by Joan Wheelis
My father always took me to the airport. He accompanied me to the gate. Always early, we sat together until boarding was nearly complete. He embraced me and then positioned himself so he could watch me walk down the ramp to board the plane. I looked back and waved as I passed from his sight. Once I was on the plane, my father moved to the window at the waiting area and, knowing what seat I had, he would try to position himself to maximize the likelihood that I would see him as the plane taxied down the runway. He also memorized the number on the tail so he could tell when my plane had taken off safely. He never left before my departure was certain. Often I did see him from my window seat. A lone, tall figure waving at the window, and sometimes he could see me waving back as well. The protracted goodbyes tethered me in tension like an arrow pulled back, waiting to be released.
As my father grew older, he stopped driving me to the airport and we said goodbye at home. We rode the elevator down together to the garage and walked out to the street where the cab waited. Unaware of the weight of the moment, the cabdriver typically sped off unceremoniously as the door was pulled shut. My father moved to the street and waved, as did I until we lost sight of each other.
My son takes the bus to New York. I pack him things to eat and drive him to the bus station near my house. I park the car and walk with him to the bus. We embrace and gaze tenderly at one other. But for just a moment before he boards and takes a seat. The windows of the bus are dark. He is not burdened by these goodbye rituals. I watch as the bus leaves the station. I wave. He doesn’t. I am saluting the past, not the present.
rain
ON WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2003, MY FATHER WENT TO the DMV to renew his driver’s license. He was a month shy of turning eighty-eight. It was typical that he would have planned ahead, in case of any mishap. He went in the morning when he would have otherwise been playing tennis. He failed the eye exam and, due to some idiosyncratic California law, a Supplemental Driving Performance Evaluation was required. The rationale behind the law was to see if the driver’s performance behind the wheel could compensate for poor vision. So if my father wanted to renew his license, he would need to take a driving test, which he would have to repeat every two years if he wanted to continue to drive. I can only imagine the ardor with which my father determined to take on the challenge, faced with a beacon of his mortality. After all, he was still playing tennis, driving to and from Golden Gate Park. When he told me he would take driving lessons to prepare for the test, I felt amused, proud and fearful listening to his plans. I felt he shouldn’t be driving at his age anyway, even if he could, and at the same time I felt proud to see him so determined to do it.
In his appointment book, starting on October 1, is the chronicling of these lessons: the name of the instructor, the school, and sometimes commentary about the instructor. The first part of each entry is written in red ink, but his description of the teacher follows in pencil, as if he wanted to be able to change his commentary.
October 1, 10:30 am, Ron Moore Driving lesson, petty, scolding
October 3, 12 noon, John Li, Lucky Day Driving School, indulgent, not good
October 6, 5–7 pm, Thomas, International Driving School
October 7, 9 am, Art McNally, Mission Driving School, good
October 8, 9:30 am, Driving instruction, Dragon Driving School, not good
October 13, 2–3:30, Neal Goddard, Atlas Driving School, the best
October 15, 3:10–5, Ron Moore, not good
October 16, 8:30, Art McNally
I recall his telling me about the different instructors, and that McNally, a retired state trooper, said to him at the last lesson, “You’re ready, pop! Good luck!” After eight lessons, on Friday, October 17, six days before his eighty-eighth birthday, the entry is “9:30 DMV driving test.” And he passed. The license would be good for two years.
He did continue to play tennis, but it became more difficult. He had an arrythmia and was started on medication that made him dizzy. He took a couple of bad falls. While he didn’t break any bones, he was bruised, body and soul. My mother was alarmed and urged him to stop playing. In his appointment book on April 11, 2005, an entry reads, “Joe—?last tennis.” Joe had been one of his steady partners for many years and indeed there were no more entries for tennis dates after that.
Prior to his ninetieth birthday he took two more driving lessons and again passed his driving test on Monday, September 26. His driving after this included taking himself and my mother to their doctors’ appointments, grocery shopping at Cal Mart and Bryan’s Grocery, dinner out at Vivande on Fillmore Street or with friends. Nothing too far and no highways.
