, too close for comfort. We strangely hold the idea that we are protected, our circle unbreakable, even when we know better. Live long enough and you will see that illusion shattered like all the rest of the things we hold as truths. Even writing seems trivial, useless in the knowing that has come down upon us. I have to remind myself that I am writing to you and that offers some purpose. Maybe nothing more than a simple understanding of who I was and what I thought about things when we were young together. It gives me a certain hope too, that if death calls there will be things of me left behind, memories, something to hold through the darker times of your own life. Maybe the fact that you were loved above all else I held dear will be enough to forgive my multitude of sins and failures. 

It is hot here, the sound of the machines cleaning the dirt and grime of myself and others. Quarters deposited, eaten up for power given, for water and soap. I wash our things here and write, head down. I think of summer, when the doors of this place are flung open to a breeze and the sun. I imagine seeing her again, or someone like her, strolling through the open doors with a bag of soiled and stinky clothes, the stink of adventure, campfires and starlight, the ocean.

The snow is coming, the storm, the riding with friends. It is the moments that matter now and I take hold of them when they come and ignore the rest. Things are good and full, there is grist for the mill, songs to be sung and meals to prepare, seeds to plant. I hope you are well from where you read this, that things are still good and there is love. 

I love you still. 

[fatherhoodstory]

imaginings...

The other night we were sitting on the floor, talking about things, our life on the farm, how we used to dance in the night, your mother. I was telling you things that I remembered, a few things that stood out about her, things that had always made me laugh, and then you asked...

What would it be like if we were all still together?

I think about that myself sometimes, what it might have been like had we weathered the storm of that first year and managed somehow, despite the chaos, to have carved out a life together. I imagine you will read this one day, long after you have forgotten ever having asked me that question. Or maybe it will sit with you for years, a wondering thing, and you will find my answer one day when you need it, hidden among the other writings I have left for you, and it will give you a glimpse of the life that I sometimes imagined might have been.

The images that appear first are always the simplest; being able to see you every day for one. Waking up, having slept through the night, I know that soon your voice will call out to one of us, like you do now, often times confused as to where you are and whom you are with. But today, in this vision, it doesn’t matter because we are both here. Maybe it is your footsteps I would wake to, coming quietly down the hall towards our bedroom, the door opening softly as I shut my eyes, pretending to sleep, waiting for you to touch my face or crawl into bed. Or the night before, like most nights, you had fallen asleep between us as we read to you, as if still a baby. I imagine waking up first, from a good dream, watching you both asleep, taking measure of your similarities; the button nose, small pursed lips, and a fierceness that for a moment lies dormant. I would get up in the half-light of morning, taking care not to disturb the bed, make coffee, then sit at the kitchen table with a view of the mountains, thinking about the day ahead, or other things, confident in that feeling of having my people, my tiny tribe, together under the same roof, in peace.

Other times I imagine that we live on a boat, one we purchased and restored together, painting and fixing the broken parts when time and money allowed. When it was done, the “little D” would be put to water, your mother smashing a bottle of cheap champagne against the bow as we said the name aloud, laughing and clapping, the bubbling liquid running down her sides and into the sea. 

In this version of the story we are sailing around Italy, having spent the last few months in the Mediterranean, visiting towns and islands along the Amalfi coast on our way to Sicily and beyond, the days measured only by the setting and rising of the sun, moon, and stars. Sailing around the heel, the boot, we stare at the Lighthouse of Santa Maria di Leuca where your mother once stood looking out at the turquoise waters of the Adriatic, her hair blowing wildly in the same wind that now carries us east and north.

That night, having made it far up the coast, we sleep together on the deck, piling pads and blankets into a makeshift bed, as we often do when the nights are warm and the weather is clear. The lights on shore flicker in the distance and aside from the water lapping against the boat, everything is quiet. We are awake early, before dawn, and you are laying in the crux of my arm which rests gently beside you. Your mother is still asleep and we are talking softly about the stars and how many more there are in the sky than lights on the shore. You tell me softly that we are surrounded always by light.

We speak mostly in Italian now, something we have all been working on for the better part of a year. You are better than your mom and I, and are patient as we struggle at times to understand and speak with you.

Quante stelle ci sono, papa? you ask

(how many stars are there, papa?)

Milliardi, triliardi, quadrabagilliardi!

(millions, trillions, quadrabagillions!)

Quello non e un numero.

(That’s not a number)

Bene, se fosse sarebbe molto.

(Well, if it was it would be a lot.)

Quanti davvero?

(How many really?)

Ahh, cosi tanto piu di quanto possiamo contare o immaginare!

(Ahh, so many more than you can possibly count or imagine!)

e passato quello?

(and past that?)

Passato cosa?

(past what?)

Oltre le stelle, come lì you say as your arm comes up and out, translucent and dreamlike, pointing towards the lights of the villages on shore, Case Bianche or Posticeddu and the other towns scattered along the Via di Torre Testa...

(Beyond the stars, like there..)

...da qui su questa barca possiamo vedere le luci, e al di lá di esse c è terra, fattorie, montagne, alberi, poi pi ù oceano e terra, fino a quando alla fine ci ritorna intorno, perchè la terra è un cerchio.

(...from here on this boat we can see the lights, and beyond them there is land, farms, mountains, trees, then more ocean and land, until finally it comes back around to us, because the earth is a circle.)

Cosi?

(So?)

Quindi, se anche l’universo è un cerchio, potremmo viaggiare abbastanze lontano da tornare di nuovo qui?

(So if the universe is also a circle, could we travel far enough to come back here again?)

Si, immagino che sia possibile.

(Yes, I imagine that is possible.)

Oppure potrebbe continuare all’infinito, stelle, pianeti, oscurità, per sempre...

(Or it could go on forever, stars, planets, darkness, forever...)

Queste idea mi è sempre piaciuta di pi ù.

(I’ve always liked this idea more.)

Per sempre? Perchè?

(Forever? Why?)

Per il semplice fatto di sapere che alcune cose non finiscono mai.

(For the simple fact of knowing that some things never end.)

Your mother stirs, wakened by our whispered conversation, or the wind that rises with the light, blowing offshore, making the pirate flag you had insisted we buy as we sailed through the Outer Banks of N.C. snap back and forth against itself. Your grandparents, all four of them, along with a handful of aunts, cousins and friends, had met us there, to see us off before we sailed east, across the Atlantic. They had rented a large house that sat on stilts to protect it from the rising tides that came in from the sound during storms. There was a small beach just behind the house, the waters of the sound were shallow and calm, our boat moored just offshore in deeper waters. I remember rowing us in on our dingy, the “Big Sippy”, and watching you and your mother as we drew closer to the crowd of loved ones who were gathered on the beach waiting to welcome us. The two of you, smiling and waving, the bright sun glaring off the calm, glass-like water, our boat just behind us, sails down, masts rising sharp and straight against the blue, the sound of laughter and cheers growing steadily louder the closer we got to shore; those are the moments that have stayed with me, even if imagined, like a dream.

What are you guys whispering about?

In Italiano per favore, Mamma!

Certo, scusa. Di cosa stavi sussurrando?

Le stelle!

We lay together, the sky growing light, a few stars still visible, fading now. The flag is still, the wind gone for a moment, the only sounds are the water against the boat and the soft creak of wood, like music, that for the rest of your life you will remember with a deep and undying love. Then your mother speaks.

Dobbiamo nuotare?

And we do, shedding our clothes and diving off the side of our boat into the summer waters of the Adriatic, laughing and screaming wildly.

