Lack of sleep is why I washed my face with Palmolive, why I sprayed my son’s soiled jeans with GLASS PLUS . Why I brushed my teeth with Myoflex and almost spread Colgate on my daughter’s chapped bottom.
Tonight, as I kiss the top of my baby’s head, her abundant hair sticking straight up like the down of a baby chick, I feel delirious with the rewards and demands of motherhood and the weariness worn at day’s end like a coat of bricks.
Tonight, I will once again take up my post at the crib, face wedged against the railings, heart captured by this tiny child, this gift from God.
It is almost as if my worry, my presence, is protection enough.
Rediscovering My Father’s Love
W e are in his blue Ford truck, my dad and I, heading north on I-85 toward Atlanta. This is years ago, long before he gave up nightly drinking and became a Baptist preacher, long before he parked the blue Ford beneath a seeping pine and bought a Nissan Murano that looks like something a Jetson would drive.
It’s early afternoon and for the first time since 5 AM we are silent as we share the front seat, each aware of the other, stepping carefully around the eggshells that surround our natures. We are both too sensitive, he and I. One wrong word, say, a conversation that heads toward politics, and we are in trouble. He is so far to the right I’m often baffled, and even though I consider myself a moderate Democrat who does on occasion vote for a Republican, I might as well be Gloria Bunker from All in the Family in his view of me.
Once, when we were fighting, he called me “Pinky Jane,” referring to Jane Fonda whom he loathed during her Vietnam fiasco.
For a while we don’t talk. We know better. It’s a long trip and there’s no point starting out on bad notes. He puts in a bluegrass tape to fill the silence. It is not the kind of music I prefer, though I close my eyes and pretend to enjoy the fiddles and Dobros. Years ago my dad got an eight-track tape player and we listened to the Eagles, Three Dog Night, The Guess Who, and other rock groups from the 70s.
That was his music then. Our music. I can still see the green station wagon with the fake wood along the sides, my sister and I in the backward-facing rear seat singing “Jeremiah Was A Bullfrog” at the top of our adolescent lungs. I can feel the heat from those seats sticking to our thighs as we drive to Panama City Beach, Florida, smell the yeasty scent of beer as Dad cracks one while it’s Mama’s turn to drive.
I’ve watched him change with each decade. The rock replaced with country, the silk ties with T-shirts, and the silver Cadillac I called the Pimp Mobile one day became a blue Ford truck. Then came the Murano and a sporty Mazda that sounds like a NASCAR engine warming up.
As I get older, he promises, I will also appreciate the unfiltered and pure meaning of country and bluegrass music, the simpler things in life.
This morning before getting in the truck just after dawn, we drink instant coffee, and later, stop at Hardee’s for a biscuit and real coffee. We are en route to Peachtree City, Georgia, from my parent’s home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, a 31/2-hour trip to see my sister’s new baby and fancy 7,000-square-foot house.
We talk and talk, my dad and I, and when we pull into her driveway hours later, it seemed such a fast and easy trip. Both of us let out a deep breath, the exhaust of anxieties that never came to pass, relief that two people who love each other so much might possibly say the wrong thing and ignite or explode—and yet it never happened.
“You and Daddy had a good trip without a single argument,” is what he said as we stood at my sister’s front door. “Isn’t that interesting?” He smiles the way he always does, with only half his face. I love that smile and wouldn’t have it any other way.
We hold and fawn over the baby and admire the house and do things one is supposed to do when visiting a new nephew and grandbaby. After a few hours, we head back to Spartanburg, leaving Sandy and her infant and home, and knowing in a few weeks they’d all get the hang of this change in lifestyle, this tilt of the world as they once knew it.
As we drive we laugh about the baby’s poor cone head, though in all other physical aspects, he was a perfect and beautiful child. We listen to more music. “Looks like he had it rough coming into this world,” Daddy says as I hold near the window’s light one of my nephew’s photos, the ones hospital photographers take and no mother refuses, no matter how chewed up and spit out her angel looks.
Miles later, during this long drive home, I grow tired and he has decided to cut off the music and talk a while. He rambles on and on about whatever soars into his line of vision.
Planes are taking off and landing at Hartsfield International Airport, and he is saying for the second time that the only airport larger is O’Hare in Chicago. He whistles and I am startled and annoyed. “Here comes one taking off. There goes one landing. The only airport bigger than this is O’Hare,” he says again. I tell myself not to lash out.
I remember Mama’s words: “Hold your tongue. Keep it hostage and you’ll have no regrets later.”
When I was little, still in diapers, Daddy would come home from work and lean over my crib, cooing. Mama likes to tell the story of how his elbows jutted out like bird wings if she came around, blocking her from stealing his show.