On February 7, 2007, I flew by myself to visit my parents. They were both still practicing and my father had just published his thirteenth book. I thought it might be useful for them to have more help at home as they were both more compromised physically and my father had had a bad fall outside the local market. But while they allowed me to arrange a few interviews with candidates, my father was vehemently opposed. He said resolutely, “It’s not necessary. And I don’t want any strangers in the house.” I felt troubled for having upset him, torn between wanting to step in and protect him and respecting his steadfast stubbornness.
I was leaving San Francisco to return to the East Coast on Saturday, February 10. It had been raining all day. The usual cabdrivers my parents made use of were away or otherwise too busy given the weather. Around noon we called a cab company to arrange a pickup at 8:30 for my red-eye flight back to Boston. As had become common, we had dinner together in the kitchen rather than in the dining room. The familiar routines of my parents had slowed down and there was a somber hesitation in our conversation. There was unspoken sadness and anxiety embedded with resigned acceptance that once again I was leaving San Francisco, that I might not see them again. Ever again. Time passed too slowly and not fast enough. We cleaned the kitchen together, my mother packed me a little snack for the plane, and we moved to the living room to wait for the cab. But the cab didn’t come. By 8:45 we called again and they said they were delayed but would be coming soon. When it was 9:15 and still no cab, my father said, “I’ll take you.” It had been years since he had driven me to the airport. It was nighttime and it was pouring rain outside and it was a thirty-minute drive on the freeway.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Daddy.” Not wanting him to know that I was worried about his ability to navigate the highway, the rain and the dark, I continued to insist that the cab would arrive soon and that the weather was too terrible. And it was late. My parents were usually in bed at this time. The cab didn’t come and at 9:30 I reluctantly agreed to my father’s proposed plan. He seemed excited, almost elated as he fetched his hat and coat. Then my mother suddenly decided she would come along too.
I asked my father for the car keys, hoping he would not insist on driving to the airport as well. Without pause or hesitation he handed me his keys. He was smiling. He sat in front with me, and my mother sat in the back seat. The rain was torrential and we drove in tense silence. Yet the car was full of my unarticulated thought: I wished my mother hadn’t come because if there was an accident, I might lose both my parents. And I was glad my mother did come because she would keep my father company, keep him awake. If they got back home alive, my father would feel great. If they didn’t, he would have been glad to know he had died without cowardice. I had a gripping stomachache by the time we reached the airport. I could hardly bear to part from them. I thought about changing my flight and driving them back home, but I knew none of this would happen. I kissed them goodbye, hugging them as if it would be the last time, and told them, fighting back my tears, that I loved them both very much. My father was tender but matter-of-fact. “You had better go, sweetie, or you’ll miss your flight. We’ll be fine.” With that he got into the driver’s seat, my mother at his side, and they drove off. I waved in the rain as they were swallowed up by the stormy night. My flight was delayed and I called the house before taking off. My father a
nswered the phone. “Everything is fine. I feel exhilarated, like a young man again. I didn’t think I had it in me anymore. It was great!”
I visited San Francisco again in April a few months later. My father allowed me to drive him around town to do the errands. I was surprised that he let me, but I didn’t comment as we made our rounds to the markets, hardware store and post office. At some point he turned to me and said, “After that trip to the airport in that rain, I have nothing more to prove.”
last cut
FOR YEARS I CUT MY FATHER’S HAIR—A RITUAL THAT BEGAN after I left home and lived on the East Coast. I really didn’t know how to cut hair, but he related to me on the matter as if I were a pro. For a while, in an effort to spare myself the charade without directly disappointing my father, I would absent myself, apologetically claiming that I had run out of time during my visit home. I suggested the obvious alternative. “Daddy, why don’t you go and have it done professionally?” Usually he would respond with a deflated “Maybe I will,” but we both knew it would not happen. Indeed, he disliked hair salons, or rather he was acutely uncomfortable with being part of the exhibitionistic celebration of vanity.