We sail north, eventually for Venice, where we will leave the boat docked for the winter and rent a small apartment deep in the Alps. You attend school for the year, your Italian becoming almost perfect. We ski together nearly everyday, taking trips to the hot springs on the weekends, the same ones Leanardo Di’Vinci once sat in you say, something you learned in school.

As we sail we slowly read the classics, Moby Dick and Homer’s Odyssey being two of your favorites. Sometimes you read to us, other times your mother and I take turns reading to you as you sit confidently at the helm, keeping us steady and with the wind, eyes on the sea ahead...

“At that a massive wave came crashing down on his head, a terrific onslaught spinning his craft round and round - he was thrown clear of the decks - the steering-oar wrenched from his grasp-and in one lightning attack the brawling galewinds struck full-force, snapping the mast mid-shaft and hurling the sail and sailyard far across the sea...”

And that my love is but one of my imaginings, as I sit and write, staring at your toys that lay scattered across the floor where you left them nearly two weeks ago. In this dream we live apart, scattered like the stars, surrounded always by light.

[fatherhoodstory]

summer - a play in two acts

act one

June, the threat of snow still lingers. I sit on the porch and watch the clouds gather, darken; the wind blows cold, too cold to pretend it’s summer. Winter keeps her own time this far North. Inside, a message waits. There is a script attached, a question. 

Would you be interested in auditioning for a play I am directing? 

I read the script and laugh, caught off guard by the parallels at different periods in my own life. It is relatable, real. On the cover is the symbol of the Pulitzer Prize and some other prize I can’t remember. The character in question is Sam. Sam is 35 and lives in his parent’s attic. There are only four people in the play, three of which carry the bulk of the dialogue, Sam is one of those three. There are many long awkward pauses. We sweep and mop a lot between lines. The play is nearly three hours long and takes place entirely inside an empty movie theater strewn with popcorn and trash. I agree to audition. 

You sit in front of the stage on a dirty couch that belongs in a frat house basement. I warm up by reading lines from some other play, a play whose character seems similar in tone and conviction to Sam. In the scene there are a few characters sitting around an empty parking lot, drinking, talking. I give a little speech about how I am going to leave this small town and go to NYC and make something of my life. I read it twice. We talk. I read it again. The second try is better. Then we read from the the play in question, it’s called “The Flick” by Annie Baker. We skip around, reading various parts, the director playing both Rose and Avery, the other two main characters. I am just reading words on a page, despite my best efforts. I don’t know Sam yet, not like I will. I do my best to talk like I think he would talk. I am nervous, imagining the lights shining down, a room full of people staring, the silence. The part is mine if I want it, probably more so out of necessity than a great audition. The play opens in less than two months.

-Can I think about it overnight? 

-Of course. 

I don’t think about it at all and call the next day. 

-I’ll do it. 

I come to understand, later, that a play, much like the start of a love affair, or almost anything else we do in life that we set ourselves upon, is something we will never fully understand; what we get ourselves into, or what the outcome will be, we can never know. 

Who is Sam? Sam I am.

_______________________________________________________________________

She stands behind the counter, her lower half concealed. She is beautiful to me for all the reasons that I have never understood, even now. I order coffee, doing my best to smile, then quickly move to the other side while others line up and do the same. From time to time I see her on the street, walking to or from the counter where she works. Perhaps emboldened by the play, the brief appearance of the summer sun, or the drink or two I have with a friend who is leaving; I set upon her. I say things, things I’d have normally kept to myself, but life feels much shorter now and so I say and do exactly what I want, most of the time. She is stunned, mostly silent, still achingly beautiful. She laughs and smiles, nervously. 

If I’d known then what I know now, I would have done exactly the same, probably much sooner. 

_______________________________________________________________________

Rehearsals, endless fucking rehearsals. We sit around a table and read our lines, getting the feel for our characters before we stand and start to inhabit them. On the nights you are with me, you have no choice but to come. It is too expensive to hire a babysitter, and a community of people whom I can rely on for help never existed for us. It has always been just you and me. 

The language is rough, not for me, but certainly for you. You sit in the back with headphones on, watching movies or shows I would otherwise never let you watch. Little House on the Prairie, cartoons, other things you find on your own. You slip off the headphones from time to time, listening to us, to me. I say my lines anyway. I have no choice. I am Sam now. We open in a month. 

These are late nights, way past your bedtime nights, but, I think, memorable nights. There are memories that emerge for me, from around the same age, things I’d forgotten. Pews all in a row, the same cushioned seats, that smell of stale farts mixed with leftover perfume from Sundays service, applied generously in an attempt to cover the sins of the week. The cross above the stage where they practiced, a symbol of the torturous tendencies of Rome. I would play in the pews as my father practiced the songs, flirting with the piano player or the other women in the choir, the choruses repeated ad nauseam, songs about the sanctity of his blood, the consumption of his flesh; wicked things. 

Perhaps you will remember this like I remember that, in fragments, mixed with the smells of popcorn, scenes from Little House on the Prairie, and the the foul language of three Bostonians playing out their pathetic lives between the rows of these worn out movie theater seats. 

_______________________________________________________________________

I come in the afternoon and sit near the counter. You smile. I begin to write, simply, like this, and fold the paper until it is small enough to pass over the counter without anyone seeing. There are others here, men of certain predilections, for you; boys really, without my years of experience and pain, whose mothers still coddle them when they cry. The women who linger here are worse, much worse, possessive and bored. They’ve all been here too long, wrapped up in the idea that this is real, that they are important. I drop the note in your waiting hand and leave without looking back. The note marks the beginning of something, something strange, something that in one way or another will never end.

With the writing, like the play, it becomes eternal, remembered, like this. 

_______________________________________________________________________

It rains a lot, too much it seems. They say it will get hot soon, too hot to bare. They say it won’t be long now, but the rains continue. Things are changing; the climate, patterns, you and me. Things are always changing, but they say it’s for the worst this time, glaciers melting, seas rising, fires burning, and yet the coal train passes through this town three times a day, it’s blaring horn an alarm to all those who Patagonia wearing princesses pretending to care.

Everything we do seems trivial, insignificant; the play, the threat of love like a storm on the horizon. I think about backing out, of everything, running away and living like a monk on some island and waiting for the seas to rise, to wash everything clean. You call less and less now. Your need for me growing thin as my need for you grows thicker still, like the blood we share. The weeks between stretch out, feel longer, like these cold days of summer. It’s getting harder to pretend the older I get. To pretend that love will win or that everything will be alright in the end. I think it just is, like everything else, and it is we who apply the meaning.

The thoughts pass, eventually, even if they are true, and I turn toward the storm, approaching it with hands held open. I listen to the laughter coming from the back seat, the dreams you tell me about in the morning getting clearer, fuller. I see the sadness you carry, the weight of never being completely whole, stuck between a madman and a mother you can’t help but love, and whose only common ground is you. We keep going, there is no other choice, the rehearsals drag on, our play and the drama within continuing.

We ride our bikes in circles around the edges, looking for holes in the fabric, ways of escape. We see friends, your friends mostly. I am in a  supporting role now, standing off to the side more and more as you develop your own lead.

It is summer now, despite the storms.

_______________________________________________________________________

The play is everything; summer, memory, time. I say the lines as we ride our bikes, trying to get them straight. You know them, your memory better, and repeat them with me as I say them over and over again. People stare at us as we ride by; a man yelling about tamales and a little girl being towed behind in a cart with a giant stuffed bear you call Tad or Ted, depending on your mood. We stop at the coffee shop and you jump out and run in, already friends with her. I can hear you both laughing before I enter, already cutting up cups and pulling tape, making houses with windows and doors for characters that will live there, happily. You are both wearing dresses and I marvel at the simple beauty of a woman and a child. It is all there is.

