by H.C. Paye
Old Man Anthology
Heather Paye, et al
“You know, fathers just have a way of putting everything together.”
~ Erika Cosby
Papa’s Celebration Suit
By Salvatore Buttaci
The clerk at Hugo’s Custom-made Suit Shop tried to talk my father out of it.
“Sir, this suit would be more appropriate for a much younger man. Why, it’s practically white and the black pin stripes don’t help,” said the clerk.
I was beginning to think my gift of a suit for Papa on Father’s Day was not going to work out. We would leave here, and again this June, Papa would open my gift and say, “You sure know how to pick out the perfect tie!”
I knew the clerk was simply doing his job, applying his fashion expertise to help my father’s selection, but he didn’t know Papa, and for that reason I felt a bit sorry for the young clerk. My father was the least likely person to take anyone’s
suggestion once he had made up his mind. I kept my mouth shut as Papa touched the bolted fabric, smilingly ignoring the clerk who simply didn’t know enough to let my father choose whatever he wished.
“Sir,” he went on, pointing towards another bolt of gabardine, a somber solid black, “this might look better on you.”
My father’s ears were reddening, a sure sign he was getting, if not angry, than certainly annoyed. Then he clinched it by running a quick hand through his wavy hair, black as that fabric was, and streaked at the temples with silver gray.
“You saying I’m too old for the suit?”
“No, of course not, but—”
“But it looks like I’m not old enough to make up my own mind. Is that it?”
Now it was the clerk turning red. “Sir, I was only trying—”
“To help,” finished my father. “Don’t you think if we needed help, we’d call you? Looks to me like an easy sale.” Then to me he said, “What do you think, Sal?” I nodded, and he closed the deal with, “I’m sticking with this one. My celebration suit.”
“Celebration?” asked the clerk. I could tell Papa was hoping he’d ask.
“To go dancing in. We got some weddings coming up and I want to look good out there on the dance floor.”
The clerk made a face which he quickly dismissed by changing it to a beaming one. If this old guy in his seventies wants to act like a cool dude, guess that’s his problem, he thought for an instant and then gave in with a smile that read, “The customer is always right.”
Let’s get you measured up. It’ll take only a week before you can come pick up your suit.”
All Papa talked about on the ride home was that suit.
“Imagine that guy calling me too old,” he said.
“Pa, he never said you were too old.”
“I imagined it?”
“He just felt the suit was not the kind typically worn by older men.”
“I am not ‘typically,’” Papa said. End of conversation.
Yes, he attended several weddings in that suit. There, he would dance a string of waltzes with his niece Jenny, a tradition they both enjoyed for years. He attended a few family celebrations where he seemed to enjoy himself so much more than he would have in a different suit. “An old man?” he would say, a non sequitur I alone understood. “Can an old man dance like that?”
Less than five years later, Papa got lung cancer and died that April 1987. When we were wondering
what final suit for him to wear, Mama in her wisdom picked the one the man said was not for him. “Ma,” said my sister, “who gets laid out in this color suit?” but Mama said, “Your father does. He loved that suit.”
Seeing Papa lying there, radiant in the suit he loved, I kept thinking how he called it his celebration suit, and now, a new soul in Heaven, who could accuse him now of being too young to celebrate in Hugo’s suit!
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
~ Anonymous
Bits and Pieces
By Joel Blaine Kirkpatrick
Dad was a cabinetmaker. For forty-five years, our backyard was too cluttered to play in. Filled with every scrap of lumber he had ever held in his hands, we could have been burned to ash by an errant lightning bolt. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't junk. Dad knew every stick in the yard; there was some order to it all, which only he understood. But to me it just seemed worthless. Until yesterday.
Dad is not gone—I should clear up that notion. But that pile in the backyard, that small private lumber yard, it is going away. He's not happy about it, for a little while, and then he forgets again. Forgets that he was told by the city to clean it up… forgets that I'm here to do that for him. Forgets me, actually. Dad stopped being a cabinetmaker just two years ago. He stopped a lot of things then, stopped remembering family; the worst part of it all.
He had a stroke while making his last set of inlaid cabinet doors. They are right where he left them in the garage. No one could finish the project for him. No one knew how. I wasn't around to be taught.
Yesterday, I realized, quite suddenly, I should have stayed. My own life may have been happier. I learned such a heartbreaking thing, by opening a simple box on one of Dad's cluttered shelves.
Twenty-six years is a long time to be so stupid. At seventeen, I knew enough to leave everything behind, including my Dad. It wasn't to get away from arguments. Not to take on some glorious, world-changing quest. Stupid was the correct word to call it—that leaving—Dad told me it was stupid. Funny now, I always thought he was the one who had stopped listening.
The box marked 'bits and pieces' told me plainly; Dad had never stopped listening, or talking.
I remember my fifth Christmas like yesterday. Well, today I do. I did my fair share of forgetting, without needing a stroke to cause it. But, that fifth Christmas was quite special. One single toy survives after all these years. When I found it yesterday, I nearly cried. From what had been lost. Not that old toy, but time.