He took to cutting his hair himself, resulting in a look that was affectionately described as mouse-eaten. There was a lot of talk about how he ought to feel a little sheepish for hacking away at his hair himself, especially in view of the fact that he was a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst and a well-known writer. But he didn’t. And whether he knew that his behavior would ultimately result in my taking on the responsibility, I’ll never know, but I suspect that was the case. He never stopped cutting it himself, but when my visits were frequent enough, he would do it less often. When many months had gone by between visits, I felt punished for my absence by the ravaged hairline.
Whether he was asking for a trim or a major cut, I would try to rectify the mouse-eaten edges while chastising and teasing him for his folly. I cut very slowly and small amounts at a time. I moved around him constantly, holding up tufts of hair to compare the respective lengths. From side to side I combed it one way, then another, sending him to the mirror to check how he liked the length. No matter what I did, when I was done he would compliment me on my handiwork. Once when he asked me to cut a little more from the sides, I snipped at the air without actually cutting any more hair. I told him to go check again and he did, announcing that now it was perfect.
The haircut was an excuse to be together, in close physical proximity. We spoke of poetry—Philip Larkin, T. S. Eliot, Rilke, Neruda, Yeats—and he would frequently quote an entire poem from memory. We spoke of the meaning of life, death, and the vicissitudes of self-deception. We spoke about Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, Kierkegaard, and Popper. When we weren’t talking, he would often close his eyes, enjoying the sustained and sanctioned touch of my fingers. I did too.
When I visited in April 2007, my father, then ninety-one, asked for a major cut. When I reminded him that I would be back in July, he admitted that he wanted a different, shorter cut and of even length all over. I was surprised, as he usually preferred a longer, wilder cut. “What do you want to look like?”
Without pause my father answered, “Gary Cooper.” We both smiled.
“Okay,” I said.
It was a cold April day, and we decided to use the bathroom for the haircut rather than our usual place in the garden. It took a long time to cut his hair, moving around my father, from side to side in the cramped bathroom quarters, cutting and combing. Of course I pretended to know what Gary Cooper’s hair looked like. We were both silent.
As my father grew older, I often felt an urgent restlessness, seeking conversation to receive his wisdom and memory, aware that time was running out. “Tell me about the War of the Roses.” “What were the names of the plays you directed in the theatre in Austin, Texas?” But on this day I was content to be silent, as was he. Just the shearing sound of scissors. He closed his eyes. He was relaxed and content, his breathing slow. I asked him to look in the mirror a couple of times and each time he did he wanted it shorter. In the end he found it to be just right. And just like Gary Cooper. “I think this may be the best cut ever,” he said. The thought crossed my mind that it might be the last. For several years I often thought that when leaving San Francisco. Waving out the back window of the cab as he stood in the street—his long arm arching slowly and deliberately till we lost sight of one another.
But it was not the last time I cut his hair. Getting ready to leave for the funeral home in June 2007, I thought to bring the shears. His hair was flat, damp, combed back, and I felt shocked by the coldness when I went to touch his head. I took the shears from my purse. Like a thief raiding a safe, I pillaged from the haircut I had so painstakingly made but two months before. I felt guilty, looking at the obvious invasion, imagining certain disapproving consternation for my disrespect of the dead. I took a picture with my cell phone. My hands felt stiff and clumsy and my movements furtive, as if any moment someone would enter the room and apprehend me for my egregious transgressions. I reminded myself that I was invoking arbitrary customs for which my father had little patience.