Time is a wheel, spinning, returning again and again to points familiar, and sometimes I find myself sitting in the middle, on the hub, watching things spin around me, a witness, dizzy and content.

I laugh at all the things I cried about before. I shake my head and smile. It’ll all be over soon.

It is hard to be anyone but Sam now, with his rashes from unrequited love, his complaints, his heavy metal and retarded brother whose wedding he must attend. We are almost there. The books have been set down and we are moving around the theater as the characters we now inhabit. Lines are forgotten or skipped altogether. We call out for them and they are thrown to us like feed for the chickens. 

-FUCK...LINE? 

-...whatever, who cares. I just had a shitty fucking weekend. I hate weddings anyway so...

-Yes got it...My mother went like way over the top, it was disgusting...

On and on, night after night. The play takes form, as Annie intended. We do not see it though, moving in and out of our parts. We are just ingredients, the meal is for the audience. For us it is broken down in sections; when to enter, when to exit, where to cut them off, when to stay silent. The movements become our own, the characters inhabiting us like demons to be exorcised later, when it’s over. 

_______________________________________________________________________

A birthday. I ride the bike into the mountains, alone. Miles and miles to think, to sing, to cringe. Another turn, older still. None of it means a thing. You realize that only with years. It seems they want you to grow old, to give up or give in, to fold. 

There is no difference between you and I, save time, experience. Same sun, same moon, same air, just different positions from which we view and breathe. 

I watch you age, growing stronger, more confident. I watch as your mother grows older, harder, at least towards me. I was always a disappointment to her and have more or less accepted my role there. If it’s true that women pick their partners by the example their fathers set, then I was doomed from the beginning. I was never good at pretending, although at times in my life I have tried, for love, for you. I try to be decent, getting her a card and book for her birthday. A book I struggle for hours to pick, thinking; if I pick something I enjoyed, it would be selfish; If I picked something she liked it would be some sort of trick to shame her. With her there is no solution, the struggle is what she requires. I get nothing from her as time passes, save you. 

I sit by the fire, in the mountains, waiting. She comes, hesitantly, like the first stars, then arrives so brightly it’s hard to remember the day. We make simple food, eat and laugh. The music spills out and into the night and we find a place that is comfortable between us, wrapped in the night like blankets. I do not tell her it is my birthday...

[fatherhoodstory]

swing in the night

Riding the bike from town, you behind me on a seat attached to the frame, a seat you no longer fit. Peddling, steady not hurried, we sing simple songs down dirt roads that lead to the farm. The farm, a place so vivid for me, a place you will only remember in the stories I tell, or in a snippet of a song played on summer days later in your life, fragmented, as if in a dream. The late sun throws bits of pink and golden life out and over the mountains ahead of us. The tall grass in fields dark green and wet from storms we watched pass from the safety of eaves, the lightening unable to find us. Cold icy fingers rising up from the earth to grab at our legs, reminders of winter, laying low in water-filled ditches or up high on north-facing slopes, waiting. Past the fence and up that last pot-holed rocky hill, you shouting encouragements as I exaggerate the suffering. 

“Go Papa go” you scream over the noise of bike and chain on rock. 

“I...don’t...think we are going to make it” I say, panting heavily between words. 

“You can do it Papa, I know you can do it.” you say quietly, somehow already knowing the power of your words. 

The hill complete, we turn into the Aspens that hide our house in summer, a few already yellow, the first to die. A strong wind from the mountains above, a final breath before the coming of night. An iron bell from Italy hangs from the tree in the yard, ringing faintly as we pass, disinterested. A bell that is now buried beneath the earth like arrowheads, like love, like things lost but always found again, by others, made new. 

We stop near the house and lean the bike against the red earthen walls of the cabin, walls that leave red ochre on your hands and clothes if you touch it in certain places. Sometimes you are already gone, hunched over in your seat. I undo the buckle and you reach instinctively for my neck, sound asleep, falling forward to the source. Your shoes dropping first to the floor, lost among the toys and scattered things of our life, socks, a jacket puffy and warm, a helmet unclipped at last; a simple trail that leads to your place of dreaming, a trail I can follow even now. Tucked in, protected, the world simple and perfect. 

Most times you are awake, waiting for me to do what you cannot yet accomplish, freedom. We start a fire by the garden, even if we eventually leave it to burn on its own. You help arrange the smaller sticks, then the larger, the flame slowly able to rise and speak. We stand and watch it grow, sometimes we kneel and give it breath when there is no wind. We are all remnants of the sun, trapped in wood, in body, to be released someday by spark and a great breath, sent back. Moon rise over mountains we know by name, by touch and feel. We take turns looking at it through the telescope, its craters and dust within reach. 

More storms, thunder and lightning. We take shelter under a tin roof, rain and hail so loud we dare not speak. The smell of the air charged by the speed of light. Food, on wood and cast iron. Flour, rolled out by hand and laid to rest. Water in green tinted glasses adorned with small fingerprints that remain long after you’ve gone, unwashed relics. Water from the sky, from the ground, from the mountains, seasoned in snow and ice. We were never thirsty there. 

The music, always music. Records later, after her. Vinyl you pick gently, like berries from the garden. Lifting the needle slowly into place like she showed you. A scratch, that look of fear, then music, never at the beginning, always somewhere in the middle, loud and roaring, where it should be with you. 

Dancing, always dancing. The lack of furniture giving us ample room to move. Wooden doors hanging open on nights the warmth allows, one stubborn, unhinged, always trying to close. Any line between house and night, earth and home, now dissolved. Stars as ceiling, ending only at the black outline of trees rustling at the far end of the pasture where coyotes cry to strange music they knew well by then, their neighbors. A child’s swing missing from some outdoor playground hangs limp from the central beam in our living room, just inside the double doors, making it possible to swing outside on ones highest arc, when the doors are open; to swing in the night. 

“Can we Papa?” you would ask nightly, and on occasion still do, remembering. 

“After dinner” I’d reply. 

“Now, Papa please” demanding, then begging. 

“No baby” sternly. 

“I want to swing in the night” you would finally say, the phrase like a password. 

I would always relent, before dinner, whenever you asked, knowing then like I know now, those moments never last. I lift you up and in, the wooden bar sliding down, your tiny hands gripping tight for the ride ahead. I pull you up by the handle, slowly, like a roller coaster reaching the top, just before the drop. Mimicking the sounds, click...click...click. Release. Your eyes rolling back and closing, back nearly hitting the ceiling, laughter wild and unhinged. Back and forth while the music plays. I take breaks to check on dinner, to jot down notes, to take pictures. The house full of flavor and feeling; music, food, wood smoke and night air. In my absence the swing would slow and you would hang still, like bait for the night. 

“Swing Papa”

I return, the same. 

You get down only to eat meals of simple food from the gardens just outside the door. We would eat by the fire, on the counter in the kitchen, or at the table by the window; a table made for two, never three. Pajamas, teeth brushed, a bath when time allowed, the night only then ready to fully accept you. 

“Can we swing in the night Papa?” 

I hand you the light, solar, fully charged by the day. The light we read by even now. 

“Ready?” 

“Yep” 

I turn off all the lights, the room black save the glow from your lap that lets me see your face and short blond curls. You swing again, the same as before, but different, final, the last waltz. The music louder, outweighing all the pain and confusion of our strange and broken lives. A small glowing orb moving back and forth in a noisy room. The coyotes watch from the field, silent now, admiring our simple ceremony. 

