Recently I was laying in bed on a warm evening and was struck by the symphony lulling me to sleep. The crickets, all shapes and sizes, were rubbing their wings together singing. Some on the beat, some off, periodically a high pitched sawing song would join in creating harmony. During the earlier hours the Thrush calls replaced by the almost visceral buzz of the cicadas. The angle of the light suddenly changed creating long, lemony shadows across our dirt road. Darkness sneaks in earlier, pushing us inward, robbing us of precious garden time.
Each time I run Muir I gather wooden bushel-baskets of apples. The shiny red metal press comes out and lives on our deck for a few weeks so that we can press at a moment’s notice. Pressing becomes a party with kids arriving, paper cups in hand, open bags of tortilla chips and guacamole scattered on the picnic table. We work hard and fast and manage to press nine gallons of cider in one afternoon and tuck all but one into our freezer in the basement to enjoy all year long.
My mother is moving to a smaller place this fall. It will be more convenient, easier to manage and, perhaps, less empty without my father’s presence. It stirs the simmering pot of grief inside of me to walk into my father’s basement, a shrine to all things fishing, and see the photos of our kids in his large montage. Each photo a boy holding a fish next to a beaming grandfather. The struggle to hold up the fish is the impetus behind the shaky grin, dependent on the age and size of the boy. My father’s baseball gloves from when he was a teenager, lovingly oiled: deep pockets created from hours and hours of play, the gloves now in a closet in our house. Smiling parents as young teenagers with everything ahead of them. I see my dad, long and lanky grinning down at me, not knowing me when that photo was taken. How strange. My mother with bangs, looking up as if into a tree at my father’s young face: searching for something, perhaps their future?
My dad died a year and half ago and I have only been into this basement a few times. Easier to stay above ground. If I descend, I tend to go further than I planned..
But now there is no getting around it. My mother smiles up at me with that same bright smile: looking toward me for guidance. This time I become the tree. I quickly push important things into a box so that I can send my kids back the preciousness they once sent him. Tickets from ballgames with my dad’s big scrawling across them. The large parrot hat from a Jimmy Buffet concert Michael and my dad attended together: Michael winning tickets and choosing my father as his plus one. A photograph of the two of them, laughing toward each other, delirious in each others company and the joy of the day. My dad had paper-clipped it carefully to the hat and now I have to pull it down with a carelessness that belies how I am feeling. I just want it to be done.
Funny how our mind bends to protect us from reality; I believe that if the wall stays up, stays the same, maybe my father isn’t really dead. Such at big man at 6’3- like a big wall really. So what happens if you take that down?
I worry that, if my mother moves to a new place and my father finds a way to return, nobody will be home when he opens the door..
We keep taking things down and boxing things up. I’ll keep his gloved oiled and safe in Josh’s old closet. The fading photographs will be thumb-tacked to new walls and the documentary of a life will be finished.
Next week the fall season of lessons begins. The shearer comes tomorrow. Baby chicks chase each other around the hen house and leaves begin to dot the ground with beautiful colors.
Sometimes when I open an old photo album and see my father laughing, young and handsome and so far away from the end: or hold a vinyl record in my hands that he and I danced to when I was a small child, it is hard to feel anything other than sadness and anger at it being taken away. But, if I am quiet and collected, sometimes, only sometimes, I can look and smile.
There is an almost irresistible urge to insert myself back into his prime: those larger-than-life times when he could conquer anything, when there was no possibility of decline. The times when I could bask in the warm sun of his presence in a way that made our lives together seem golden and devoid of sadness.
The challenge is to know that there is ultimately only one real way to move. Forward.
I was gripped reading this homage to your beloved father. Your love for him comes through so cleanly and purely – how fortunate you (and your boys) are to have known this depth of love for almost your entire life. While reading it through twice (once is never enough with your blog posts), I was reminded of something Chogyam Trungpa said to his students as he was dying – something to the effect, while I’m alive, you’ll think of me from time to time, maybe even often, but after I die, you’ll understand that I never left.
There is much that we can’t fully understand until we are looking back at it.