Little Bit Of The Past

Yesterday I was all sorts of behind. I woke late. It had snowed. I needed to shave, shower, write Morning Pages, dress, shovel, pack lunch, eat breakfast, and get to work. No way could I get it all done and still drive my daughter to school and myself to work on time. Damn it.

My wife rescued me by taking our daughter to school. I paused Morning Pages halfway and shoveled the snow, shaved, showered, threw some lunch together, ate a bit of toast, and walked to work. Fifteen minutes early, I finished the last Morning Page and a half. No harm, no foul, but I knew I had to get up earlier, if for no other reason, then to feel better.

Last night, after Syracuse Women's Basketball in the Dome, we returned home to an inch or snow of new snow. Despite the late hour, I shoveled to save having so much snow in the morning. I considered shaving and showering to get them out of the way, but my daughter was in the shower and I was too tired.

This morning, after a couple snoozes, I got up earlier. I wrote all three Morning Pages, shoveled off a dusting on the driveway and sidewalk, shaved and showered, dressed for work, made lunch and toasted bread. By seven I was ready, but my daughter doesn't need to go until 7:30. Which sent me back to a little bit of the past.

I'm typing in the living room while side three of Genesis' Seconds Out spins on the turntable just like it did most mornings while I was in high school. Side three is comprised of one twenty-four minute song, "Supper's Ready." Each morning I got up at least twenty-four minutes early to listen to that song. It was a comfort before high school, which I thought of as a kind of prison. I'd sit in my room alone with the music playing and...well, I don't even know. I'd just sit and listen. That was good. It was enough.

This morning is a nod to that past. I no longer go to school. The last ten years of teaching were far worse than the years I spent as a student. After dropping off my daughter, I'll go to the community center and it isn't just that I don't mind, it's that I kind of can't wait. I'm happy.

Today is Dad's birthday. He would have been 81 and last night would have gone with us to the Syracuse Women's Basketball game. He would have been happy about my new job. And this morning he would be up early to watch the plow guys do his driveway, have his coffee, and start the day. I'm in the past enough this morning that he's here with me just a little.

Being up early, going back to the past, and Dad's birthday are happy things for me. I doubt it's the same for my mother and brother who wake and remember in their own ways. Me, I'm up early, Seconds Out is into the "flute" solo just before "the gods of Magog," it's Dad's birthday, and soon I'm off to a job I love. All that and I've spent twenty minutes typing this. What a day.

You should see the smile on my face and hear this album. Both of them out of the past and into the morning. Both of them just right.

Be A Dad

Your kid is hurt. Not badly or suddenly but hurt. It's her leg. She started running cross-country on a whim and probably ramped up too fast. Whatever the case, her left leg isn't right, the calf is tight even when she's just walking around school. She's in constant low-grade and occasional high-grade pain. Or, as she would say high-key pain. These things happen.

Your wife makes an appointment with an orthopedist. Your job is more flexible than hers, so you get to drive your girl to the appointment.

On the way, you say to her you're glad she's not a little kid, that it's good she's in high school. She shrugs. You explain: When you were tiny it was worse. You couldn't help yourself. You couldn't tell us what was wrong. This, you tell her, is still bad, but better. You know you're not explaining it right.

Okay, she says. She's nice that way. Knows when to throw the old man a bone.

You're her dad, so most of what you do is drive where she needs to go, try to be quiet and let her talk with the doctors, listen more than you talk, and head her off when she begins to spiral into anger or depression. You know about such spirals. Bet your ass you do. Trying to head her off helps head you off. Sometimes.

The orthopedist looks her over. Kick this leg up. Now that one. Stand up and walk across the exam room. Lie down and put your leg up. How's this feel? This? He figures out where things are at. He suggests an MRI.

She is nervous about that. He says, no sweat, but she says, isn't that the thing that makes you feel like the world is coming down. You smile. You know what she means. Claustrophobic, you say. The orthopedist says she won't go all the way in. Just her leg. He asks, is your leg claustrophobic? She smiles but only a little, like it's a dad joke. He smiles back. No sweat, he tells her.

And there's a job opening.

The job description: nod and make sure she believes him. Say, it's no problem. When she says it still high-key makes her nervous, nod again and say that you understand. Don't try to fix things. Just be there. Be a man. Be her dad.

You step up. You do the job. When she raises her eyebrows at you, that's when you know you've done what you were hired to do, what you were born to do, all you've ever wanted to do. And you both smile.

February Cold

Of course Dad got cold once in a while. Sure. He had to. We lived in Central New York. I still do. It gets cold. Snow falls sometimes more than a foot in a day. I remember how cold I was playing youth football in freezing rain while he stood on the sidelines with the other dads who all looked frozen. Dad wore no hat, held no umbrella, just smoked his cigarettes. He had to be cold. No doubt.

Except I wonder.

Driving to my job this morning I was desperate for the car to warm up. Come on, come on, come on, I said. I kept checking the vent with my bare hand then blowing into my fist trying to keep from shaking. Some of this was the cold, some was not having dressed warmly, and some was the anxiety I feel every day I drive toward my job. Whatever the case, I felt cold and got to thinking about Dad.