Later, as I grew old enough to talk and toddle, we’d wait until dark and go out on the carport and I’d sit in his lap, a little girl whose daddy was her hero. I’d study his face and listen as he pointed toward the sky and told me about the stars, the Big and Little Dippers, wanting more than anything to see everything he saw.
When I was in kindergarten, my daddy entered his jazz phase. He had a stack of albums—Peggy Lee, and Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass—and I’d hold him around the waist and stand on his shoes as he stepped right, then left, forward and back. Sometimes when I hear one of those songs I can still feel the leather, stiff and warm against the bottoms of my bare feet.
“Now that’s a crazy place,” he says now, glancing off the interstate toward Grady Memorial Hospital. “Knife fights and gunshot victims all hours of the night. It’s a madhouse.”
I nod and say, “Ummm.” It must be apparent that I’m talked out, but he’s alert, drinking a Diet Coke and filling empty space with his musings. He reads the writing from 18-wheelers and billboards.
Years before, during what I refer to as my rebellious period, this would have sent me over the edge. Those were the Lost Years, from age 16 to 25, when I believed I was smarter than him. It was the decade my father lived with a broken heart and dusty dreams, the kind of dreams a father collects in his mind, hoping one day a child might wake up and fulfill.
He must have thought he meant no more to me than a coatrack, a place to hang my hat when out of money, to drape the heavy wool of failure I so readily cast, and blamed on him.
“Please pay my parking tickets or I won’t get my diploma.”
“I’m overdrawn at the bank. Can you help me out? I won’t ever do it again.”
“I had a wreck. I couldn’t see in the rearview mirror and hit a fast food sign.”
He got me out of all these jams. I expected him to. I never thanked him then. It was his duty, or so I believed at the time. After all, he was a father and isn’t this what all fathers were supposed to do?
Now I know better. Back then, I was ignorant of the happiness I stole, unaware of the bits of a man’s heart I tucked in my pockets and forgot about, even sat on at times.
Funny I nev
er gave him credit for the good things: the braces on my teeth, the education, the beach trips when he bought us giant seafood platters and virgin Piña Coladas.
“That’s how teenagers can be,” he told a heavy-eyed coworker one day, a man who feared he’d lost his only daughter. “In the end, if you hang on long enough until she’s matured or had kids, she’ll come back. Mine did.”
When I finally did return, understanding his angle in life only after having given birth to my own child, he received me with arms wide, his eyes bright and forgiving, not questioning, What had happened to the last decade?
We are so different, my dad and I, and yet so much alike. I look at his hands as he weaves through thickening traffic. They are wide and the skin is rough and dry. I look down at my own hands and see they are the same.
When he smiles at the two women who drive by, singing and dancing to the music on their radios, I see my mouth is like his, too, sly and tilted to one side.
As a child it’s so easy to idolize a father, to place him higher and higher until one day he’s out of reach. After reaching my teens and twenties, we allowed our differences to become matches, lighting fires that have never really burned out. That’s why we were both apprehensive about this trip, neither of us admitting our fears.
It was on a Tuesday evening when he called my Asheville, North Carolina, home to announce my sister had given birth. I was to drive to Spartanburg the following night so we could travel together to Peachtree City where Mama had been for a week.
This was the first time in ten years I would be alone with my dad, and I felt an enormous wash of anxiety, then guilt for feeling that way about my own father. I packed a travel survival kit: books, magazines, stationery—diversions if the front seat suddenly became too small or the conversation too intense. With us, talk can take strange turns. It may start out pleasant and generic, then, if carried on at length, could cut straight to our differences.
It used to be so easy. We agreed on everything. Whatever he said just had to be right.
As I grew older new ideas surrounded me, ideas that made him reel, made him question his influence. We could no longer discuss things. His heroes were my horrors. My heroes were those he called “liberals,” with a tone of disgust.
I allowed our differences to deepen the gully we’d dug, to rub at us until we were bruised and calloused and sometimes raw in each other’s company. I’m not sure how or why it all changed and the differences became unimportant, but I believe it was shortly after my first child was born. Instead of recoiling at the dinner table each time his fork scraped the plate, raking the food in neat little piles, I became thankful he was there.
He had always been there for us. He was the kind of dad men try to be though many never are. He came home at night. He loved our mother. He showed us how to solve math problems, drive a straight shift, play softball and croquet. He sat in the audience at all our dance recitals, the talent shows we entered and didn’t win. He stood at the edge of the pool cheering as we swam blue-faced for ribbons and trophies.
He was always with us: In the hospital when we lost our tonsils or wisdom teeth. On the sidewalk of the girls’ dorm as he set us free, sleeping that night in a half-empty house, feeling his heart bleed with loss and his eyes wet with tears he’d never show.
