Don't Go To Sleep Mad

My father gave us cinnamon hearts on Valentine's Day. That would happen in the morning, at the kitchen table, him in his robe, drinking coffee and slipping pieces of buttered toast to our cocker spaniel. We'd be dancing with impatience to get to school with our stacks of cards, cram them into the boxes in our homerooms and endure the wait until it was finally time for the designated post person classmate to deliver the cards, for the volunteer mothers to circulate with tiny cups of juice and cupcakes. Dad drove us to school, so none of this anxious waiting could really begin until he showered, shaved, patted on the Old Spice, cracked a fresh shirt out of its cardboard surround, put his wallet in his pocket and found himself ready to leave the house, enter the Pontiac and navigate the mile and a half to our small school. He was a stickler for punctuality, when it was his events and very cavalier about other people's time.

The last time I saw him was right after the Manson family butchered Sharon Tate and her playmates. I heard about those murders while being driven across the Bay Bridge, on the way to SFO. The weird skankiness of it haunted my visit to my parents, as though all the air in the country was suddenly polluted with fear and hate and uncertainty. Where my parents lived, in Wisconsin, was a retro burg that had ordinances prohibiting people of color from staying within the city limits over night. It had an island covered with coal in the delta where a river flowed into Lake Michigan. It was an ignorant place and my father, a sybarite, suffered and wilted within its confines.

The visit started okay. Dad was enchanted with my sturdy, three year old son and took him off on toy store excursions, coming home laden with cars and trucks. We were treated to Dad's famous bratwurst (grilled and steeped in beer and butter) and semi-raw chicken. We hung around the backyard barbecue until the mosquitoes had drunk their fill. I woke one night to the insistent hum of a bloodsucking insect close to my ear, turned on the light and discovered over forty of the critters, hanging out on the cottage cheese ceiling. When whacked with my tennis shoe, they all left blood spots.

By the last night of the visit, I was more than ready to go home. Dad decided I should come along to the summer theatre performance he was directing and I did, knowing we would wind up closing some bar at 1 a.m. He let me drive home, at least, after stumbling on his way to the parking lot and dropping his keys when he opened the car door. He dozed a little in the car but revived as we pulled up under the carport and poured another several fingers of bourbon in his old fashioned glass as soon as he got to the kitchen. Then he started lecturing me on my thrown-away life.
That stuff used to make me cry. Crying, I knew, only egged him on. This time I listened, refuted, and finally shouted. My mother woke up and separated us, scolded, sent us to our beds.

On the early morning drive to the airport, he was quiet. He stopped once, to vomit off the berm of the road. I barely said goodbye. The following summer, he died of a heart attack in the Chicago airport.