The first thing he remembered on that big day was when he tried to sneak out into public, at the grocery incognito, to pick up the usual things for the nightly barby.
It was the thing to do for this year of moments, endings and beginnings: but they were all breakings in their own way ... the collapse of the sine wave, of that up till now time when anything was possible, coalescing into known possibilities at the expense of parental sentimentalities.
The Grill was fired up every evening that Summer, excepting for the fasts, of course: then, fish and pasta and the obligatory pirohi ... Lord what we do, we ex-prot’s, ex patriots, exiles, ex familia.
It was luck, who knows what sort, that brought the church lady from the other parish who took a look under the shades, “Why that’s you with the Bruce Springsteen shirt and the RayBans, but I know you, how’re ya doin’,” she said on the 85 degree asphalt, sun ray waving vibrato summer.
And the day spun just that way. A higher divina commedia to his lower ironic, WalMart tragedy.
Divinity vs. irony, the chthonic dichotomy.
For about six whole hours he was stuck in family court downtown, trying to help save a young mother and a little three year old with ringlets and the same sort of barrette and bow combo that he had seen waving atop his own little girls once. There she was, in the marble tomb of spite, the lugubrious Pittsburgh jail that movies like to show when they want to stick stones on your soul: now it's remodeled as family court, my God, and he watched her run from brother to grandmother on the black marble. She laughed and jumped, and colored Elmo in orange, no where to go but on the floor. On her way out with her mother, she reached up with the tiny hand exactly like two daughters before and took hold of two of his fingers, exactly like two daughters before, and he led her out of hell, which is exactly like he would have done if it were his daughters: on that day, she was free, and he saw her smile in the sun.
In the dark gloom on his way to the River Styx, he stopped at the WalMart gas station to check his tires and found that the driver's wheel, as usual, was low. He dropped four quarters into the machine, remembering ruefully that in higher income regions the air pump is free ("it is expensive to be poor"), and brought his all-weather steel-belted radial up to speed.
In the next space was a 2011 SUV of indeterminate brand (they all look alike): a rather corpulent Midas-icon lolled out of the SUV cockpit and huffed, simmering impatient, for the air hose.
The driver's wheel was inflated, and there where three quarters worth of air left remaining: he proffered the hose to Midas -- it was an offering, so to speak, of "inspiration."
Midas sniffed: "I don't want your air."
On this big day, he had resolved at the beginning to watch his thoughts as the neptic fathers had advised. He understood that on days such as this there was always the danger of thoughts running off into fantasia, scattering away from hypostasis, running amok under the rubrics of deranged energies.
But he had not prepared himself for derangements on the external field, such as this Midas-man. He got in his car, turned on Vaughn Williams, and breathed: "Lead us not into temptation."
In his head, dead father figures haunted like Hamlet's ghost, and all the Jungian analyses withered in simple thought. Campbell’s silent and the replacement myths proved to be cardboard. He had known a bishop once, but now (Nicholas, Dmitri, Maximos, etc.) ... the king is dead, long live … well, hell. "We post-anabaptist converts are tired ... the ex-episcopalians have it much easier."
Can’t find the good man, Diogenes, hold up your lantern. You’re blocking the sun Alexander. Please step aside.
Later that day, he took his better half home out of the agora: innocent, can’t fathom the decadence, the packaging of clerks. Did he really expect the purveyors of cloth and furnishings to discern the dignity, the faithfulness, the courage and the beholding of beauty, as he had? for long?
Well, hell. They’re only capitalists, so how could they know, so he took her home, and started to make ready his younger daughter for the long ride off to the classic schools at Land’s End (this side of the pond).
Lord how they scurried and packed things he never thought would be displaced from her little girl room -- things that had their meaning only in context, like his fatherhood he thought in dimmer moments.
And in the in between times, they took a juvenescent terrier to school with a rather misanthropic pedagoguess who promptly took him, who must have appeared as a self-styled paternalistic elder, to the woodshed and denounced him in front of the sycophantic onlookers. "Bring your little bitch up here and show them how it's done," she said to the smug lady with the mindlessly compliant houndette: both hound and owner looked, with condescension, at him and his bohemian white terrier and his college-bound daughter.
“Your dog is hopeless,” she forecast, “because you do not take control.”
