Happy Birthday to My Father, Ten Years Gone

"So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words , a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children." — Brian Doyle

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I've written about my father here before, but I really cannot help myself... I have to do it again. My father died way too early at the age of 66 and with very little warning. Sick on Tuesday, dead on Friday. That sentence is cold and abrupt, and the experience was as well, of course. He also died in an extreme snowstorm, and I recall my grandmother telling me he was also born in one. That reality added to the surreal nature of his passing. We could not bury him until the 36 inches of snow dissolved from the cemetery plot where much of that side of my family is buried. That meant waiting about six weeks. I have a fantastic memory (most of the time). I have many, many memories of my father. He was a talker, I now realize. I do not think I made that connection when he was with us, but I certainly am aware of it now. Like Doyle says above, my father's voice, as well as the moments we shared, echo. My father worked terribly hard, commuted far and - I now believe- suffered from sleep apnea. When I came towards teen age, I became responsible for waking him up. As much as I remember his method of waking me up earlier in life (giving my toe a tug), I remember the impossible task of doing the same for him. I remember the soda shop he took me to on Valentine's Day when I was five. I remember and still have the stuffed rabbit he brought home for me one weekend morning as I wept in my parent's bed because my non-stuffed rabbit had suddenly died. I remember the first time he took me to the Museum of Natural History and walked me under the magical whale that hangs from the ceiling there, as well as him taking me (more than a decade later) to see and swim near a live one that trapped itself in a local inlet. I remember how he drove me absolutely mad by asking me to 'speak to him in algebra' (his way of asking that age-old parental question 'What did you learn in school today?'). I remember his pride in me and the way he put it into words. I remember how he tried to comfort me when my beloved grandmother passed away; the first death in what feels like a long parade to the grave of everyone. I remember his talents and interests. I remember the things he considered sacred and in large measure they are the things he handed down. I remember the things he taught me and the things he tried to teach me. Truthfully, I remember his mistakes as well and with as much detail as I remember my own, so I guess that's proof that my father and I share more than genetics; we share the experience of being wrong more than from time to time. But most of all, I remember the look on his face when he described thinking of his own grandfather and father every day and about how much he missed them. I know that look well. When I look in a mirror, I see much of my father. When I look closer, I see that that look lives on in my face, too.

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Teaching a Stone to Listen/ Plate Tectonics

Dad,

I should have known.
You told that story
about the well where you
weren't perfect and about
Great Grandpa.
Caught you smoking
near the head and
made you dive in
after the pack. Said
"this water feeds the county"
and tied a rope around
your ankle to keep everyone
around Candlewood from picking tobacco
from between their teeth for days.
There's not a day
I don't miss

the old man,
you said.

And I should have known
when I asked if I

should come
and she held the phone
to her chest and

repeated the question
and the answer
No.

That last birthday

I bought your cake

maybe from Campbell's.
I told little Bruce
we should have known
when you fell asleep
in front of it.
That wasn't like him,
I said.

I brought him to see you
that last night.
I don't know how I came
to be the last one to leave.
They said to talk to you,
but I was dumb,
I swear.

I set it on the Discovery Channel
in case
and said goodbye in
a way that echoed
inside my throat
like a secret.

We took him to the
Smokies after.
So little of the family left,
we wanted to move him
into a small, tight circle.
He liked it,
even with no TV,
walnut-sized bees, and
Scrabble with my
funny friends from school.

The biggest surprise, though, was how he
nonchalantly began talking
in sweeping historical perspectives
before the New Jersey Turnpike.
Not like you, of course,
but, Dad,
we were silent ---and together
we usually turn the
tickets of the Trivial Pursuit
prayer wheel.

We're having someone out to
check the tulip tree.
I remember you and Grandpa
and the ropes twenty years and counting,
when my retrieval and
hurling skills
made him call me

The Mighty Sheena
over near the
rhododendrun.
Half those years ago,
you and Uncle Roy trying to
save some more.
We'll see what we can do,
Dad.

And it's time to buy the
stone, but I feel
our familial skippings
from that to
wondering when I

can roll one back
or buy what's behind
door number three.
I found one I think

you'd like:
just a big rock with a small
square biography.

I have a friend you also
would have liked to
talk to.
She said when
her father died
she made some debris
caught in branches
outside her window
into some form of the
eternal paternal.
She asks me
how it is
-leaving as you did-
carrying what Mom calls guilt but
what felt like anger.
Stephanie, I say,
It's so much easier
now that I can
talk to him whenever
I want.

- C.M. Carroll