"You love those dogs more than you love your children," my mom used to joke with my dad. He spent hours in the yard with them, refused to let anyone discipline them, always made excuses for them, like the time Max (our St. Bernard) knocked me down on my roller skates and pinned me to the ground with a snarl or the time Tasha burst through the bedroom door, grabbed my kitten, shook it and a couple hours later Alice died of shock.
But we weren't supposed to take that to heart.
Anyway. He's the sort of fellow that has at any given moment a few dozen open beer cans scattered about in various stages of temperature and liquid level. He's the guy in the basement chain smoking cigarettes as he writes feverishly in his yellow notepad: song lyrics, radio scripts, letters to the editor. "Hey, come here, kid. Tell me what you think of this."
He's the guy that had his arms folded, tugging at and chewing his moustache, waiting for me to come home from somewhere so he could tell me he found my journal and knew that I smoked pot and then I yelled at him for invading my privacy. Spun the tables.
He's the one that wore those darkened 70s glasses at the kitchen table and put his cup down so firmly and half the time he was mad and half the time he wasn't and I could never quite figure out the correlations or patterns, so I was always scared when he placed down his cup because I could never tell what was in his eyes through those glasses and then my mom laughed hysterically when my brother "accidentally" broke those glasses by setting down the radio on top of them. Once, he flung my brother across the room and my brother bounced against the wall, landed on the bed, and got a cut on his hand between his fingers. I think he was 9, but he could've been younger. It was when we still lived on Herman St. in Bay View, where I was never older than 6.
It was kind of well known in our family that he was the one that never wanted children, but my mom wanted three, so they compromised at two. She fell out of love with him pretty quickly, if she ever had been, which I wonder about because there's a story of her flinging the engagement ring at him down the street. But her mother told her that his heart was breaking and his mother thought he would kill himself so my mother relented. What a life saver. What a martyr. I guess at least one of them figured he owed her, so children it was.
But, you know, "You never wanted them." So it was fun growing up with that hanging over me while we heard them fight through the paper thin walls at night. Not falling asleep. Wondering if they'd get divorced and being so very scared of that, but wouldn't it have been better? Wouldn't a quiet night time been more bearable? Wouldn't I have avoided insomnia later in life? Couldn't my brother have had a better role model? Someone a little more involved in the idea of having a family, not just a servant to the woman he loved so desperately that he was willing to do anything, including putting two lives into the world, just to keep her... to keep her happy. Which she wasn't. No one was.
He was hard to talk to. Mostly because there were two modes: not wanting to be bothered and therefore referring you to the dictionary to look it up (how I hated the dictionary!) or feeling chatty and wanting to be the dictionary. We had a joke. You ask him what time it is and he tells you how to build a watch and the complete history of clocks, starting with the sun dial.
He's the guy that taught me two things.
One. That there is no such thing as unconditional love. That men do not have a complete set of feelings. That I will always be unworthy of love. That there is something that lacks in me and no one can quite put a finger on it.
Two. If I'm having trouble getting to sleep at night, why don't I write something down? How about poetry. I'm a pretty good writer, so why don't I try that?
