Archive for May, 2009

Get out of my head!

May 21, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized

I’ve got to share a blog with you. I was searching the web for something aabout Belfast, and came across a blog from a guy called Nils Ling

I’ve been reading all afternoon. This guy writes like he knows me. Read on.

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My daughter is getting married this weekend.

OK, let me try that again: (ahem) My daughter is getting married this weekend.

Nope. Still not registering. I can say the words, I can write them out, I can sing them, shout them from the rooftop, or tap them out in Morse Code but they still don’t seem to be catching hold in my brain.

My daughter? Is getting married? This weekend?

Even with the different punctuation, it’s more than my brain can handle.

For one thing, it is physically impossible for me to have a daughter who is old enough to be getting married. That would make me … well, old. And I’m a lot of things, but old? No way.

Besides, it is patently ridiculous to suggest that a young girl I can clearly remember having to gently push across the threshold of her nursery school on the first day could be considered of marriageable age. I mean, we do have laws in this country.

Okay, she’s not in nursery school any more, obviously, but it was just a few months ago that I dropped her off for her first day of middle school. She didn’t want to take the bus and I was up early in the morning anyway, so what the hell. As I dropped her off, I expected her to leap out of the still-rolling car to avoid the humiliation of actually being seen with her father because “ … Omigod he is sooooo embarrassing!”

Instead, she leaned over and gave me a kiss. Right there, in the car, in front of all her friends. And it occurs to me even as I write this that never once has she ever bailed out of giving me a kiss goodbye, no matter what she was doing or how many cool friends were around, waiting to tease her. There’s incontrovertible evidence that she’s a little girl, right there.

The point I am making is, these memories are far too clear for them to be more than a quarter of a century old. They must be far more recent. Ergo, I couldn’t possibly have a daughter getting married this weekend. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

I will now go and weep the bitter tears of a father for whom everything is happening just a bit too quickly.

When she was a baby, I thought we’d never get that damn kid out of diapers. Then she was barely walking when all of a sudden whoooosh it was her first day of kindergarten. But elementary school dragged on and on until I realized she’d somehow made it into junior high when I wasn’t looking.

It was only a week or so later that I was helping her pick her high school electives – and then of course she had to decide what her major was going to be in University and that was only a month ago. So don’t even try to tell me she’s getting married. Not buyin’.

Maybe it’s just a dream. That’s it. I’ll wake up and she’ll be bringing in a handful of dandelions to put in a vase for Mom. Or she’ll be rushing out the front door to find the bird that hit the picture window, and making a little nest in a Kleenex box and bringing the damn thing in to me and asking me to make it better.

Or maybe I’ll wake up to find her climbing that stupid tree that I’ve told her to stay out of a million times, then calling me outside to see how high she’s gotten and making my knees go weak when I look up at her.

Well … I can still look up at her, but now she’s standing right beside me. And my knees still go weak, but … well, she’s always had that effect on me anyway.

And this weekend, unless someone fixes the tear in the Space/Time Continuum, she’ll take me by the arm and support me as I walk her down the aisle because I know my knees will be too weak for that.

I need to go and lay down, close my eyes, get some perspective on all this. But now I’m afraid to do that.

I mean, you can see why.

Look what happened the last time I closed my eyes for a bit.

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My daughter is getting married in July.

I’ve been so busy sorting out her first house that I’ve missed out on the important fact.

I’ve not even finished my speech.

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Dad

May 21, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized

I came across this while googling for something else alltogether. It made me stop and think. It’s been two and a half years but it stil hurts like it was yesterday.

This guy puts it into words, so well. I can hardly see the computer.

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It was time to go have my last words with my father. He was dying, in the bedroom he built. He built our whole house, even dug the foundation himself, with a diaper tied around his head to keep the sweat out of his eyes. He was always working on the house, more than 35 years, and he never did finish it. He was first to admit that he really didn’t know how to build a house.

When I went in to see him, he was lying in the bedroom, listening to “The People’s Court.” I remember when he always would be on those Sunday-morning television talk shows, back in the fifties and sixties. Dr. Barry, they called him. He was a Presbyterian minister, and he worked in inner-city New York. They were always asking him to be on those shows to talk about Harlem and the South Bronx, because back then he was the only white man they could find who seemed to know anything about it. I remember when he was quotation of the day in the New York Times. The Rev. Dr. David W. Barry.

His friends called him Dave. “Is Dave there?” they’d ask, when they called to talk about their husbands or wives or sons or daughters who were acting crazy or drinking too much or running away. Or had died. “Dave,” they’d ask, “what can I do?” They never thought to call anybody but him. He’d sit there and listen, for hours, sometimes. He was always smoking.

The doctor told us he was dying, but we knew anyway. Almost all he said anymore was thank you, when somebody brought him shaved ice, which was mainly what he wanted, at the end. He had stopped putting his dentures in. He had stopped wearing his glasses. I remember when he yanked his glasses off and jumped into the Heymans’ pool to save me.

So I go in for my last words, because I have to go back home, and my mother and I agree I probably won’t see him again. I sit next to him on the bed, hoping he can’t see that I’m crying. “I love you, Dad,” I say. He says “I love you, too. I’d like some oatmeal.”

So I go back out to the living room, where my mother and my wife and my son are sitting on the sofa, in a line, waiting for the outcome and I say, “He wants some oatmeal.” I am laughing and crying about this. My mother thinks maybe I should go back in and try to have a more meaningful last talk, but I don’t.

Driving home, I’m glad I didn’t. I think: He and I have been talking ever since I learned how. A million words. All of them final, now. I don’t need to make him give me any more, like souvenirs. I think: Let me not define his death on my terms. Let him have his oatmeal. I can hardly see the road.

© Dave Barry

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