Everything We Don't Know

by Aaron Gilbreath

  At comments like Mom’s, Dad will simply nod and make claims such as, “I only ate half the bun.” Or he’ll make some pseudo-scientific statement like “a burger is high-quality protein,” or say how it’s okay to eat a hamburger because at breakfast he eats ham instead of sausage, and ham is “leaner than sausage.” Mom will then roll her eyes or shake her head, and before she can point out the ridiculousness of his comments, he’ll simply say, “Loraine, I’m fine,” and change the subject.

  Even if he won’t heed her, at least she confronts him. I respect her doggedness. Whereas my silence still makes me feel as culpable an enabler as someone shoving buttered white toast into his mouth, Mom won’t buy Dad the foods he wants. “I’m not contributing to your problems,” she’s said more than once while watching him eat Oreos that he bought at the store himself. He just chews his cookies and smiles. I used to wonder if he interpreted my lack of effort as comradery or lack of interest, but when he shoots me a wink during one of Mom’s small lectures, I know he believes I’m on his side. I am, but not in the way that he thinks.

  Then again, can you really save someone from themselves? Dad couldn’t save me from my own dark urges during my adolescence. Even if he’d known that I’d smoked pot every day for three straight years, he still couldn’t have stopped me. I would have found a way to get high. Just like he couldn’t keep me from trying all those other drugs back then. And the way that, no matter how much he loathed cigarette smoking, and no matter how many times he advised I never start, he couldn’t get me to quit smoking cigarettes until I was ready to quit on my own after many false stops. So is he, as my father, accountable for my poor choices? Is it his fault I got into drugs and cigarettes? No. When I asked for help when time came to quit smoking dope, he was there to help. People relinquish their habits when they want to, if they ever want to at all. All we friends and family members can do is offer a few choice words of encouragement, directives from the heart, and hope that they act upon them; if they don’t, then we have to be there to support them when they’re ready to stop.

  Of course, some will never stop. Like all people determined to indulge despite sensible critiques, Dad sneaks around my mom’s back. While she’s at work, he eats miniature yellow donuts coated in waxy chocolate frosting. He buys sticky glazed cinnamon rolls and eats them after lunch. And when Mom goes to sleep, he stands at the kitchen counter, eating his new favorite creation, what he calls a “roll-up.” It’s a piece of deli ham rolled around a slice of Swiss cheese. He assembles each roll-up from a stack of meat and cheese, and eats it along with white, buttered toast that he dips into a container of creamy potato salad. When I find him at night indulging like this, I say nothing about it. I no longer even shake my head. I come home from work, chat with him for a few minutes and have some laughs and then go to bed. What would I say that I haven’t said already? Bad Dad, you’re very, very bad. Eat some of the tofu and curried lentils I have in the fridge.

  Mom knows about his snacks; she has the deep knowledge that comes from nearly four decades of marriage. That and she looks in the trash for evidence. He hides the cellophane wrappers from his Twinkies and cinnamon rolls deep inside the trash, and whether in the kitchen garbage can or the big bin in the garage, Mom finds them.

  “He’s having an affair with a Twinkie,” she said in the kitchen once. She held up the torn cellophane. “Here are her panties!” We all laughed. There seemed nothing else to do.

  I laugh to counter the effect of brooding over that common, universal question that I am only now frequently asking: what will my life be like when my mother and father are gone? I can imagine a day when I myself am dead. I can imagine a world without me in it, but somehow I can’t imagine my life without my parents. A life where Dad isn’t here to retell our family history and make jokes and call me son? Where Mom isn’t here to laugh and describe her Grand Canyon hikes and to say out of the blue that she loves me? That hardly seems like a life at all, but it’s going to have to be.

  Sometimes I find myself composing Dad’s eulogy while driving around town or lying down to sleep. I’ll rest my cheek against the pillow, or turn a corner onto a familiar street, and I’ll suddenly become aware that I’m wondering what exactly I’ll say at his funeral. To prepare for an event that has yet to happen seems masochistic, but maybe I’m being practical. Once Dad passes, I tell myself, I might so completely fall apart that I won’t be able to write anything coherent, let alone speak without crying, so I better write the eulogy now. When I think that logic over, though, I realize that I’m not composing the eulogy to be practical. I’m doing it as a way to prepare myself for the moment that has had me bracing for years, the moment when my phone will ring, and I’ll answer it, and Mom will say, “Aaron, I’m at the hospital. Dad died,” and all the breath will leave me as fast as it left him.