The songs, two, maybe three. Old songs. Loud songs. Finishing always  with soft songs. Sometimes you pick them. 

“The one about love Papa...the one about me.” 

Eventually, always, you sleep, your fingers wrapped tightly to the light, to that last bit of life. I let the swing reach its own end, the music to. I sit on the steps, three of them, wooden, that lead to the living room, steps that the mice scurry beneath. I try to remember the details, the smells, every moment we had together on that farm, but they slip and break, laying like broken glass my words so poorly reflect. 

I raise the wooden bar above your arms, gently lifting you up and out and into my arms. I dance slowly with you in the dark, like we always have, hoping that these simple memories will last when all the rest have gone. The memory of the two of us, dancing, moving as one to music that has always been our own. 

Changes. 

There is no swing here, no darkness in the glow of these city lights, no coyotes howling, no fields of grass or trees at its edge, no dirt roads that lead to a quiet house on a farm. We still dance, always dancing, on wood floors with the sound of cars speeding past outside the door, the music  louder, the records still scratching, our shadows dancing with us on the wall. 

[fatherhoodstory]

remember december

In the dark and the fog she was there, they both were. I lay my head back and listen to the sound of laughter as it flows like water over rock. Laughter and whispers, echoes of the past, already floating towards a future that will inevitably separate us. Laughter heard briefly in darkness, in fog birthed from cold air moving softly over warm water, compressing months to seconds, years to minutes, from a child to a woman and back again. It is one laugh to me, my love for them as pure and simple as the sound of their laughter together. Two silhouettes become visible when the river breathes and bends the fog slightly left and then quickly right and away. As if made real by being seen they move towards me, silently, like spirits, like river nymphs, still giggling and whispering things. An arm rises from beneath the mud and wraps around me like an old blanket, comfortable and warm. A body rises and lays on top of me as if still a baby, legs much longer now, intertwining with mine. Two heads on my chest, one on each side of my heart; a heart that for a moment beats slow and calm. This must be like the end, if one is lucky; a heart bursting at its torn seams with more love than it can hold. Silence, save the movement of water, a soft breeze and the warm breaths against my chest; the deep slow breaths of life, breaths of contentment; the weight of these women against my life like feathers on wings, lifted by warm winds, flying effortlessly up and out into the clouds and deep blue. The world is perfect and for just a moment I have everything I need, everything I have ever wanted. I imagine selfishly that this is the family I was given, a woman I love so deeply that it no longer has words and I stutter when she asks me to describe it; the child between us, born of the same indescribable love, magnified, multiplied. I let it fill me up and make me whole, the moment, knowing that it will never be fully mine. I close my eyes and sink a little further under water, feeling them, feeling us all together again, forgetting everything else and remembering what it might have been like. 

Those were the last days of December. 

Looking back from a new year it feels like a dream. Her voice, soft and loving, is now distant and harsh. You are gone again. 

I promise to write a letter I will never send. 

I sit in a teepee late into the night. A teepee filled with fire and smoke, dreams and visions. We are left alone to talk and I stare up at the poles that rise to one. I think about love and how it is always with me but never mine. It pulses in colors of blue, yellow, green and purple. It takes the form of an eagle and other strange shapes behind my eyes. When I open them they are still there, in the fire, rising up with the smoke and out the slit at the top. The teepee is a woman and we sit in the womb, waiting to be born. A part of me is dying, softly, with ease. 

I run ahead of you as you ski, your arms cocked at weird angles for balance. Zigzagging between the cones, you miss one, yelling and laughing, arms moving wildly now. I catch you at the bottom and we high-five and laugh together. Again! You ride back to the top and I walk alongside the moving track. I run ahead, backwards this time so that I can watch, trying not to fall. I drop my glove half way down and you almost grab it. We collide mid-slope, laughing. 

You are the best woman I know. 

I am alone in this room. There are ghosts here, sitting in chairs, smiling, nodding. Men, women and children, I can see them, or what is left of them. They are not bad or scary, they are just here, like memories. We sit together in an empty room. My head is pounding and I need water. A few more logs on the fire, a sip of water and I sit back down, pulling the blanket over me, only my head exposed, my body below the earth, safe and warm. It is dark outside but there is no time to assign to it. There is no time. Out the window the outline of branches like arms reaching for darkness. Nobody knocks and nobody enters. 

You rip into presents you think came from Santa. I watch you open the gifts from her and smile. The love was never for me, it was always for you. There are no presents for me. You are the gift. 

Driving back in a blizzard, fighting the urge to turn around and stay, not wanting to return to a town of strangers and lights. You are there and that leaves no choice. Arriving feels like loss. Maybe that will change, when spring comes, when things are green again. We sleep in the main room and read the BFG, the heater expanding and contracting, alive. Her name is on the inside cover, her candle burns beside us, her cup filled with tea, steaming. You awake early and nudge me over and over, but I am already awake and trying not to laugh. You demand that I keep reading and then tell me to wait. Soft footprints on an old wooden floor. Drawing back the curtain you reveal the crescent moon sitting low and bright between the trees and houses, our small slice of the sky. Turning back you smile and ask if I see it, as if you discovered it. You did, and I say yes. More tiny footfalls, a sound I will never forget, and you are beside me again. I read and can see you watching my mouth, studying my face. Yes, I am your Dad. 

Snozzcumbers and the Bloodbottler, Frobscottles and a wall full of dreams in a bottle. 

I texted your mom to tell her we made it home safely, trying to do what feels right. 

“Why don’t you bring her home where she is comfortable, where she wants to be?”

I ask if you are comfortable, you are. I ask if there is anywhere you would rather be, there isn’t, you tell me to keep reading. 

I try to understand her, to empathize with her. I am tired of the story she tells herself to keep this all going. I am writing a new story. 

Love is the only thing that will dampen the growth of your hate. 

In the teepee I send the light to those I love. Blue to you, purple to her, green to them. I can shape it and breathe it, blowing it out and sending it off to cover everyone in my life. I learn that I am right where I need to be, doing everything I need to be doing.

I don’t need any of this, but it is nice to be reminded. 

I drop you off, a last hug, a kiss. She hides behind the wall, her back to us, her face a permanent scowl. 

Why does it have to be this way for you? 

I asked the fire and it said that I can only change myself, to be a good example and don’t worry about the rest. 

We talk on the phone for the last time as I pace up and down the street, spitting and kicking snow around. It all feels forced and empty. It saddens me. I remember that you are two and I am talking to the other now. 

I feel you and turn to see you passing by in your mother’s car as I walk. 

I wave. 

Goodbye December, I will remember you. 

[fatherhoodstory]

the relic

A garage turned house on a back alley in Bozeman, sandwiched between half a million dollar homes and rising. The record player spins in the dim light of what we call “the cabin”. I wake up amused and ready to fight, for what I can barely remember. The music still plays and we always dance in the night. We talk about her, a relic now, most times we just dance and laugh as she would have wanted it, as the record player demands. There’s a table made of rough sawn wood, cleanable only with sand paper and stained with various colors of paint from your many artistic endeavors. A simple wood stove stands in the corner, framed in metal to protect the walls from the heat. A wooden ladder assembled from the tops of trees we pulled from the forest leads to the loft where we read books and transport ourselves to The Neverland, or Narnia, or a Wonderland where Alice wanders dreaming. The floor is bare, unfinished concrete with cracks like canyons, soon to be covered with smooth tile or stone. Scrap wood lays against the walls or stacked in corners to be used for bookshelves, table legs, and if nothing else, firewood. Still too many things, too many possessions left over from then, carried here and moved from one place to the other like it was there. The books, culled in the fires at the farm, grow again in the warmth of firelight and cold winter nights. New authors, new stories, all just words scribbled on pages in other dark corners of the world. I scribble my own, hoping it all makes sense to someone besides me.

