OverPowelled

Rose City, part II.

I'd set aside my Saturday in Portland for touristy crap, which may or may not be the kind of touristy crap the average tourist anticipates. The hotel was a scant few blocks away from the Portland Saturday Market, a nearly year-round cavalcade of artists and buskers and food booths that sounded promising...but on my way there I stumbled across Voodoo Doughnut, an establishment I'd already seen profiled at least once on t.v.

Voodoo Doughnut is an extremely...alternative donut shop, which will also marry you should you request or require it--they have a sliding scale of ceremonies with or without donuts. They are also famous for their outrageously indulgent donut toppings, like breakfast cereal, or bacon atop a maple bar. They are also also famous for their snickeringly provocative donut names. When I got to the front of the long line, I just pointed at the one I wanted, twirling around in its glass case: chocolate cake donut, with chocolate icing and Cocoa Puffs on top. The clerk sang out its name for the benefit of all: "One Triple Chocolate Penetration," she shouted, causing the man behind me to erupt in astonished/alarmed giggles. Probably I should have turned around and chatted him up. Do you come here often? Anyway. The donut was hilarious in concept, if fairly ordinary in execution; cereal atop a donut apparently gets damp/stale quickly. I will have to return to assess the bacon maple bar on its own merits.

On to the artists' market. It was kind of a gloomy, overcast day, so I'm not sure how representative the booths I saw were...but there was a little more of the patchouli-and-B.O. crowd going on than I tend to prefer. I did spend some time lingering over an artist's psychedelically colored pen-and-ink rendering of Johnny Cash, flipping the classic bird. I would seriously hang that on my office wall, so it's probably for the best that I didn't have $30 cash on me. Oh well.

And then: I noticed the first of what were ultimately several stained-glass artists' booths. Oh dear. I have only mentioned obliquely, I see now, what my father did for a living--he designed and built custom stained-glass windows for nearly 30 years. Took an extension class at the local community college when I was a little girl, and built an entire business and a considerable reputation from it. He put windows in businesses and churches, in Street-of-Dreams houses and in McMansions for people with more money than taste. It always amazed me, that my dad, who if we are being honest was strapping and kind of loud and prone to fart jokes and could potentially be classified by Jeff Foxworthy as a redneck, had ended up making a living this way: this delicate, translucent, elegant art form. It was a secret in plain sight, a hidden depth that I saw him practice every day but that I was not smart enough, not soon enough, to ask about.

This is a prelude to my saying that, for several years, Dad had been a presence at the Vancouver, Washington farmers' market on summer weekends. He loved the intrigue of bickering with the market's governing board--oh, man, the epic wrangling over choice booth real estate, insanely boring and what I wouldn't give for a fresh earful...but more than that he lived to banter with the teeming hordes. He couldn't have been making serious income just from the suncatchers and the metric ton of glass marbles he sold out of a couple antique gumball machines, but he used the attention to secure larger commissions. Dad was a salesman down to the bone, a cheerful master of wearing you down with corny patter until you succumbed: to buying whatever it was, to forgiving him something, to being his friend for life. I never went down to Vancouver to see him in action, but I didn't need to. I knew exactly how he would be.

Except maybe, too late, I did need to see it, because I stood there in front of some random person's booth in Portland, hyperventilating, throat tight. There were suncatchers and kitty-cat potholders and, I don't know, blown glass bongs arrayed all around me, and hucksters everywhere manning their tables, hamming it up, messing with the crowd in genial booming voices, and for a minute I thought I would have to run. Knocking over incense burners and bags of organic dog treats, crashing through the line at the falafel stand. My heart hurt.

It helped when, after considering for a moment, I decided that this particular stranger's stained-glass doodads were cheap-looking and ugly. Thinking that, I could proceed.

* * * * *

Later that afternoon, Mecca. Powell's, where to my complete incomprehension I had never previously been. And seriously, what the hell? Why didn't Dad ever take me to Powell's, summers when I was bored out of my skull in La Center? He would have earned points for eons, would still be redeeming points with me from beyond the grave. Missed opportunity, Dad.

Anyway. There's a smell that good bookstores have, a clean papery scent of books that is definitely not to be confused with the musty funk of used books left to mildew in the basement. Powell's smells wonderful. "Have I died?" I wondered to myself, and for two and a half hours I was one of those people kicking the plastic shopping basket ahead of me across the linoleum, unwilling to lift it the entire time. I did have a pre-programmed boundary, in that I had to be able to carry it all back on the damn train. That helped me to get out with my life and only $150 in the hole, hilarious water bottle included: pretty damn decent.

