Little Scribbles

 

My youngest son’s latest composition. He always, always knows where my phone is and how to unlock it. From there, it’s only a matter of what buttons he finds most colorful.

Inspirational Malaise

Cool wind, bright sun, soft grass.

A clear sky over students hurrying to class,

Professors shambling along,

And couples entwined.

Not too crowded to be oppressed.

Not too empty to be alone.

It is, above all things, the perfect time to write.

To feel the pulse of life thrumming beneath my feet

And to add my own small beat.

The perfect time to be inspired,

To feel the hunger deep inside that craves to be filled

With my voice, my words, my thoughts.

But I have nothing to say.

Beautiful

“I want to be just like you, Daddy.”

The words are not unexpected.  He has seen them in books, heard them in movies, and experienced them in a hundred memories shared by other fathers.

But these words, these particular words are different.

They do not march across an otherwise inert sheet of paper, or dance in cinematographic splendor with a matching orchestral accompaniment,  or shroud themselves in the life of another.

They hang in the air, framed by wide, open eyes and cheeks still slightly rounded with infancy.  The voice that gives them life is high, squeaky almost, sincere in a way that is both foreign and beautiful to the father.

Foreign because there is no echo in the father’s own memories.  His memories of a father are not of one man, but a fractured mess spanning a crowd of men each with only an ephemeral presence in his past.

Foreign because the father never uttered such words as a son.  Never wanted to be anything but different than his pretend fathers.

But the words are beautiful too.

Beautiful because the father always hoped for this moment.  Always hoped for a son with wide eyes and a sweet voice, with a face unscarred by sarcasm, regret, hatred, and pain.

Beautiful because in his son’s life, the father redeems his own past.

 

Two Chairs

Two chairs.  Two people.  His is wicker, tacky, ornate.  Mine is something simpler, cotton, or microfiber.  The kind of thing you get from discount furniture warehouses.

I digress.

He is talking, but I’m not listening.  To the hum of the cheap electric bulbs, the whirr of the fan, yes, but not to him.

He stops talking.
He leaves.

Two chairs.  One person.

 

Not-quite-morning

It’s happened again. For some reason I’m awake before morning is even a hint on the horizon or in my wife’s slow steady breathing. I feel energized, awake, my body lean and taut, ready to run, or work, or write.

But what will I do? Will I stay awake and enjoy the beautiful silence before the birds shatter it with their cacophony, before the light creeps into the day and makes me weigh the rationality of my choices? Because the not-quite-morning is no place for reason, a limbo for deep thinking, or writing, or questioning.

Or will I go back to sleep, to wake up in an hour or two, no longer electrified, no longer excited, with the inevitable feeling that I let a beautiful moment pass me by?

Redefining Father, Part I

I’m sitting on the back porch, my legs swinging in curious patterns to avoid the dogs gathered at my feet.  My dog, Jake, has come up to my side and pressed his wet snout to the side of my face.  I had been thinking about my life, the kind of deep thoughts into which teenagers occasionally stumble.  But now my thoughts and feelings are just a bundle inside of me.  A breeze stirs the calm Texas evening, the backyard tree sways gently back and forth, the leaves’ rustling blocks the sounds of my family from the house behind me, and the tight bundle loosens inside me and I’m caught away in the past.

I’m walking toward the front room of our house.  Dad needs to talk to you, Mom had said.  I feel as if I’m in a dream, that I’m really somebody else, that if I wake up, or maybe just run away, it will all go away.  But I continue down the hall.  There is no one to welcome me but an increased feeling of foreboding sinking in my stomach and wrapping around my lungs.  Dim, low-wattage, electricity-saving bulbs glare from the ceiling and the fan creaks in endless circles.  To my right I see the board-and-brick shelves of our small treasure of books.  The shelves that Dad and me built together.  Sometimes I would run my fingers along their spines and count how many I had read and how long it would take me to finish the rest.

Dad comes in and sits in the far corner of the room in the wicker chair.  Mom loved that chair; it had been a gift from his mom.  “What happens if he leaves us?” my voice out of a yet more distant memory comes back to me, an echo of a newly resurfaced, earlier fear.  “No problem,” Mom had answered in her confident, reassuring tone.  “We’ll simply make a list of everything that is his an everything that is ours and we’ll be together.” I wondered on whose list the wicker chair will turn up.  Dad had never liked it.

“I’ve been thinking a lot,” he begins his confession.  He does not look at me, but Mom always insisted we look other people in the eye so I look straight at him.  “I’m going to be leaving, to think things through,” he continues.

Silence.

A slight shrug as if to say, “I don’t know what else to say,” and Dad left.

Shouldn’t I feel something? I wonder.  Rage, anger, depression, perhaps guilt?  Nothing.  I wander around the room, run my fingers over the backs of the books on the shelves.  I love books, the solid feel of the, the dependability of the orderly pages and words.  I end back in the middle of the room and lie down, letting the lazy shadows of the ceiling fan pass over and through me.