  After Dad’s birthday dinner, my parents and I drove back to the house and spent some time chatting. The three of us went into their bedroom. Mom sat on the bed, skimming the paper. Dad settled into his recliner, leaning back and propping up his feet. I sat by the door, petting Red the cat. All the revelry had left Dad subdued, and he seemed happy to be home where he could rest.

  Somehow we got onto the subject of my parents’ courtship and they lapsed quickly into reminiscence. My parents met at a sandwich shop. Mom was Dad’s waitress. She was twenty-two years old, a student at Arizona State University, and had just arrived in the desert West with her family from New York. She spilled soup in his lap, but they disagree about who wiped it up. He says she did. She says no, he cleaned it himself. Dad was thirty-three and still technically married. After a number of dates and countless expressions of his affection, Dad took Mom to meet his parents for the first time. They lived in Tucson two hours away. That night, the four of them talked, and when Mom left the room for a moment, Dad’s mother—my granny—got up from her chair, sat down next to Dad on the couch and said, “Is this love or lust?”

  Dad said, “It’s love, Mom.”

  “That’s good,” she said.

  Hearing this, my mom laughed. “I didn’t know Granny said that.” Mom remembered Granny playing gospel music on a record player for her. “She said, ‘This is what I grew up to.’ I sometimes wondered, Was she testing me?”

  From his leather recliner Dad said, “She was sharing with you.” As if sensing her self-doubt he paused then added, “She thought you were a lovely, wonderful person.”

  Mom said, “Did she?” seemingly relieved to hear this forty-year-old information. “It was hard. I felt like such an outsider: this Jewish young girl from New York.” She pointed to Dad across the room and laughed. “He was older, divorced, had four kids. I still had an accent.”

  Theirs was a collision of cultures. Dad’s mother was a heavy set, half-French woman who smoked cigarettes and cooked constantly. She grew up among Christian farmers in rural southeastern Oklahoma, and she died when I was six months old. By all accounts, she cooked the best cream gravy you have ever tasted. When Dad was a kid, she’d call him and his brothers in for supper and the house would smell like fried chicken, buttermilk biscuits, mashed potatoes, and gravy.

  Mom described the breakfast Granny and Granddad cooked the next morning. It was the usual big country Gilbreath feast. “Granddad always made the biscuits,” Mom said, “and Granny made the gravy.” Normally this sort of discussion would have grabbed Dad’s attention, but he was still thinking about the first night they all spent together.

  “She played you The Happy Goodman Family,” Dad said. His mother loved Southern gospel music. She owned numerous records—The Statler Brothers, The Blackwood Brothers—but The Happy Goodman Family was her favorite at that time.

  I’d never even heard of any of these performers.

  Mom looked up at me from bed. “I wish you could have met Granny,” she said, “and seen Dad back then. He lived on fumes. He would stay up late, get up early on a few hours sleep, and go right back to work.” Dad sat smirking in his chair, neither addin
g nor contesting anything she said, only smiling. “He was the first person I ever saw use Visine.” She pantomimed the act of applying drops to red morning eyes. “Then,” she said, her gaze fixed on Dad, “he’d do it all again at night—partying with coworkers, going to the bar.”

  He laughed. “In those days it was called ‘a conference.’”

  At 9:30, after Mom went to sleep, Dad led me into his office and said, “Let’s Google The Happy Goodmans.” I sat in the black rolling chair in front of the computer while Dad leaned against the desk beside me, and we scrolled through live clips on YouTube. The Happy Goodman Family were arguably the most popular and famous gospel group of all. Founded in the 1940s by pianist and vocalist Howard “Happy” Goodman, the group consisted of a number of Howard’s brothers, as well as his wife Vestal. Howard was a large man with sagging jowls and a broad face. Vestal was a woman with a body like an obelisk and a voice like a racecar engine. Later in her career, she had a towering column of black hair composed of two hair pieces stacked atop one another, kind of like Elvira’s. Vestal and Howard passed away, but during their heyday between the 1960s and ’80s, they sang gorgeous harmonies.

