On My Father's Birthday

Daddy off to work, 1969

I've written about him again and again. Type "father" in the search box of this blog, and you'll see what I mean. But March 29 is his birthday, and I can't let it go without acknowledgement. He would have been 103...how unreal is that?! I live in a time unlike any that he knew or could have possibly imagined.

And still I think of him each day and search for him in dreams, and I try to be good in his honor, and I wish there were more happy memories to look back upon, but his life was hard, and I know I didn't help or thank him enough. I was young and stupid, after all.

But a small and unexpected moment with him altered me forever. It was the day I began to see him clearly and realize how much he meant to me.  If the story sounds familiar it might be because it ran in The Santa Barbara Independent some years back, and I've shared it more than once in a book and on this website.

Before I post it though, there in the picture above is the very thermos my father was carrying that morning, with its red stripes and chipped places and dried up paint drips from some long ago job. I carried it with me recently on a walk to the sandstone shrine, and I tried to imagine him here with me. When I hold that thermos, I picture it in his hands, filled with coffee he brewed in the dark.

Anyway, the excerpt is below. Why again? Because on my father's birthday, I want to speak of love, which must be expressed and acknowledged and rendered into deed, which fuels and inspires and endures.

♦♦♦♦

Lilacs were more fragrant then. All rain was hard, every star shimmered, the wind through the treetops was a voice in my ear, and each path through the sparse scrub woods might yet lead to someplace undiscovered. I yearned to see the sun rise over the sea, and one day my boyfriend Richie agreed to drive me to Robert Moses Park the following morning at dawn. I knew my father would never understand, so I tiptoed out of the house in the dark of four a.m and met Richie a little further down the street. It was the morning of the solstice.

We drove across the Causeway just as the first sun of summer began to rise like a great flat coin above the water.And that was it. We watched the sunrise, vowed never to forget this particular June morning, and Richie drove me back home. The sky had lost its blush by now, but still possessed its early morning shyness. I stood for a long while in the backyard, fully awake and unwilling to return to my bed. A single rose had emerged from a small thorny bush I had inexpertly planted myself. I examined it like a proud mother, then sat on our brick steps and stroked the fur of an old cat named Duke who belonged to nobody but frequented our yard. I enjoyed the way Duke unquestioningly accepted my unlikely presence in the morning’s narrow seam, pushing his thick head against me, purring at my unexpected companionship.

Suddenly the door opened and my father appeared. He wore a green plaid flannel shirt and old paint-splattered trousers, and he carried a thermos of coffee. A single shank of his black hair fell across his forehead, and he looked at me with a bemused, tired expression. For an instant I braced myself for defense, but he knew nothing of my foray to the beach, and I could tell he was happy to see me. He smiled as though my being there was nothing more than a pleasant surprise that did not require explanation.

I realized only then how bleak and lonely were his mornings. No one rose to make him breakfast or see him off, even in the dark of winter. Sometimes I would wake and hear him getting ready downstairs. There would be a small clatter of keys and kitchen things, then the door would shut, and he would drive away, and I would lie there as the sky grew light and blank, feeling utterly bereft until my trifling dreams reclaimed me.

Now he smiled and reached for me, and I nestled my head into his shirt the way I did when I was a little girl. He smelled vaguely of coffee and casein paint, and his shirt was soft and achingly familiar, and he had about him a residue of sleep and weariness that made him gentle. I felt protective of him suddenly, and it occurred to me on some guttural level that he would not be with me forever, and my heart chilled with a fleeting foreknowledge that I was not capable of grasping.

“It’s the first day of summer, Daddy.”

“No kidding,” he said distractedly, as though all days were one smudged procession.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I added, “so I thought I’d get up and greet the day.”

This sounded silly, and I wished I hadn’t said it, but my father didn’t patronize me. I wondered if he ever felt the restlessness that stirred in me, the romantic tug of wanderlust and yearning. It would be many years and much too late before I found the letters and poems he had penned in his youth.

"If I could but scale tonight the vault of sky," one poem began, "the stars as stepping stones to reach on high…"

But I suppose I thought I’d invented yearning. I somehow assumed that my father had been programmed differently to choose this life.

“Well, kid,” he said, beginning to shift, “you got to greet an old man, too.” He pronounced it keed, as he always did when he called me this. It was an affectionate nickname, and it pleased me.

He approached the car and turned to me once more.

“Help out today, and take care of the baby,” he said, referring to my little brother.

“Daddy…”

I don’t know what it was that pressed upon my heart. I did not yet know the names for love and had never felt this weight, this vast presence at the core of me, so elemental I might dissolve within it or die without it. I was frightened and grateful, immobilized by the enormity of what seemed both burden and gift. In time, I would get used to this, for my heart would fold over it, and my soul would take its shape, but for now, I was suspended precariously in the stilled breath of morning. It was the start of summer, and I was seventeen.