Sunlight spills through a south facing window when the clouds allow. A prism catches the rays and bends them across the room in yellows, reds, blues, and purples. A few pictures sit precariously on wooden beams temporarily screwed into an unfinished wall. Dresses hang from hooks, the purple one with the heart, the one she made you, hangs next to the turkey wing, the fleshy end that connected it to the body still bloody and drying. Binoculars, a chess board, crossword puzzles pulled from the paper, wooden spoons and knives, sweetgrass and sage. A dirty white door with a small window faces the main house, on the list to be rebuilt, probably last. It doesn’t feel any different than any other cabin with it’s wood and stone and light. All just temporary anyway, like words, like art, like love. 

Cold and dead, the dead man’s pose. Post full moon haste moving turtle like towards Monday. Chocolate instead of cigarettes, chips instead of wine. Gym at two, dinner at five, then back to read and write by the fire until the words stop coming and the eyes won’t stay open any longer to read. Monday, then Tuesday, Wednesday, then Thursday, but not until five pm and not a minute earlier. Schedules get her off, a well-organized and full calendar her bible, her religion, her way to get through a life that would otherwise derail her with its chaos. 

My train derailed years ago and now I ride the chaos like a wave. I think about you often and write silly notes to you in the dark, ones you’ll never see or read. Just a memory I can hardly recall, like the soft touch of a woman that loves me. Gone and done I remind myself. Love is for the little one now, the fight is for everything else. Late at night, sideways on an Italian red that looked like blood and tasted like late summer berries I scribbled the following...

I build a home around a relic of her, a small house, a tiny home, and still it is more than I need or want. The technica record player, the relic, stands in the corner with it’s receiver, speakers, and ever expanding record stack. She had wanted it back when she finally left but I refused, telling her that I had donated it or some other such lie. She had bequeathed it to you some time before, in one of her mock departures, a rehearsal, an old song she learned in childhood, the same one you are learning now. But she had come back, not ready to say goodbye or perhaps just needing a place to stay while she worked. I can’t say she even liked me in the end, transforming me into whatever made it easier to treat me like she did, a stranger, a lost cause. Women can be harsh and men are fools, at once in love with every woman that crosses our path, and she more than crossed our path, she paved it. Raising you I understand her better, and strangely love her still. 

We listen to records in the night and sometimes we think of her and laugh, wondering when she will come back and dance with us again, if ever.  Most of the time we just enjoy the sound of the record spinning and scratching its jazz, classical, rock and rap as you shake your legs and throw your arms about in spins of yellow gold and rainbow fringe.  

[fatherhoodstory]

nyc

We landed at LaGuardia in the heat of an August afternoon. It was hot, that sticky kind of hot that comes from too much rain followed by too much sun. You held my hand as we walked through the airport and out into the street, laughing and jumping over the cracks and discolorations in the concrete as you tried not to break your mother’s back. Moisture seemed to seep from everything, connecting the thousands of us in stink and sweat as we swam to and from New York City. 

I picked you up at four-thirty that morning and stopped at the bakery to grab coffee before the flight. We couldn’t find the key to the bathroom and you peed on the street behind the truck. You held my arms for balance, like you have since you were a baby and first learned to pee outside at the farm. I love that about you, your adaptability, your sense of adventure. Even early in the morning, half awake, you always find a way to make me smile. We made our flight out, our connection in Minneapolis, and by the time we landed in New York things were beginning to slow down for you. As our bus rocked and swayed on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway you worked your way into my arms and quickly fell asleep. I wiped the matted hair from your face kissed your forehead and stared out the window at Jackson Heights, Astoria and the city across the river through the breaks of avenues.

We live in a small city now, much bigger than the quiet life we had on the farm. The mountains are still there, the wide open spaces. They are just a little further from the back door than they used to be. It is nothing like this, where people are stacked atop each other as far as you can see in every direction. There is something about it; the speed of it, the smell, all these people crammed together, surviving together, some of them living out their entire lives within the walls of these man-made canyons. 

I came here a month before you were born. One last solo trip before I became a father. I got drunk and couldn’t find my way home, wandering around the city until dawn thinking about life and not understanding how drastically things would change in the months to come.

I wanted you to see it, experience it, and I wanted to be with you when you did. Soon enough you will understand that the world is much bigger than you, me, your mom and the struggle of our broken family. This is one of those places where you are confronted constantly with your own insignificance, regardless of race, age, or social status. It is ruthless here. A place where a father traveling alone with his daughter attracts no more attention or sympathy than a homeless man yelling obscenities on the train. No doors are held for us, no seats given. Everyone here is alone, together. 

I stepped off the bus into the heart of Queens carrying you in my arms, sound asleep despite the car horns, sirens and stink of a city very much alive and in decay. There are a lot of stairs between us and the train and I climb them one by one with slow steady breaths. I take comfort in the weight, the heat, and the sweat of moving and being alive. The time I will be able to carry you is waning and I secretly wish these stairs would go on forever, that our destination was here in a never-ending climb with you asleep in my arms. 

You wake on the train as the world begins to move around us and are at once confronted by all that is New York. There is a man walking up and down the isle. He has open sores covering most of his exposed skin. His shoes are dirty and worn. The once white socks now sag sadly and brown around his ankles. He is asking the air for a few dollars to get through yet another day in this nightmare of his. There are people of every color and nationality staring at their phones or sleeping in short intervals between stops. Most of them see this scene nearly everyday, but for you and I it is new and raw and harsh. I wonder what happened to him, where his parents are, or if he ever knew them. How does one end up here, dirty and alone, begging for life on the downtown train to Brooklyn? He exits as the doors open and crosses the platform to another set of open doors, the only thing that will accept him now. He will ride out his days below the city, going back and forth to nowhere, and I think somehow we are all to blame. 

We get off a few stops later and enter the hot breath of summer beneath the city. You look at everything and everyone then back at me every few seconds to check that you are not alone in this strange place. I give you space, not because of the weight of the bags, but because you need it, and soon will take much more than I want to give. You told me on the train that you might live here one day and add a few moments later, out of sympathy for the sadness I can not hide, that I can live here too, so we can still see each other. I imagine myself old and grey, you still younger than I am now, so beautiful and full of life. If I live that long and you still love me, perhaps I will join you here some fall and we can ride this same train to Brooklyn and laugh at time.  

You are standing at the edge of the platform clearly over the yellow line you are not supposed to cross. No one cares or even looks twice. I walk over and explain the danger, pointing at the line and into the dark cave where first a sound will grow, followed by a faint light, a whoosh of air, then the train. You nod and step closer to the edge, peering into the darkness as I sit back on the bench against the wall. You are constantly pushing the boundaries, bending them until they break. I can only smile and hope that you break every boundary that is put in front of you in your life. 

The train comes and blows your curly blond hair up and away from your face. You jump the gap as the doors open and find a seat between a large black man and an older hispanic women carrying a few too many bags. No one smiles or says hello or otherwise acknowledges your presence. You are the center of my universe, a shining sun that sustains my life. But to them, these strangers on the train, you are just a blinking star among a million others. They have their own universes, their own centers from which they draw life and purpose, and it is too much for them to consider any others. I understand that now. 

