Week 12: Taking risks

I loved my father once.

My father was an alcoholic, through and through. He’d call himself a “social drinker” and he’d head off to an executive luncheon and never make it home. Well, He did when the police brought him in their private blue and white cab. They never did fine him, prosecute him or jail him. I guess the business suit distinguished him from the real alchies puking their guts out in the gutter. My father got to puke in the privacy on his home, in the porcelain throne, or maybe the closet when he forgot where he was.

My father was a womanizer through and through. He called it harmless. I guess it was harmless, if you think no-one is looking. Ask my mother, she thought it hurt. Especially when he spent the month with his “sexretary” (yep, he gave her a desk plaque that said that), while my mother was in Philadelphia with me having open heart surgery. You could even ask us kids when he’d use us as toy props to lure in an overworked waitress.

My father was a cheat through and through. He called it harmless, if he got away with it. Ask his business partner who left the company just before it floundered from my fathers extravagant personal expenses. Ask the IRS who attached his debts to my mother’s paycheck. Ask us kids who never got the child support he should have provided.

I loved my father once, children do that.

Week #11: When words mean something beyond themselves

He arrived while she was tearing down walls. The fake brick in that house just had to come down. She chiseled away at it, breaking off pieces; small chinks fell, scattering onto the floor. She forced herself to keep at it no matter how hard it was or how fearful she was becoming.

He noticed the opening left as the bricks fell. He reached trough and found a lead to her heart. She moved over to a new section and tore down more. Fear kept her from opening that spot anymore than she already had. He tried to help, but she wouldn’t let him, not yet, anyway. Everything was too new; she needed to do this by herself. She needed to feel herself building up her own strength, and doing it her own way. He stayed with her, not able to let go, and she did not insist by then.

One day she looked up, there he was in front of her. She looked more closely and saw the same patterns, brick upon brick with mortar so firmly attached. There she was facing the same wall she thought she tore down.

Week10: Alienation

The girls brought me a gift the next day; a pudgy penguin candle that looked up at me with a beseeching smile. They forgave me, but I couldn’t forgive myself. I know it was one of those moments where nothing but a twist of fate could have changed it, but still…

Speeding home the evening before, I was beguiled by the first beautiful day of spring. I wanted to get home and enjoy the evening. I swerved to miss a cat and took my foot off the gas. “THWACK” “What was that?” I pulled over into their drive, and as I got out of the car I heard their mother, screaming, “Oh My God, Bill!” She was running toward the road, then she saw me and stopped. We looked behind the car. There lay the family dog, who had taken that same spring moment to chase their cat in the wrong direction. Its death was imminent. The girls often fought over who would sleep with it each night, and now I intervened in an all too drastic way.

My whole body sunk in a quagmire of guilt. I lit the candle just one time that night. It shed a flicker of forgiveness.