My father hated memorials because he felt they gave legitimacy to the falsification of human nature. Cleaning up the portrait of a life in cloying eulogy was ultimately deceptive. My father would have been content with my telling this story, even somewhat bemused to see his daughter carry the banner he passed off. I expose us both in a tribute to him and to our relationship. Profound but not simple. The underbelly of a great attachment is not without a vital yet uneasy tension of insecurity and certainty, fantasy and denial, exposure and secrecy. I have a silver tuft of my father’s hair and a snapshot of him dead, but I have all of him alive within where the secrets of love are secure.
mosquito destroyer
WHEN I WAS IN MY EARLY FORTIES AND MY SON WAS SIX YEARS old, my father sent me a children’s book entitled Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me by Eric Carle. Though clearly intended to be read to my son, it was not sent to him but to me and was inscribed, “To the little bird from the mosquito destroyer.”
My son asked, “Who is the little bird?”
“In the summertime Grandpa used to write his books sitting on the old oak rocking chair with the green leather seat. He liked to sit on the covered deck outside the little study that Grandma had fixed up for him. But one year the swallows had built their nest on the wall of the study under the eaves and Grandpa’s presence on the porch was far too close for the mother swallow and she started to dive-bomb him. At lunchtime Grandpa said he was going to take down the nest. I protested. He said little and after lunch moved inside his study. I was so upset that I wrote a note and then I pretended to be Monty. With the note in my mouth I leapt up in front of his window to show with some urgency that I had a note to deliver. He came to the door and I gave him the note. He didn’t take down the nest and resigned himself to write inside his study. Thereafter I was nicknamed the little bird.”
My father wrote about this in 1999 in his autobiography, The Listener:
Swallows have built a nest under the roof of my porch a few feet from where I sit. With all the places available to them—house, barn, shed, water tower, the whole unpeopled island—they choose the one place I have chosen for my work. And that would be all right with me, I would share quarters with a mother swallow, but it’s not all right with her. It makes her nervous for me to be so close. She wants me to leave. Moreover, she has a husband and a lot of friends. All of them are after me. They circle and scold and, one after another, bank and swoop on me as dive-bombers on a battleship, pulling up at the last moment. “The nest has got to go,” I say. Joan is shocked, disbelieving. “You wouldn’t tear down a nest, Daddy! Not with eggs in it!”
My concentration is lost for the morning. I go for a walk on the beach, thinking I will take it down when she is occupied with other things. In the afternoon returning to my porch I find the sheet of lined paper pinned to the rocking chair. On it printed awkwardly in crayon:
Dear Sir,
I know you have work to do, but I’m going to have babies. Please don’t tear down my nest. Sincerely, Bird
I pick up my gear and move inside the cabin, surrendering the porch to the swallows. (pp. 148–149)
In a file labeled “Joan,” amid school reports and pediatrician notes and a brief essay I wrote on having my tonsils out at age five, there is my hand-scribbled note from the bird. As with the notes and letters from my mother, my father has added the date in pencil. August 1964. I was nine years old.
“What is the mosquito destroyer?” my son asks.
“Do you remember my room at Grandma and Grandpa’s house? It was at the back of the house. It had a lot of windows that opened out onto the backyard. It was shady and a little damp and mosquitoes used to come in the windows. I was afraid of them not so much because of their bite but of the noise they make. Actually it wasn’t even the noise, it was when the noise stopped. I would thrash around in bed. Eventually, I felt very upset and would get out of bed. Monty was upset too because I was upset and would get up and stand next to me while I called out for Grandpa. ‘Daa-dee, Daa-dee!’ After a while I would hear the key unlocking their bedroom door and Grandpa would appear at the end of the hall, in pajamas and his silk robe and a silk bandanna that he wore over his eyes at night. He carried a folded newspaper, as he sleepily made his way down the hall to me. Once in my room, he would turn on all the lights and start searching for the feared enemy. It often took a while to locate and destroy them. Sometimes my father had to climb onto my leather desk chair or get on the desktop to swat the mosquito. Monty would get excited and try to join in the action by following us around. Only after the mosquito or mosquitoes were destroyed by the rolled-up San Francisco Chronicle would my father leave. This often went on for days at a time. After a while Grandma and Grandpa bought cheesecloth to cover my bed, but the mosquitoes still seemed to get in and finally they had all the open casement windows replaced with screened ones.”