We did so much. So many things I wish lasted longer than they did. Moments that are gone the second you settle into feeling them. We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge with hundreds of other people doing the same thing. I carried you on my shoulders to the spot where the Twin Towers stood when I was a boy. Thousands died here and a thousand others have already taken their place, promising to remember. We went underground, below the spot where a monument stands bent against the sky in their honor, to three levels of a mall that pays homage to the American way, shopping. Uptown to Times Square and the St. Regis on Broadway, which felt more like a cheap carnival than the epicenter of great theater. There were people hustling for money on every inch of concrete, illuminated even in daylight by the flash of advertisements for a million useless things that nobody needs and everyone wants. I surprised you with tickets to a play, and as we were ushered in with a hundred little girls dressed in princess dresses I stopped in another line and paid thirty dollars for a lemonade, some M&Ms and what is normally a cheap beer. A childhood friend and his daughter came to the same show and afterwards we bobbed and weaved through the crowds and rain to spend a moment together in our busy lives. We caught up as best we could, laughing at the absurdity of where we came from, who we were, and how little we really change in life. You two may pass each other one day as women, more or less the same as you are now, never realizing that you had shared a meal, played silly games, cried, and saw a play about a Princess with the ability to turn the world to ice, on Broadway. 

We played in parks across the city, the first as we arrived with our bags in Brooklyn. It was filled with Hassidic kids running around with their braids and tassels flowing behind them. There is no division amongst children, unless the parents teach it to them or they are just born rotten. You play with everyone equally and I rarely sit idly by why you have all the fun. At one park we played a game of tag with ten or more African American children of all shapes and sizes while their parents looked on in wistful shock. It’s a shame as adults we aren’t encouraged to play at such a level; humbly, joyfully and with wild abandon. It was so hot that first day we took off our shirts and you rode on the handle bars as I peddled a rented bike through the Hassidic neighborhoods of East Brooklyn. Old men with funny fur hats and big beards waved their fingers or shook their heads while their wives stared at the ground. They are lost to us, trapped in dogma and servitude to a vengeful God I don’t believe in or fear. You laugh and point at their silly hats and we wave and smile despite their judgement, shirtless and free.

We are on the train again heading back towards the city from the vast rolling hills that surround it. My shoes are still wet from our last swim in the waterfall before the inevitable goodbyes and hugs of family we hardly ever see. The Hudson is flowing wide beside us as I scribble thoughts in a notebook. You are looking out the window and notice a park with a slide and swings. I see it too and we both smile at each other at just the thought of playing there. You turn to me after a while and ask what I am doing.

 I am writing about our trip, so you will remember.

I won’t remember any of this, dad.

Perhaps you won’t, but if I don’t write about our time together, our family, our adventures and mishaps, it is certain. 

My uncle, your great, picked us up outside the small town where his wife has run a store for the last three decades; a Winter’s Sun, a Summer’s Moon. It is filled with trinkets and clothing from the world over, a testament to the places they’ve been together, in love and in life. I buy you a dress, then another, watching you try them on and twirl around in front of the mirror before making your decision. We walk to the farmer’s market and buy a few things before heading to their wooden house on the hill surrounded by forests, fields and farms. There are memories here, deep in the wood, in the soil, from before you were born. Your mother and I took shelter here in a hurricane, with our family, friends and a few strangers. We made extravagant meals, drank too much, danced and played music while the rain fell in torrents and the winds screamed a tune they carried from Africa, building a symphony over a warm sea, until the final movement, an allegro of destruction in the valleys of upstate New York. We swim everyday beneath a waterfall that once threw large trees like twigs against a cliff wall. While it is calm now, as calm as a waterfall can be, I find myself looking at the porch above the cliffs where your mother and I once watched this creek run wild and drank red wine with a beautifully lonely man. Chuck was his name. Chuck made perfume and traveled the world. He is gone now, like the storm, like your mother and I. 

Even tranquility holds in it the memory of more turbulent times and we swim now on the other side of chaos, floating around it on a giant white clamshell. We eat dinners on the porch by candle-light and play with cousins and aunts whom you’ll remember as if characters in a dream. Your great uncle though, the one who wrote you a song when you were just a baby, the one who traveled the world and never stopped playing his songs, I hope you will remember him, as he is, a pillar of joy and hopefulness in a crumbling world. 

We are sitting on the floor at Penn station digging into our snacks. I read Babar and the Berenstain Bears as we both glance around at the never-ending flow of people moving past us. A man that has already asked us for money, money I don’t have, stands mid-stream and stares at nothing. He puts his hands down his pants and begins scratching vigorously. He stops and puts his hand to his nose and inhales deeply then rubs it slowly all over his face and neck. He is sick, dirty, lost in this maze of uncaring motion. I return to the adventures of the Berenstain Bears and handfuls of popcorn my Uncle grew in another world far from here. 

Back on the train we are leaving the city, heading south to the place where I was born. We spent our last few hours walking around Grand Central Station before taking the bus up to Central Park. We laid on the floor and looked up at the constellations that adorn the ceiling of Grand Central, the people moving around us in a hurry, never looking up. You knew a few but made me tell you the rest, over and over again. I told you about a book I read where the main character lived up there, behind one of the stars,  watching the city come and go from his home in the sky. In Central Park we watched a lady in an elegant gown emerge from the bushes, no doubt where she had slept off the night before. She was carrying her shoes and smiling, not at all embarrassed. We climbed the rocks that have been here before the city, before the park. We walked over bridges and through tunnels, eventually coming back to the place we started. As we left a monk with flowing robes gave you a piece of string with some plastic thing on it and I gave him ten dollars, he bowed. 

We unpack our things in seat 6; colored pencils from Italy, faded and worn like the woman who gave them to you, paper, a bag of snacks, a large bottle of water and several books. A line of impatient travelers builds up behind us and I move aside to let them pass. They see you and the cause of my delay and soften slightly, the first sign that we are leaving the city, the return of empathy. 

Trenton, next stop, Trenton. 

People are strange and the strangest ones travel by train, the bus being overflow. We of course travel by both. There is a large man behind us who hasn’t stopped talking since we left Penn Station, talking loudly about nothing. The woman next to us is busy bothering people sitting at desks on the other side of the country, no doubt rolling their eyes as she lists her demands for her future stay at a conference for beauty supplies or some such thing. I am exhausted just listening to her, the banality of her demands mixing with the jibber jabber of the man behind her like some terrible symphony of meaninglessness. Silence is hard to come by on the train or in New York and I look forward to the quiet places of my birth. 

I can see people moving about on the street, in windows of buildings we pass. I’ll never see you again I think, and you don’t even know that I’ve seen you, that I thought about you and wondered about your life. She is out there somewhere too, with another, or by herself, perhaps thinking of us now moving on with our lives. We are in the world together, but alone, like everyone in New York moving past one another, hardly smiling or saying hello. She is behind us now, like all those passing in and out of view from this window on the train, seen, thought about, but unlike all the others, remembered.

The world is madness and chaos. Trash piled in the street. A bare ass bent over and shitting in the park at daybreak. A muddy river flowing into a dying sea. A speeding train going over a bridge heading south. A father and his daughter sitting in seats 6A & B, drawing pictures, sharing snacks, laughing, and looking out the window at things they will never see again. 

[fatherhoodstory]

the stag king

If home is wherever you are then I am a long way from there. 