  Dad and I watched clips of the band performing in settings ranging from Arlington, Texas in 1969 to the Grand Ole Opry in the 1980s. We stared at the screen in silence, listening to songs that were now considered classics, such as “God Walks the Dark Hills” and “I Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now.” Then he directed my attention to the search engine and told me to type in “Bill Gaither.” Nearly 800 YouTube hits appeared.

  Gaither is a Southern gospel and Christian musician who also organized a series of worldwide concerts called the Gaither Homecoming. The concerts took place in enormous venues filled with Christian music fans. Performers included both legendary gospel singers and younger, up-and-comers. The shows were frequently recorded, and Gaither broadcasted them on religious-oriented cable channels and sold the shows on DVD and VHS.

  “We used to always watch this,” Dad said. He leaned closer in order to see the screen. “Your mom and I would race home on Saturday night to watch it.”

  This surprised me. Officially, Dad’s family was Baptist. Many Okie families were. His parents had occasionally attended church, but they weren’t religious, and by the time Dad was in his twenties he considered himself an atheist. Religion always seemed to him a means of control—“fire and brimstone,” he’s always called it, “all about fear.” The idea of a single creator keeping tabs on peoples’ behavior never seemed plausible to him, and he didn’t believe that the only way a universe this well-ordered could come into being was from a single deity. The Bible was written by people, he’d told me when I was a kid, not God. “God is the Supreme Politician that human beings use to keep us in line.” Instead of scripture, he reads Einstein and Tesla, turning to science to understand nature. Surprisingly, the mystery of existence didn’t interest him.

  When the subject of life after death came up during my adolescence, Dad occasionally said, “You live once, you die, that’s it.” According to Dad’s belief system, what we have at this moment is as good as it gets. He’d echoed this sentiment one night in the kitchen. He and Mom and I had just eaten barbecued spare ribs, and Dad and I were doing dishes. “Why spend all this time worrying about what you can’t control: why am I here? What’s the purpose of living? What if an airplane falls on me? You die. You can’t change any of that.” He toweled off the knife he’d used to cut the ribs. “I’m here because I’m here. I try to get the most of the best things of life, live a good life. And then, you die.” He slid the knife into the drawer and glanced at me over his shoulder. “It is what it is.” That was the same line he used when describing the doctor’s decision to put him on insulin. Mom said that sounded too resigned for her taste. I agreed, but Dad only smiled and gave me a wink. “The golden years aren’t so golden.”

  Recalling this, I watched the screen. Dad directed my attention to a video displayed in the sidebar. “Click that,” he said. It was a clip of two bickering bass singers named J.D. Sumner and George Younce trading insults about the other’s career. J.D. was a rail-thin man of six feet, six inches who’d made his name singing for the The Blackwood Brothers and The Stamps. Younce had sung with a number of gospel groups. J.D. towered over the short, squat Younce. George grabbed the microphone out of J.D.’s hand in order to finish J.D.’s singing part, and J.D. smacked the side of George’s bald head. Dad explained that in real life the two singers were close friends, but on stage they played the part of embittered rivals. Their differing heights imparted an Abbot and Costello quality that was nearly as funny as their banter.

  Another clip showed J.D. seated on a couch in what appeared to be the backroom of a concert venue. “George spent forty-five minutes fixin’ his hair,” he said. “Then forgot it and left it at the hotel.”

  George responded: “J.D. said to me the other night, said, ‘Did you hear how my voice filled the room tonight?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I seen a bunch of people leavin’ to make room for it.’”

  Dad pointed at the screen and said, “Try that one.” It was titled “George Younce’s Final Appearance Part 1.” Dad leaned close and studied the footage. “Mom and I watched this particular concert when it first aired,” he said.