Still as freshly cedar-smelling as that very Christmas morning, the toy, a beautifully carved horse, which could stand on two hind legs, as gracefully as ever Trigger could—Roy Roger's famous horse—my dad had carved that for me. When I lifted it from the 'bits and pieces' box yesterday, I instantly recalled my exact words on seeing it, that Christmas, so long ago, “It's not big enough!”
Those words burned my heart yesterday; I couldn't help wonder if they had burned him that distant morning. Dad never said.
A year later, another wooden toy. Carved by his skilled hands, which made nothing else but straight lines of wood, with smooth polished faces—and never anything small. Dad worked twelve hours each day in his cabinet shop, two weeks for one whole set of kitchen goods. I couldn't guess how long he carved on the new toy, a dog, perhaps a few hours. Perhaps half a week? Dad never said.
But, my words were as harsh, at holding that second gift.
“I wanted a real one!”
Thirty-seven years ago, those words must have fallen in line with the first, "It's not big enough!", and began to form a chain, quite long by the time I'd had enough of home, school, toys that were only hand-made…and had enough of Dad. Thirty-seven years ago, I began to weigh him down, not noticing, not caring.
Somewhere in those years, fell the words, "Why do you waste your time?", and that present was set aside. He might have carved on that airplane for three days. I held it for three seconds. If he was deeply hurt by that? Dad never said.
More years piled onto my shoulders. What should have felt like growing up, instead felt like being compressed. I took most of my frustrations out
in equal share: fights with Dad, Mom, fights with my brothers, fights with friends, which got me into a great deal of trouble. I was thrown out of school for two weeks, and spent every moment of my punishment in the cabinet shop, with Dad. He must have thought that would help me. Instead, it set me off. It seemed, every minute the machines weren't screeching, he was preaching. When my suspension was used up, I proved how wrong they had all been, how wrong Dad had been; I didn't go back to school. If that one thing disappointed him most? Dad never said.
The next school year, I did go back—to repeat the grade I tried to throw away. Those friends I'd left behind, or fought out of anger, they were all gone. They wouldn't have anything to do with me. A fresh group of faces came at me, already suspecting, already aware. That tenth grade year was my last.
If it broke his heart, he never really said. I stole a car and drove it hard to Vegas, too stupid to even make it half way there. It ran out of gas two hundred miles from home, and I walked until someone gave me a ride. Vegas didn't welcome me, but I tried to stay. That first week was hell, but, I had never been to Hell. I didn't recognize what I had done. Dad recognized it for what it was, and found me in three months. But all he said, was that it was a stupid thing to do. Nothing was said of jail, for the taking of the car. I'm sure the owner was relieved it only turned out to be a fool on a joyride.
But, I had forgotten to take any joy along, and Dad brought none; only money so I would not starve. He waited, outside the coffee shop, watching me through the windows, giving me time to come to something close to sense. He didn't wave as he drove away. Nothing else was said.
Within that box, those 'bits and pieces' I held yesterday, were gifts for the years that I was not at home. A foolish, aging cabinetmaker, carved toys for a son who had gone elsewhere. A son who deserved nothing of the care being given to the wood on his behalf. I had never seen those things. He had never said they were there.
It made me wonder, because it made me think about a childhood story, a man who carved the son he longed to have. Was my father carving me, all those years, in 'bits and pieces'? trying to make something of me, something I could not become without his delicate, careful strokes? The old box was full. I lined them all up, on the dusty remains of the unfinished inlayed cabinet doors, and saw a toy for every year I had lived since being so selfish at five. When I held the last one I had known, my seventeenth year, the year he carved a toy automobile, I realized those were the pieces of my chain, and their burden had not been his at all, but mine. I had denied something so simple as a wooden gift, and let the weight of my disappointment pull me down. He carved something every year for me, even toys, for a man, until the year he had his stroke. I had only known half of them. He had known them all. He had known me. I really was there.
My first real job, which finally proved that I might turn my life around, was at a marina on Lake Powell. I repaired boats for two years, and learned what I should have learned in High School, how to be responsible for myself. Cheap smokes and drink had cheapened me, and that job in the boat shop saved my life. Amid the toys on the dusty cabinet doors, was a lovely hand carved boat. We hadn't spoken in years, but somehow, Dad knew. He just never said.
I found some sense at twenty-five, and studied for my GED, earning enough respect finally, to be made a foreman on the construction crew where I toiled for years to forget my mistakes. The hardest work I had ever done, still did not teach me enough to send me home, or teach me that nothing I had left behind was worthless. I was building things at last, with my hands, as my father always had, but I could not understand, there were things at home to rebuild as well. None of it would have been hard.