I am dirty, stinking, my clothes are sweat stained and worn.  I order a coffee from a woman in a white flower print apron. It is folded neatly at the top, making it end just above her knees. A man and his teenager daughter are waiting for their drinks and eye me with both caution and curiosity. He is pot-bellied, wearing dad jeans, a tucked in polo shirt, and a 9mm in a hip holster. She is stylish, firmly on the line between daddy’s little girl and the woman she will soon be. I say good morning to them and mention that I also have a daughter and how I can’t imagine you yet as a teenager. The man wraps his arm around his daughter, the gun now poking her in the ribs, smiles, looks down at her, then back at me. 

It happens very fast

Yes sir it does. 

I say this as if I can yet fully understand the leap from four to fourteen. 

The lady in the folded flower apron hands them their drinks, an almond latte for her and a black coffee for him. He helps himself to the white sugar and then joins his daughter at a table behind me. Whatever their situation is you can tell they are close and that they love one another deeply.

I hope the same will be said about us. 

I sit outside with my book and my pen, writing nonsensical things, thinking about you and her, why I’am here, all of it. Planes come in fast over the tree line, bank into the bay and land in the water in front of me. Cars are lined up in a waiting area next to the dock, there is a ferry due in soon, but not mine, so I drink and stare and write.  

I rode my bike around the island yesterday, peddling through bouts of laughter, some off-key singing, tears of joy and sadness, and a lot of silent contemplation. The bike has a way of surfacing things within me, especially alone; old memories, lost feelings, events deeply buried and forgotten. I thought about things I haven’t thought about in years; relationships, you, how badly I was treated, how badly I treated others. It can turn dark then light and back again as quickly as the clouds block the sun and change the hue of things around me. There is no one here to judge this process, no guide, no therapist, so things flow freely, chaotically, then, after they have been chewed sufficiently, processed and digested, they are left behind me like sweat, emotional excrements scattered invisibly on this road to nowhere. Then there is silence, save the sound of my breath against a soft wind, until the process begins again as suddenly as a car approaches and passes me. There is no rhyme or reason to any of it and it is in that mystery of metal, gears and rubber that I feel fully alive and well. It was a gift from her, the bike, that led me to my own well-being, a curse that both frees me from her and binds me to her, forever.  

I finished the day at a small beach close to where I had started early that morning. A group of people were gathering as the sun began to set. They were having a ceremony to celebrate the coming of summer, the energies of spring. I washed off in the icy waters of the Haro Straight, cleaning myself up the best I could before joining them. A King and a Queen were to be chosen for the ceremony and they sent all the men and women out to look for the crowns, one antlered, one flowered, hidden somewhere along the beach and tall grass. I was coaxed gently by a woman into participating in the hunt and walked a few feet from where I was standing by the fire to a large pile of driftwood logs.  Not wanting to seem rude, but also not wanting to give any more effort than would be necessary to appease my coaxer, I looked lazily behind the first log and there, of course, was the crown of antlers.  

All hail the Stag King! someone said noticing me donning the crown. 

After a few more minutes, my Queen, the ten year old daughter of a local chef, was crowned in flowers. We took on our respective roles as we sat in folded beach chairs and were promptly brought food and drinks by the others, the servants. Wine for the King, juice for the Queen.

Is there anything else you would like my King? a woman asked in the chaos.

Yes, bring me my daughter, and that girl I love at once. 

Who? 

Never mind, I’ll have another scoop of the seven layer dip, and fill my wine!

Yes, my King

We danced with the others, wrapping ribbons around a large wooden pole erected in the sand. The ribbons carried our intentions for the year and were intertwined with everyone else’s. For the next year, the pole and our intentions, will sit somewhere with a view of the water and be whipped by the wind, rain, and sunshine. Next year, like the pole that is burning now, weathered and worn, carrying with it all the intentions of last year’s participants, our pole will also burn, and there will be a new King and Queen and new intentions wrapped on a new pole for a new year. 

This is the way of all things.

It is dark now and people are drinking and dancing around the fire. The festivities have begun in earnest. I stand on the beach staring at the lights from the city across the water. I am here, a King, but my heart lies elsewhere, my kingdom scattered in a cold spring wind. 

I can’t think about anything but her, and you, even though there are a few here that would hope to cure me of that. I ride my bicycle back in the dark instead, climbing the hill to the road high above the beach. I stop and look down on the strange shapes moving in ancient rhythms around the flickering light. I am detached, alone, looking out at the Olympic Peninsula, the Haro Straight, the dark contours of this island in moonlight and stars, and the city lights across the water that envelope her somewhere beneath. I turn and begin the descent before the memories can fully catch me. I go fast, faster than I normally would in the dark. The road turns slightly left at the bottom, away from the water, and I hit the loose gravel that covers the road with speed. I am on the ground in a flash of pain, falling hard on my left side. There is blood, a strawberry that will soon be a bruise that stretches from my hip down my leg, but nothing is broken but the pride of a drunken Stag King.  

The King has fallen, I mumble through the pain

I rock back and forth in the dirt and rocks waiting for the pain to stop. I laugh though, at the pain, at the falling, at myself. I stand up after a few minutes, not bothering to brush myself off and get back on the bike after making sure it still rolls true. I ride through the dark looking for my friends house by the bay. Without a light I can hardly see the numbers on the mailboxes or the driveways through the trees and I pass it three or four times before I find it. I beat them home and am already half asleep on the back porch when they arrive. All the women went swimming and danced naked by the fire they tell me, some inquiring about an absent King. I roll onto a bruised hip and go to sleep.

My friends live with their son in a house on the bay. They are trying, like most of us, for balance, for love, to keep things afloat and happy.  I do not envy them, being now on the other side of it all. It seems impossible to stay together, to raise a child, to have space and freedom to keep up with the love, for yourself, for the other, for a child. I commend them on their efforts though, on the life they create daily together, despite the pain and mistakes of yesterday, their young son so full of energy, love and mischief. 

I hope they will remember to be kind to one another, to love one another, to take care of each other, to not sweat the small things or anything at all. I would tell them now, in leaving, that nothing is for sure and there are no guarantees. Love every minute together that is available, even the hard ones. It’s all part of it, and it’s all over much faster than we think. 

I came here to see them, to sleep on their deck through a windy night, to watch the ocean and the tides come and go with the pull of a full moon. I came here to get away from a life I have not yet entered fully. I came to see her, or at least be near enough to know for sure, to gain perspective, to ride my bike around these islands. I came to take my place as the King, an old stag wandering again.

[fatherhoodstory]

the art of goodbye

I walk the six blocks to the house you share with your mom and the midwife. You hug my neck and bury your head into that space only a child can find. I feel warm tears trickle down my shirt as mine fall gently on the back of your jacket. Your legs are wrapped around me and I am supporting you with my arms. I wonder how much longer I will be able to carry you like this and I vow to work out harder so that I can delay the inevitable for a little while longer. 

You are so young and already so torn between those you love. I see this for what it is now, the rhythm of coming and going that will dictate so many things in your life, as it does for her, that one we loved. I’ll do whatever I can to smooth the rough corners, taking advice from her, seeing my own truths behind the curtain of her painful admissions. I cry because I know there is only so much I can do, only so much any parent can do to protect our children from a life that is wholly unfair. 

What’s wrong baby? 

I don’t want to say goodbye to you Papa.

Sigh.

Neither do I, but this is something we have to do and something we must learn to do well. 

Silence. 

Saying goodbye is an art form, like a beautiful song, a painting, a dance we are only beginning to learn. 