Of course he got cold, but I don't remember hearing him say so. He had to have said so once or twice but if so it didn't stick with me. Instead, he's the guy who went out in the cold in a light jacket or his funeral directing suit, felt hat, overcoat left open, and maybe a pair of black leather gloves. I remember being cold and complaining about it while he listened. His teeth never chattered.

I'm thinking these things having just marked the fourth anniversary of Dad's death. Mom and I spent the day together and at one point she asked how I'm dealing with him being gone. I'm good, I told her. It's what I usually say to that kind of question, but I felt it this time. I'm good. When he died I thought I would have to find some way to put him away, to not think about him, to let him go. I thought I would grieve and then Dad would be gone so that I could go on. Instead, I grieved and continue to grieve, but I turn toward him and his memory and it's not like he's still here, but I'm not alone. I write about him often, think of him even more, mark the dates that matter (anniversary, birthday, when he bought his funeral home, the day he died), and spend maybe too much time comparing myself to him.

Which is why I felt wrong giving in so much to being cold this morning. It's why I worry that I'm supposed to cope with my awful job which has become more than I can bear. Dad never seemed to find anything too much for his strengths.

Then I remember the job he left to buy the funeral home. He had to get out. He hung in a long time, even after buying his own place, and ran both businesses, but eventually, for reasons I can easily imagine now, he quit that other job. His business wasn't making ends meet. There were signs it might not ever. Quitting the other job was messy, dangerous even. But I know something now: staying in the job was a messier and more dangerous choice than leaving.

Of course Dad got cold. He didn't say much about it. That was his way. He didn't talk a lot about himself and he hardly ever spoke of things being difficult or over his head. I was his child — I still am — and I still enjoy thinking of him as towering, powerful, capable of anything, maybe everything. But I know he was cold. There's that line somebody or other wrote: he was a man, take him for all in all. Men and women reach their breaking points. Teeth chatter, hands go cold, death comes eventually or suddenly. And when we are alone in our frozen cars driving toward a job that feels toxic and venomous, sometimes we cry out for mercy. The traffic pays us no mind.

When I imagine Dad in those situations, he looks and sounds almost exactly like me.

Shoveling the Driveway After A Terrible Snow As Night And The Temperature Descend Into A Cold Fit For The Dead

I hold the snow shovel in my corporeal and gloved hands. The snow is terribly deep. It's beyond pushing down the drive and into the road and has to be taken one shovel at a time. It's nothing that can be done quickly. There is a process to it. A slow process. I lift a shovel-full and throw it high over the wall feeling it throughout body, mind, maybe even heart and soul. It's all too much, I think, this snow that I have to clear. I couldn't possibly. Then I dig the shovel in and throw it again.

Dad leans reluctantly on his old metal shovel with the wooden handle he wrapped in black tape where it began to split forty years ago. There's a chunk out of the metal edge where he tried to pry something up with it. Maybe ice. Maybe something ridiculous. The shovel and he have come back looking just as they had the day before he died or whatever day it was that he and I last shared this life. He would have preferred to come back younger, stronger, but the living bring back the dead as they wish, never the other way around. Dad excepts this, accepts what I've given him.

He has taken up smoking again. Why the hell not, his expression says as I watch him strike the match and cup it close to his face where it shines in his glasses. Then the smoke hides his eyes and blows out past me. I can't smell anything and wonder if it's just his breath floating on the frozen breeze like mine. No, I think. It's certainly not that. Right Dad, I say. He wipes his nose with a gloved hand. That old leather glove is worn, stained with grease and oil. He touches the top of the old knit hat he still wears. It's one I cast aside at ten as unfashionable. Nothing wrong with it, his shrug says. I exhale and it's as if he has blown a cloud of smoke across me.

I survey the driveway I've cleared, the snow left to shovel. Percentages, that's what I'm calculating. Dad looks. He thinks in fractions. I say, about two-thirds to go, my breath blowing hard away from us. He nods. The afternoon sky has gone dark and the snowstorm is giving way slowly to falling temperatures. We're headed down below zero, frigid, breath-stealing cold.

Dad finishes his cigarette and tosses the butt in a pile of snow I've thrown over the wall. It doesn't fizzle but disappears. He holds the handle of the shovel like a tool but uses it as a staff, something to hold him up or hold him here. I tell him to rest, just take it easy, Dad. Be here with me.

I dig in the shovel and throw snow high up out of the driveway. Again and again. Dad stands and watches. There's no hurry. The streetlight at the foot of the drive flickers to life as I throw another shovel of snow up high over the wall. The wind catches it, blows it back at me, right through where Dad stands. That snow blinds me. I'm so tired. I rub my eyes with the back of my glove and open them again worried, anxious that I'm alone. The night is growing so cold and though the streetlight illuminates all the work left for me on this Earth it has put out every single star in the heavens. I dig the shovel in and throw it hard against the blowing wind.