  Younce, the same man whose body had filled out his suit in previous videos, now stood withered in this black sport coat, thin as a skeleton. He was seventy-four years old when it was filmed and on dialysis. Young backup singers had to help him onto the stage. Then, when he stood to sing, the singers watched closely to make sure he didn’t fall. His hair was thin and gray. His skin had a bleached, sickly pallor. “I don’t have a lot of strength anymore,” Younce told the crowd, “not much voice even anymore.” The close-up shots revealed a large lump and scratch on his forehead and eyes tinted a yellowish red. Despite his frailty, he still possessed his legendary warmth and wit, and he frequently laughed when speaking between songs.

  Introducing the next number, George said that many people had asked to hear it, and so, “One more time, on this marvelous stage, let me see if I can get through this song once again.” The song was called “Suppertime,” and in a soft voice George sang: “Many years ago in days of childhood, I used to play when evening shadows come.” He reached for the arm of one of his fellow singers and, gripping it, a young man fetched a chair for George to sit in. “Then winding down that old familiar pathway,” George sang, “I heard my mother call at set of sun:

  Come home, come home, it’s suppertime

  The shadows lengthen fast.

  Come home, come home, it’s suppertime.

  We’re going home at last.”

  I mentioned that it must have been hard for George to be there. “I don’t know how he keeps from crying.”

  Dad said, “Well, he didn’t know it was his last concert.” Of course, “George Younce’s Final Appearance Part 1” was only the title given by the person who posted the footage on YouTube. Bill Gaither marketed the video as A Tribute to George Younce, the year after Younce passed. “That’s also how Southern Baptists are,” Dad said. “Death isn’t a tragedy, because they believe they’re going somewhere better when they die.”

  Like Dad, I’m an atheist. “It would be great to believe that,” I said.

  Dad said nothing.

  Watching Younce’s last concert, I couldn’t help but feel that this might be the last quiet moment Dad and I would ever spend together. I feel that about most of our shared moments lately. A simple chat, a Sunday drive, a birthday dinner. Now everything takes on a weighty significance. It becomes: The last conversation. The last concert. The last supper. And nervously I savor these moments and then write about them in my journal, as if by preserving the details the event’s participants will endure off the page, the way Jesus’ followers endure in heaven.

  After letting Younce finish his song, Dad and I stood in the kitchen eating sliced strawberries from a bowl and talking about gospel. “There were lots of craz
y hairdos in those videos,” I said. I told him that the music was alright, but I preferred blues and rock and roll.

  “Gospel, rock and roll—all those styles are connected down there,” Dad said. He rummaged through the cupboard for something sweeter. He was out of Oreos.

  We ate and talked a few minutes, stared into space, then he said, “Alright son, I’ll see you in the morning.” As always, I hoped that would be the case.

  The next morning I found Dad in the kitchen. He wasn’t eating, only counting out his pills. He plucks each pill from the collection of bottles in the cupboard, places the pill in a shot glass then washes down the mix with a gulp of diet soda. It’s his morning ritual.

  I looked around. The kitchen counter was bare. Not one birthday card remained. “What’d you do with them all?” I asked.

  With his back to me he said, “Threw them away.”

  “Already? It’s been twenty-four hours.”

  “You know,” he said snickering, “you and Mom are just alike.” He was referring to the plastic bag I have full of notes and holiday, birthday, and Valentine’s cards from all my grade, middle and high school friends and ex-girlfriends, as well as from my parents and grandparents. The bag is in a box in the garage behind the trash bin. The contents date back nearly twenty-five years.

  The pills made little clinking sounds as they fell into the shot glass. I explained that I wouldn’t feel so weird about getting rid of the older cards if they ended up somewhere other than dumped atop old spare rib bones and yellowed Q-tips.

  “Okay,” he said, “but where else is it going to go?”

  I had no answer for that, only, “I’m sentimental.”

  “Well, there’s nothing wrong with that.” He gulped a soda and swallowed his pills. “Mom is worse than you. She shoves everything in a drawer in her bathroom—every card, note, postage stamp.” The collection had recently become such a mess that he’d moved it all into a box and stored it in the garage.