Your arms tighten and then release, your weight pivoting back so you can look in my eyes. I show you my tears and smile despite them. I pull my arm up and flex my bicep like my grandfather used to do. 

We have to be strong D, no matter what, because this is the way things are for us. 

You look at my arm and fresh tears fall as they do for me. What is left of my heart breaks again; cracks that leak, mend and crack again. 

We are almost there, it is almost time to say goodbye (to dance). We had fun, right? 

Yeah Papa. 

What was your favorite part? 

The apples. 

Eating them or picking them? 

Both. 

Laughter. 

You ate a lot of apples. (or a lot of bites of a lot of apples)

I set you down in front of the house, kneel, we hug again. 

I would stay here forever if I could, in this embrace where everything is right and safe. 

I can feel the love stretching out before us like a river, flowing violently as it drops from the mountains above, breaking rock and carving canyons as it makes its way. I envision it many years from now moving deep and wide across a valley of flowers and tall grass, the banks covered with the soft sand and smooth rock that can only be shaped through these turbulent times we are now in. Someday we will sit in the sand and swim out into a calm river with the sun shining down on us.  

You are going to be ok, we all are. 

You are already much stronger than I will ever be.

Your mom walks out and kneels with us, asking what is wrong, answering her own question before you can give voice to what it is you feel, what you have spent the last few blocks telling me.

She isn’t scared I think to myself, you are. Scared of all the things you can’t see or control. 

She picks you up and you wave over her shoulder through tears, struggling with an emotion no child should have to feel. 

Bye Papa. 

Bye love. 

I touch my hand to my heart and wave like I have done a thousand times before, like I will no doubt do a thousand more times before this is done. 

You did well and I am proud of your strength. We had a lot of fun. 

I walk alone in the cool of early fall, tears streaming down my face like the golden-brown leaves that fall around me. I used to hide these tears, behind sun glasses, behind my own fear, but no more. Let them fall and be seen, like the changing of the seasons, like time, like life and death, like the love that comes and goes for those of us lucky enough to have it. 

[fatherhoodstory]

today

Every time I sit down to write I hear her telling me that my writing is ridiculous, that I should get over myself, that she hates me or can’t stand to even be around me. She does not trust me with you and shows it every day with word and action. I ask her why she never smiles and she says she can’t smile if I am in her house. The tension is palpable. You and I exchange funny looks while walking on egg shells, afraid to be ourselves, to laugh and play with the wild abandon we usually have. I do my best to laugh, to bring lightness to what at times can feel like a funeral. I let it go, knowing there is nothing I can do save dying that will make her smile in my presence. It hurts, and I guess that’s the point.

_______________________________________________________________________

I sit with the two of them in a small café at the edge of town, slightly uncomfortable that our midwife is still around years after your birth. They have brought me here to tell me they are in love (for the second time) and that they will be living together with you from now on. I take a bite of my burrito, filling my mouth, knowing there is nothing I can do or say to make this feel any less awkward. As far as I can tell you love her, if that is just a consequence of presence from the beginning, or because there is in fact a bond, I suppose time will tell.   

We all have strange circumstances that test us, relationships that destroy and save us, sometimes all at once. I understand better with age the swiftness of time and what is important, and what is not. I have also loved with reckless abandon, extreme stupidity, and will do so again, so I can not judge anyone for their own choices in love. It is what it is. 

_______________________________________________________________________

We played in the field next to the park the other day, making hamburgers, french fries, cookies and a birthday cake out of mulch and pulled grass. Everything cooked at once on my longboard, which was the kitchen, the grill, the plates, and our ride to and from the park. I am exhausted, laying on my back in the grass, astounded at the energy you possess after a long weekend in constant motion.

“Papa, the cake is for mom, the cookies are for you, the french fries are for me. Do you think she will like it?”

“Of course, but I think she could use a little more grass”

“Daaaad, those are sprinkles!”

“Of course, sorry, she could probably use more sprinkles.”

I pull a few more handfuls of sprinkles and you load them on top of the cake. I watch as you make things for the people you love; simple things that spill into the grass and will never be seen by those they are made for. Right now, the people you love are few; a small circle that will grow ever wider with age until I am surrounded by strangers who become family, friends, characters in a story of love and adoration for you.

Your hair is curly blond, illuminated with the last rays of sun peering out behind the coming storm. We run from the swings to the slide, to the monkey bars, settling back in the grass with laughter.

“Dad?’

“Yeah baby?”

“I am going to miss you tonight”

“I know love, I’ll miss you too, but I am here and you can see me tomorrow, or the next day, whenever you want.”

She smiles at that and runs off to do another lap up the ladder and down the slide.

Tired, I follow her, knowing that the days where I am a center of her world, needed, are numbered. I pretend to get stuck in the slide and you struggle to extract me with screams and laughter as you slide down on my head and shoulders, pushing us both out the bottom and into the world again.

This is where we are love, today. 

[fatherhoodstory]

a candle called happiness

The rain is falling lightly on the roof of this old garage. If it wasn’t completely silent you wouldn’t know that it was happening at all. There is a purple candle burning in a glass container that sits on a small table, the candle is called happiness. It is a glowing, flickering remnant of a life that no longer exists. Staring up at the roof I catch a glimpse of the farm in a shadow of light and wood. You are asleep and have been for hours, she is making tea in the kitchen and prepping herself for bed. I am laying in the loft waiting for her, listening to water pour into an empty cup.

The rain gets louder as a car passes by on the street. The crows are yelling back and forth across the alley as another car speeds by in the rain. A jet flies overhead, its engines at full throttle for the ascent. It is loud here, and never fully dark. It reminds me of Los Angeles, on the night I came back from the jungle to be with your mother. The airport was packed with people gathering their bags and meeting loved ones. She approached me through the crowd wearing a red blouse, jeans, and a smile I have not seen since. I was wild, feral, unprepared for what awaited me outside those automatic airport doors.

I hung my hammock in the top of a Fig tree that lined her street in Santa Monica and stayed up there until the cops came and forced me to get down and enter her world.

This isn’t LA, and I am much less wild, but it is still unsettling, 

We pass your house at night on the bikes, the three of us riding silently towards the center of town. I look at your window as I pass and imagine you sprawled out in your pajamas, mouth open, snoring lightly. I say nothing to the others. Part of me wishes I was still with you, with her, but the other part of me jumps the curb and rides deeper into the night. It is enough now that I know where you are, that I can pass by and feel you just inside, covered in blankets and sleep.

I am exhausted but laying awake just the same. So many thoughts bounce around my head and ricochet off my broken heart.

“Don’t come to Washington my love, please don’t come.”

But I come anyway, for her, not for her, for love, to see it through, even when there is nothing left to see. I tell myself she has no power, that the love is gone, but she does, and it isn’t. 

“Stay papa, don’t go.”

“I have to go baby, i’ll be back soon.” 

And here I am, looking at the passing of time on the face of an old friend. Life was hard on him too, love lost, a child between them. Parallels in the cosmic game we all must play. Some crashes have survivors, others claim all. We are the ones who emerged from the scattered debris, forever bruised and limping. 

We talk about the old days, how messed up everything was and how none of us really knew it. No matter what your life looks like as a kid, it all seems normal until you look back from the distance of years. We compare notes, get our stories straight, confirming that yes, we were indeed bad kids. The only thing that seems to matter now is that we made it, we are still alive, still trying, still loving, still able to be friends after all these years. 

I wish I could share this all with you, and in a way I am, here in notes and scribbles in strange houses or candle lit garages. Even if you are not here, you are with me still, those women I love.