Moving Dad

January 19, 2008

Blue dawn. Saturday.

Snow canceled class on Thursday, so I revised my plans and set out toward Akron in a U-haul Thursday morning. The weather was bad, but got only marginally worse as I head north, and then better, or at least dryer. In the thirty-seven hours between leaving my house and returning to it, I spent twenty five of them on the road, blasting through seven states and making, as the song says. "front page driving news." It is one of those personal records I have no desire ever to break.

It’s difficult to know what to write about the two last days. I arrived in the evening and loaded the rented van with dad’s things, the few he would find indispensable in his new home. Alongside them I put a few things I wanted, garden tools, my mother’s dresser from when she was a little girl, a large photo of my father when he was four-- looking very suspicious-- the red toy spade my aunt bought me to dig the sand beside Lake Erie. I wanted to dig up and take with me the hibiscus I planted thirty-five years ago, but it was too big. I said goodbye to my basswood tree, and to the creek still flowing merrily between its artificial banks. I thought I would feel worse than I did. Father was frail and befuddled. It’s not dementia, for he was very much himself, himself as he always was, but forgetting everything, and talking mainly about how thoroughly he was going downhill. Yet he seemed eager and happy. I think he was taking it all as an adventure and, unlike myself, exhibited no regret, no debilitating nostalgia. I realize I may never see my father again. If that is the case, this is the story of our last hour. We had supper at a place he likes out by Chapel Hill. Afterwards, there was ice cream in the freezer, so we shared a little of that, watching TV. Then the power went off. The neighbors’ houses were dark, too. I remembered where he kept the flashlight–the same flashlight I had received as a tree gift when I was seven or eight–and he remembered at last where there were candles. I lit three candles. I said "Where do you want your candle?" He said, "the living room, I guess." I took mine to the bedroom. I’d brought my diary, as I always do, and in it I was going to write:

January 17, 2008. These are certainly the last words I will ever write
in the room where I wrote my first poem. This is the last time I will sleep in
the bed that grandma bought me when I grew too big for the crib, which is–now
that I think of the mattress and box springs sitting on the floor back home–
the only bed I ever owned.

But the lights were out, and it was too hard to see, and I did not write these words in my diary. My father and I parted, candles in hand, into our separate rooms in the vast dark. I was gone before he woke. I thought that I would dream by candlelight, that I would have some summarizing dream about that room and my old life. I did dream, but it was about Rick Wilson, the choirmaster at the Church of the Saviour, the first man I knew to die of AIDS. He was playing the organ in a restaurant, and the playing produced food rather than music, and that was the gimmick of the restaurant, and he played something special for me that he thought I’d like. I woke very early and began the marathon drive to Atlanta and then back home. I tried not to think about anything, I paid careful attention to the radio.

The Dogwood Grove, or Dogwood Forest, something Dogwood, which will be his new home in Alpharetta, is very elegant, but not the sort of place my father ever frequented in his life. The first wave of real sadness came when I imagined him waking there the first morning, not knowing where he was, confused and alone.

Linda and David met me at the facility, David looking wildly handsome, Linda on the edge of despair from the conspiracy of Delta and the weather to keep her from finishing the move. This is a drama which has not yet played itself out.

In the last week I have been a mass of undifferentiated emotions, some of them quite ugly, until, during hours and hours of driving, they sorted themselves out into the best and worst of them, grief. Mr. Ralphsnyder shouted at me from his driveway in the dark of the morning, and when I shouted back I knew I would never speak to him again, and I regretted not knowing him better; I regretted– everything. Everything that did not happen. I was grateful for the drive. Trying not to by sideswiped by careering semis kept my mind out of the depths.

Among the things I hauled from Akron was my mother’s black wood dresser with the lyre mirror, that had come from her father’s house on Hampton Road. Her father died when I was in Baltimore, and she must have gotten the piece then. She lined the drawers with newspapers, which were still in the drawers until today, Akron Beacon Journals from October, 1972. Fiddler on the Roof, Slaughterhouse Five, The New Centurions, Butterflies Are Free, Super Fly played in Akron cinemas. John Raitt appeared in Kiss Me Kate at the Civic Theater. The Weathervane was playing Done to Death, and the Falls Masquers, The Girl in the Freudian Slip. There were three "adult cinemas" still advertising, and the live "State Burlesque" offered Diamante the Great, plus comic Jimmy (Yockum Yockum) Mathews. The best sellers were Jonathan Livingston Seagull and I’m OK–You’re Ok. A gas furnace cost $377. Akron, though past its prime, was livelier than it would ever be again.

Amid the traffic stalling everything out of Atlanta, I thought of my father, of the bright being that is his eternal self. I asked his forgiveness for not being a very good son. And I gave him my forgiveness in return for being not so much a bad father as a bewildered one. He was the wrong man for the job. It was not his fault. We had nothing in common. I look at his old photo, taken before the Depression started, and I think we might have found common ground, had things been different; we might have been friends had we not been thrown together in the oddest and most cruelly intimate way imaginable. But all things come to rest, and all things come out well. I do believe this. I think he does too. Grief and exhaustion are two roads leading to forgiveness, and I was traveling both.