When my parents were dating in college, my mother took my father home to the farm with her one weekend. No one yet understood that my mother’s mother was dying of a slow paralysis. No one recognized that an inexplicable fall was the stealthy calling card of a disease she could not outrun for long.
But that summer, in the heat of an August weekend, the 19-year-old boy who would be my father remodeled my grandmother’s kitchen so that she could reach cabinets and counters, still make potato salad and strawberry jam. Could still be herself for a while longer.
He was her youngest daughter’s charming and generous new boyfriend, but as they packed up the car to return to campus, my prescient grandmother whispered in my mother’s ear, “He’s either the best thing that has ever happened to you or the worst.”
Decades after their divorce, my mother said, “He was both.”
My father and I didn’t have much time together. Memory must start to accrue around the age of three, and my parents separated when I was nine. After that, I saw him infrequently as he remarried the day their divorce was finalized and never lived closer than an hour away.
When you have little time with someone, you come to know and remember them through stories. In the end, that’s all we are. The tales others will tell about us. But beware of white hats and black hats, superheroes and villains, I tell my writing students. No one is all good or all bad, except in the world of Marvel, and no one should be confined by a narrative spun by others.
I don’t know the source of my father’s flaws, the drinking and companion vices that caused me to fear him, to seek his approval in place of affection. He never told me those stories, but I know each of us is born into this world wanting only to love and be loved, and if you are lucky enough not to be held hostage by your biology, stop pointing at those who are and say thank you.
And so, I don’t imprison him in memories that are hard to endure because those stories are not the whole story.
When I was perhaps three years old, we had a swing set and monkey bars in our leafy side yard. Bored, in the doldrums of a warm September afternoon, I’d managed to scramble up and over the top of the rungs unobserved, precariously straddling the metal crossbeam, bare legs dangling, to survey the yard. I balanced there, gradually listing to one side, doomed without doubt to fall.
My father was replacing spark plugs under the hood of our Ford, too far away to save me, when he heard my mother call out my name. He looked up, knew he couldn’t make it, but he threw himself into the path of a miracle in case one was available.
I don’t remember this event, but my sister was witness to a plaid shirt and stained jeans sprinting across the grass, and the story has become my proof of love, as stories often are when facts are not in evidence.
And maybe in some deep neuronal recess of my subconscious memory, a bee laden with pollen weaves heavily, drunkenly upward, spun adrift off the sweet clover by the spiraling vortex of this hurtling, heroic dash. My grip slips, my inner thighs pinch with the mean twist of burnished steel against tender skin. Icy panic knocks the wind from my small chest as the earth rushes up, but slowly, in terror’s altered state. I fall for minutes, hours. I fall for years.
I squeeze my eyes closed to endure my fate, but instead of slamming into the ground, I am crushed breathless to a pounding heart; pressed vise-tight against a plaid shirt with a pen in the pocket. A rough cheek grazes my own. I keep my eyes scrunched tight as one might to receive a blow or a blessing. To a torrent of kisses raining down.
Successful stories, I tell my students, circle back at the end to the place they began—to that question, that mystery, that ambiguity that is all of us.
But stellar stories don’t close the circle. They open up again to infinite possibilities.
I use my hands to demonstrate this, wrists pressed together, palms cupped open in the air. I think of my father and hold them up as if to catch something falling.
I hold them up as if to set something free.