We are almost home now and I am ashamed that the prospect of this trip caused me so much unnecessary panic. For now, as he drives and the sound of the wind and engine lull us into a comfortable silence, I think how lucky I am. My dad is alive. I reach over and touch his arm, the hand that looks like mine, and his eyes fill with tears he is strong enough to keep from falling.
Maybe we aren’t so different. Maybe he wants me to accept him as much as I want him to accept me. Liberal. Conservative. Baptist. Methodist. What does it really matter if the heart and flesh of two are so connected?
The truth is, no matter how many years go by, I’ll always be the little girl in the carport staring into the black sky and hoping I see the same star my daddy sees.
That day seems like so long ago. My nephew, the one we went to see in Peachtree City, is now 12 and my father is graying and bearded, skin mottled from time and sun, skin cancers burned away at doctors’ offices. I wrote a poem for him on Father’s Day and he still keeps it, a sign he’d never given up on us.
He is the daddy the child adored. With big innocent eyes, she searched his face for wisdom and security, and finding this, she discovered love as well.
And when he smiled at her, praised the little girl, it was as if a July sun had found her in a dark cold world and wrapped her in warmth.
Later, the girl grew taller, older, and with these physical changes came the storms: the thunder of her anger and the rain of her emotions. The father’s forehead furrowed with lines, with confusion and heartbreak. How could this little girl be so unhappy?
He had tried, oh, how he had tried.
Many nights he fell asleep with wet cheeks, the wife next to him offering words of comfort. She’ll come around, the mother said. She won’t always forget your sacrifices. One day they will all come rushing back, when she has children of her own.
The daughter, though not aware and without malice, continued to rob this life-giver of contentment. She was ignorant of the happiness she stole, the hopes she sank, those pieces of a good man’s heart she kept stuffing in her pockets and forgetting.
The man must have thought his little girl was trapped behind the shell of her new selfishness. Hadn’t people told him, “It happens. Adolescence. One or two get lucky, but most of us…well…it happens.”
It seemed the child was gone forever, replaced by a stranger the family hardly recognized. Didn’t she appreciate the small car he bought? Brand new? Sacrificing his own needs to meet hers? Didn’t she care enough to stop coming home after midnight with traces of alcohol on her breath? Or what about the boy with long hair and bad language?
Then one day, and it was years later, he noticed the little girl peeking around the corners, peering from behind adult eyes.
Was she back? Dare he dream?
Secretly, the man may have wished his girl to have a child just like herself. A sort of punishment. “See what happens when you give and give and get nothing in return but punches to the heart?”
But she didn’t. Her own children were small lights illuminating the pathway back—back to the man who’d given everything and gotten so little.
The admiring girl inside the woman awakened again. She rubbed her eyes and wondered where all the years had gone.
And though she longs to take back those years of adolescence and early adulthood—when a daddy turned to father turned to stranger—she cannot.
She can only hope that in all the time remaining, before he is bent and lost with age, she will let this great man know how special he is to her.
How she remembers being the girl counting stars from his lap.
How she remembers the love that had always been there, even when she had none to give.
What she would give to be able to lasso the lost years. Instead, she takes the days that are left, and uses each to show him how he still shines in her eyes. And always will.
The years passed way too quickly and suddenly my father was turning 70 a couple of years ago. We decided to surprise him and throw the first birthday party he’s had since he was a skinny little boy with big ears and dreams to match.
Back then, he wanted a BB gun and toy soldiers, maybe a new pair of shoes so he didn’t have to share with a sibling. When a man turns 70—if he’s lucky enough to reach that age and do so in good health—he wants only happiness for his family and maybe another decade of decent living.
The wishes are simple as the desire for the material gives way to things that really matter.
My sister, mother and I decided to surprise him. Around 6 PM , Sandy and I met and prepared his gift. She’d bought a huge basket and we filled it with my father’s favorite things: red wine, Bibles and barbecue.
We jumped from a small room and yelled, “Surprise!” and I wouldn’t give a million dollars (if I had it) for the smile on Daddy’s face. That half-smile, the only one we ever knew or wanted.
He’s a man who gives to others and works daily to suppress his own needs, beating back his ego the way a gardener fights weeds. Gone now is the former high-strung man, a corporate engineer with a pressure-cooker job. Gone is the daddy who’d come from work beat and frustrated and pour a double shot of bourbon, sit in his easy chair and listen to jazz or Merle Haggard, depending on his mood, while Mama prepared dinner, the smell of sizzling butter and onions winding through our home.
He was always a decent man, but in the last five years, he’s not the same daddy I grew up with. He and Mama had discovered shortly after Dad’s retirement a country church in need of a few good men and women. He found a place where he could make a difference, and my parents, along with others from the small congregation, provide a children’s ministry that has grown from a few kids to more than sixty.
Don't Sleep With a Bubba Page 20
