I am a grown man now, grown with a job and a house and responsibilities, and every now and again, a respite on my back porch. At the end of a hard day, or a weekend eve, I grab a cold tumbler from the fridge, put some bourbon in it, and go sit outside.
Oddly, this weekend night was a bit different.
I got a phone call, a notice, that my father was in town. My father, who I hadn’t seen in years, the man whose name I bear, the man for whom fatherhood was summed in in dollars and cents, said he was going to come by.
I felt nothing. I had come to peace with my rage some years ago, a rage borne of absence from milestones, of two phone calls a year, of time and distance. My sadness had passed sometime earlier, a pre-teen who comes to realize that the father-son bullshit is just that, a teenager who sees his father for his high school graduation, but says goodbye right after the ceremony because “I can’t stand your mama”.
I have no idea that he’s in town, because I’ve lost track of his travels years ago, having both lost my place on the People Who Need to Know and the People Who I’d Like to Know lists. His home number is in my phone, simply for archival purposes, so if someone asked me where he lived, I could tell them. I’ve changed phones a couple of times since the last time I’ve called or gotten a call from him, and this phone doesn’t have a record of either.
But I tell him to come on by. I assume he knows my address, because my sister, who acts as the middlewoman, has probably given it to him. She has her own issues with him, but has relegated herself to the keeper of his business, the one who schedules doctor appointments and asks him if he’s paid his bills. I tell him to come around back, because I won’t hear the doorbell.
I don’t expect him to show up, because that’s kinda his thing. What’s worse, saying you’ll show but not, or just not showing up at all? Either way, I’m used to his abcense, and, quite frankly, I’m at peace with it. Every day I’m reminded of who I am, and when I slow down enough, I can figure how much of me isn’t him.
But he shows up, and I’m in the middle of my glass of bourbon and the beginnings of a cigar, a habit I developed when I figured out that I needed something to do with my hands while I was sitting outside. He sat in the other chair next to me, a chair that’s left out for any guests I might have and is probably dusty. I push an unopened bottle of water closer to him, a signal that he can’t have any of my bourbon and I’m not getting up to get him a glass.
I have no idea if he drinks or smokes, one of those things in a long list of things that one should know about their fathers. I was one of the lucky ones; my mother remarried and the man I called Dad taught me those things. They say you mimic your father in so much; what pocket to put your wallet in, which wrist to put the watch, how to shave. How to tie a tie and your shoes. This man sitting here with me taught me something in his own way, but those lessons are more in the camp of Things I Would Never Do to Anyone Else.
He starts talking, and I’m back to a child, listening to him drone on about the weather, and his green thumb, and what’s growing in his garden, and various minutae involving relatives who share my last name but who II haven’t seen in an even longer period of time. He talks of family, which is rich coming from him, but one of his threads is how family means everything to him, and yet his progeny is sitting directly across him with none of that same love and reverence for these people. I learned that family is beyond those blood relatives, because those same relatives haven’t lifted a finger to introduce themselves in my life, even while living a few blocks away.
I am periodically sipping my bourbon and smoking my cigar, watching the smoke hang in the still summer evening air. I do not disrespect him by blowing the smoke directly at him, because I was raised better than that, and I take care to blow above my head. I contribute some “uh hmm”s to his patter, but I notice quickly that he’s not talking to me. He hasn’t asked me a single question which actually prompts me to say anything else.
He hasn’t asked about me at all. And with that realization, about two minutes in, I am transported back to Grandma’s porch in a hot and sticky Southern summer, mosquitoes swarming, as he climbs into his car and promises to be right back. I am remembering those bites as the sun dips and I’m sitting, forlornly, waiting for my father to come back from wherever he went, confused as to where he could be going that I couldn’t go with him. I’ve traveled 2000 miles to spend some time with him, and I’m remembering the volume Grandma’s voice gets to when she finally gets me to come in the house, bites covering my arms and scrawny six year old legs illuminated by the bright bug zapper working overtime above my head.
I’m that six year old again, as he shows back up the next afternoon, like nothing had happened. I had refused to take a bath at Grandma’s her house of the iffy running water and old-people smells, a stark contrast to his house, which had records and more than one television that actually had a remote control.
I’m that six year old at the airport gate, about to board a Delta flight back to my mother, confused that this same man is kissing me and telling me he loves me and to do what the stewardess says when I have to change planes in Dallas-Ft Worth.
I’m that six year old, confused as to why he left me, and wondering if I did something wrong all the way back West and finally crying when I see my mother at the gate to get me.
As my father droned on, I took care to look into his face. He didn’t look at me, his profile looking around my garden and into the neighbors’ yards. I’m sure it registered that I was there, but I didn’t matter. His patter was like that of an automaton, little bits of his mind that others found fascinating. He knew a little bit about everything, something I was enthralled with as a kid but as an adulthood simply accepted as him. He was definitely intelligent, and spoke in a drawl that was Southern but definitely unique to him.
I looked closer. His facial hair, his balding pattern had been passed down to me, and in pictures I completely look like him. He’d rub his chin every now and again, and his presence increasingly felt like a precursor to something.In terms of time, we had gone past the “pleasantries” part of the conversation and should be hitting the “substance” part…any time now. But that was how regular people worked.
I started to concentrate more on my cigar smoke, looking at it curl and waft in still summer air, heavy with its Nicaraguan leaf and unique smell I had come to get used to. I was sipping my bourbon very slowly, wanting to be sober whenever we got to substance, whenever we got down to brass tacks. But I realized, we’re never getting there.
I realized, after a while, that this wasn’t going to be reflective, or deep, or confessional. My father was actually sitting out here because he finally felt like he had to, a politician eating at the local diner to say that he did and to mix with the locals. I wasn’t going to get answers. I wasn’t going to get an explanation. And the way my ego and temperament are set up, I was going to have to be okay with the fact that his ego and temperment weren’t going to give me those satisfactions.
I’d have to ask those questions that had died in my throat when I was six. After my high school graduation. I was going to have to vocalize those issues that plagued my adulthood when people asked me if I’d talked him in the years since I got a job and a family. I was going to have to drive this bus, so to speak, but the fact that he wasn’t driving it his damn self brought on a new sense fo some new feeling, a sense of acceptance.
A sense of, well, that this is gonna be how it be. It is what it is.
He finally pauses. The silence between us in this cityscape isn’t comfortable, but I realize that we’ve never been comfortable. We’ve never had the relationship others have. We never will. That ship has sailed and run aground on a foreign shore, forgotten and rusted. Sure, I could feel…sorrow? Rend my garments over its loss? No, I’m merely marking the ship as Lost At Sea and marking the passage of those other ships. Those other ships who’ve gone from friends to family. Those other ships who check in with me to see how I am. My support, my community, those ships roam the world and share with me a part of their lives, who’ve invited me to share mine. Who, every now and again, come back to port and I can greet them with a hug and a hastily dusted off seat on my back porch.
He looks at me. I don’t know what he expects me to do. Pour out my heart? Ask him a difficult question? Ask him about some other minute that will lead him on another tangent? My role of son is so distorted and warped in this relationship the fact that I actually don’t know what he expects inflames, briefly, an anger. A brief, hot anger. A match lit of this time and place where all that was is done, and there may not be anything else left to set alight.
I inhale my cigar deeply and close my eyes. There can be so much to say, but right now, I am empty. Empty of wishes, of of possibilities. This is done.
I exhale, then open my eyes. The cigar smoke is completely dissipated.