When I heard a few years ago that his health was suspect, I still did not come, burdened with my own cares. Wealth had eluded me, times were hard, jobs had changed, and I still had not. Nothing tried, in all that time, removed the anger, to which I clung. I had only grown and aged, never truly learned. It was hearing he'd had a stroke, which brought me home, but less the news of it, than the pleading from my brothers. It was time I took up my share of their burden; it had exhausted them. It was time I resumed my place. They might have thought me responsible at last, but I really came home because it was finally easy. My life away—that had become too hard to bear.
That yard is nearly empty now; the garage was left for last. The city didn't care how cluttered that space might be. This wasn't a homecoming, really. There was no prodigal return. Just some weary thanks, and strained discussions about what the next few months may bring, what chores were mine to do. Few questions came up, about me, about my life; they had too many other cares. We are related, but they are the family. If that might be rebuilt someday, we have not yet had the say.
In Dad's garage, from within that tattered box, came toys which he made, and each represented
parts of me, parts of what I became. No words between us for years, but a message nonetheless. He knew of me, knew what I had done. I looked at those unfamiliar pieces of wood, and found familiarity in their form, they spoke to me at last, told me where I had been. They told me of myself.
Together, they told me of him, my father. No longer a chain of hurt or disappointment, no longer a weight on either man's shoulders, they had become links between us, which had more strength than words. They became the words he had never really said, the very words that he could no longer say. Though for years they had no power to reach me, yesterday they became precious.
What I had found, and could finally touch, he had always held. What I would not receive, from anyone, he had given for years without fail. There must be stories within that box. I should listen, though he may be unable to tell them. Mom may know. My brothers might. Someone surely does. Of all the things I've hauled and carted away, all the items which have no purpose now, this box of 'bits and pieces' will remain. Within it, is the home I left. Within it, is the life I might have lived. That is something I should stop to learn.
“Don't worry that children
never listen to you;
worry that they are
always watching you.”
~ Robert Fulghum
Remembering Dad
By J. M. Levi
As I near the corner of the bathroom door, searching for my two-year-old little girl; she stands, back against the door-jam, gaping mouth, moonlight colored locks, and eyes wide with awe. I bend towards, squatting down as my knees buckle to get a closer investigation into the situation and a timeless hug of her soft, warm skin. Nearing her ears, I whisper, “What are you doing?”
Never taking her eyes off the thing of interest, finger painting and poker-faced, “Dada!”
Not really noticing before, my full attention turned to the mirror. Standing there I began to regress to years gone by until my frame stood side-by-side with my little one. Both of us staring.
Who is that man shaving in the mirror? Was he Santa standing there with a white, shaving cream beard? Twinkling eyes and being the same color as dad’s? Not noticing our presence, the man made faces, moving his lips from cheek-side to the other and staring intently at his own reflection. The white beard slowly came off with one magical swipe after another, the swiping scraping his scraggly whiskers and the tap, tap into the sink basin with each swipe.
***
Every Sunday without fail, the ritual took place. The mug and whisker brush full of foam as father lathered up his face like Santy himself. The scent of spicy aftershave soon to follow. That man with the curly, black hair looked so serious as he strategically swiped the stubble with the razor. The pokey hair that appeared every Saturday, reminded me of the cacti in the desert, soon gave way to the warm smoothness I had grown eager to hug.
I knew what would follow. When Father grabbed the towel one last time and patted the rest of the shaving cream off, his attention would turn to me. The straight face turned into a devilish grin and Father, turning to me, “What are you doing over there?”
I always became worried that he might scold me for spyi
ng so ducking on the other side of the door way, my eyes peeked around at him—one at a time. Oh the smell of sweet spice and he always bent down and picked me up, hugging cheek-to-cheek. The face felt oh, so warm and smooth—softer than my teddy bear and smoother than my favorite velvet, blue dress. This time belonged to Father and I. No one else. I tasted his cologne cupping his face in my two tiny hands and giving him a peck on the cheek. Afterwards cuddling deep into his chest feeling the comfort and safety within his strong hug.
***
Father had been long gone nearly two decades. Now here I stand, tears streaming down my face as my husband turned to my daughter with an impish smile on his face. One brown-straight tousle of hair covering one blue eye.
“Come here, Sweat Pea.” Arms outstretched.
“Father,” I whispered as I backed my way out into silence, wiping the wet off my cheeks while leaving the two in their own private world. Walking away, I hear the muffled chatter and giggles...
I grab a frying pan and slap it on the burner—soon the house will smell of bacon and breakfast. Until next time.
“It is a wise father
that knows his own child.”
~ Francis Bacon, Sr.
A Dad’s Love
By Jessica Kennedy
From the time I was eight until twenty-one years old, I yearned for a father. When I was seventeen, my mother married for the fifth time, and I expected this man to be a poor father like his predecessors.
The walls I built to protect my heart came down slowly. He did not attempt to tear them down, but little by little, he weakened them with patient loving kindness.
He taught me to play golf and helped me catch the wild kittens that hid in our garage. They darted in between boxes and he tried to catch them. They yowled, hissed and scratched. Determined to escape, the tiny fur balls fought like lions. His arms bore the bloody scratches of their escape attempts. He never complained.