potonthefire

by Pot On The Fire Free(Lit)

  There were other moments that are more important to me: the deep pleasure he took in my writings about Maine; my admiring delight in the humorous but no-nonsense way he ran a town meeting; and, most of all, the open, unreserved love for each other that we had both begun not only to feel but to find ways to express. But that lunch, until I sat down by his bed with those Wolf River apples, was the best time I had ever spent alone with him.

  On reflection, I see that our meal at Duffy’s meant so much to me because of a mutual admission of helplessness before a certain kind of pleasure. There was nothing admirable about this: my father’s secret eating made it all but impossible for him to deal with adult-onset diabetes (a warning signal of the disease that killed him was his—to us inexplicable—inability to master the blood-sugar monitoring device). Still, it was real, and it gave me a kind of explanation of my childhood that my father never had been able to put into words.

  The only story that I remember hearing of my father’s life as an orphan was that every day of the school year he was given as his lunch two pieces of bread held together with a smear of “sandwich spread”—a mayonnaise-and-sweet-pickle mixture meant to be used as a condiment with cold cuts, not by itself. This sandwich was a message, not a meal, and it eventually became a form of torture. It was hardly the only thing his foster parents did to him, but it explains it all. And it left him—as he left me—with a hunger too visceral for public show.

  By the middle of November the wild apples have lost some of their brilliancy, and have chiefly fallen. A great part are decayed on the ground…. The note of the chickadee sounds now more distinct, as you wander amid the old trees, and the autumnal dandelion is half-closed and tearful.

  — Henry David Thoreau,Wild Apples

  I hear footsteps above my head; my mother is awake. It’s time for me to start the supper prep. I let go of my father’s hand and bend down to kiss his forehead. I gather up the apples and, before heading to the kitchen, take them to the back door and toss them far out into the darkness for the deer.

  I leave the following morning. Two weeks later, he’s in a nursing home, where, in another few weeks, he’ll suffer a massive stroke. Then, two days after that, the phone call from my mother. “This is the call,” she said, fighting back the tears. “Your father is dead.”

  I come back, of course, to attend the memorial service. During it, the minister invites the members of the congregation to rise and share their memories of the deceased. Neighbors and friends stand up and speak, but none of his children do—not out of bitterness, I think, but because our memories are too complex … and certainly too private. For the longest time, I thought my father intentionally refused to talk about his past. But I came to realize he simply couldn’t. All he ever wanted was to escape from it, a process that to his mind never had anything to do with words. So, I had to get to know my father by discovering how much of me was him, as I hope he himself came to understand during our last years together how much of him was me.

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