He thought darkly of the brown-cloud expectorating gun of flatulence on Despicable Me and how it could be justly used under the rubrics of the second amendment in this particular situation.
“But he is innocent and friendly, he smiles and trusts, and he knows more of God than you do, I think, because he’s happy and laughs at the world and I will not erase his canine smile because you have no psychic room for it,” he said, as he willed his young terrier to bark at her commands to cease and desist barking.
She, despotrix, scowled, confirmed (in her mind) his typical paternalistic desuetude.
“These white terriers make the best prophets,” he muttered as he drove the troop home.
Later: the long ride to the eastern shore in New England, and he took his younger daughter to school to stay for the long academic season.
Dominican Friars wandered the long green, tending parents who were leaving their little girls alone. What did they know about paternal, biological flashbacks of a delivery room and a luminescent maternity bed, and a four-year-old sister dressed in cartoon smocks who had leapt into weary happy arms of a young mother, cradling a pink infant who’s now in a school in New England? Did they understand the Audrey Hepburn poster, the crystal globe lamps, the retro chic necklaces and bracelets, the playlists and the penchant for Thackeray and Harding? For Orthodoxy? What did they know of Easter Egg treasure hunts, of reading the Potter canon through out loud, of singing songs to shrieking laughter and uttering voices just a little scary but not too much, just right … what did they know of fatherhood, feeling lucky but always running out of time?
God I’m tired of time, he said to the oceanic horizon.
But always, above the moments, around the corner in the higher dimensions, he could hear the silences of mirth and conviviality -- a dance, as it were, was proceeding, and he and his better half and two daughters were freely proceeding along a prevenient path.
Meanwhile the other girl, older: he and his better half and she drove wanly from the eastern shores and back into the anthracite district: and behold! wham and pow! she’s hired by a very decent place in an outright wonderful position with bells and whistles and he is quite sure he should be happy and piously thankful.
And he acknowledges he should be,
But secretly,
he wishes time were not so.
It keeps moving so.
He understands, now, the pang of cool evenings, and the haunting of fall breezes in the tall maples, and the mournful gusts on Hearthstone Mountain in 1989 when he walked her outside, promenading her to sleep in his arms as she thought, en enfant, that he was watching reruns, but he was talking to the constellations under the cold moon.
“I know I should be divining the meaning, but I’m only lesser, a stranger, an adolescent, not ready.”
"I should smoke a pipe and be wise."
"I will take up Feanorian script."
She simply relied, and stayed in his arms, as little girls are wont to do. For a while.
That said, he drove her past on that big day past her little house. The hand money’s down and the mortgage is approved by the right people. Assessment ... inspection ... closing. Time's moving this way too, again, ineluctable, mutatis mutandis, tempus fugit.
He clucked and made his suggestions and approvals, and took pictures, as is his place. The patriarchal picture-taker, the keeper of albums, the baby-sitter of canines, the visitee of grandchildren who will be indoctrinated into story in a story-less single-storey generation.
And bragged to his relatives and friends, and sounded like old men, who had bragged years before to other old men in the church basement, at Pushy’s Bar and to family on the other end of the phone. The echos sounded contemporaneous, for the first time.
He could see, in a daylight vision by the side of her new home, a swingset by the grape arbor, the long ribboned hair of another little girl, worthy of his own little girl, shining in another amber arc, in the westerly sun.
He was old enough now to see the future in the past.
That’s the trick of prophecy, what fathers broken in meekness have long figured out. And suffered. And thrilled.
In the mailbox, AARP cards and a letter from the Diabetes Fund. Early bird specials now call out to him with coupons that look increasingly attractive, and he listens to Rhythms Sweet and Hot on an obscure Saturday radio.
The elderly are no longer so wan, but are distracted by farther horizons.
He called his own dad who trained him into fatherhood, for advice on grandfatherhood, and the latter days on this big day:
Papa said: "Well, a buddy of mine once told me in Fort Smith Arkansas, do you remember? No? Well, he said when his daughters left, he got up one day and he went around the house and kicked the furniture, just like they did, just to make the same sounds and echos, just to sound the same," he said with a soft laughter that faded before the end.
Mutatis mutandis, tempis fugit.
So I'll kick the chairs this evening.
All, one big day.