I did find myself getting verklempt (for the second time that day) in the children's section, where I hadn't even intended to go--I wandered down the pink staircase instead of up the purple one, or something, and there I was. It stretched on for half a block in front of me, shelves almost higher than I could reach, and oh, oh, all the books. I've written before about how I was constantly being hustled out of the public library or the tiny mall bookstore as a kid--not because the adults in my life were cruel, but because they were unfortunate grownups with boring grownup shit to do. So, the sight of a children's book section larger than my house made me actually tear up a bit. I wanted nothing more than to go back through time to my ten-year-old self, hand her a $100 bill, and say "Meet me here in two hours. Have fun. Go!"

I'll just have to make up for le temps perdu.

Worst float ever, though

I had a minor professional disappointment last week, something I'd planned on not panning out. Not important, really. Ask Huey. But when I was lamenting this setback with Sis, she told me this excellent story about a similar conversation she'd had with our dad, a great little bead of hilarity and quintessential Dad Advice wrapped in black-humored hindsight.

Until very recently, Sis had not been employed by The Man, in a corporate environment, for some 14 months--the first half of that deliberate, the latter half increasingly, desperately not. Because they were both home all day, she found herself with many opportunities to chitty-chat with Dad on the phone, such that he was quite invested in her job search. I'm envious of these circumstances now--not the unemployment, duh, but of their regular, if random, conversations. Of how keyed in he was to her career trajectory, because I doubt my dad was ever really sure just what it is that I do for a living. "Write computer books" was about as close as he got to the truth. I do remember that when I went into management, I called to tell him the news. When I said I'd been promoted to manager, he exclaimed with pride--and extreme astonishment--"For all of NerdCo?!?" I can't describe how that irked and tickled me both: that my dad somehow thought I'd been plucked from obscurity to lead, like, 36,000 people for a multi-billion-dollar corporation, because, CATCH UP, DAD...but also that he sincerely believed I could do it. It was not outside his realm of possibility, for me. That's a vote of confidence I need to hold onto more tightly, now.

Anyway. So one day this spring, Sis happened to be on the phone with Dad at the precise moment she got an e-mail turning her down for a job she'd genuinely longed for. They'd gambled on the Other Guy, and she was devastated. Here is the first thing she says our father told her, in that moment: "You need a beer! Do you have any beer?"

Dad was never much of a drinker, to my recall; he might crack open a lone beer if the temperature got above 95 degrees. Or, on New Year's Eve, he'd consume a single shot of Bailey's Irish Cream, before tucking into bed. At 9:00 p.m. It's midnight somewhere. At his funeral, in the photo albums on display, I found snapshots of him in the mid-70s, sporting his Afro perm and brandishing a beer bottle, but that was not the man I knew.

This was, though: his immediate follow-up suggestion to Sis was "Go up to the Husky Deli and have a scoop of coconut ice cream!" Yeah. There is not one doubt in my mind that I inherited this gene from him; it's only slightly less obvious than the eyebrows, the considerable nose, that I see every morning in the bathroom mirror. There is never a wrong time for ice cream--any season, anywhere, any flavor, I will need no persuasion and I will not turn it down. Beer OR ice cream = not a contest. Also, surely someone must make beer ice cream, so point me at it, interwebs, and I will gladly taste it so you don't have to.

Dad had a longstanding relationship with the Schwan's delivery guy in his area. La Center isn't all that rural any more, and Schwan's is now a purveyor of frozen lasagnes and pizzas and chow mein and god-knows-what-all...but their legacy was ice cream, and Dad never didn't have half a dozen boxes of fudge pops and Neapolitan sandwiches stashed in the freezer. Or we'd drive out to this gas-pump mini-mart at some forgotten crossroads in farm country, where they had a drive-up window dispensing soft-serve cones: vanilla, chocolate, or "twist," the two flavors spiraled together in a frozen helix, the chocolate with flecks of real cocoa, rich and dark and gritty on your tongue.

When the funeral arrangements were still being determined, I made a joke about having a Schwan's truck in the cortege, or interring the ashes in a cardboard pint container. Sis got mad at me, and I regret that, I do...but I still find it funny, too. I'd like to think Dad would laugh. You could do so much worse, than to be delivered to your eternal rest in an ice cream truck. I might want that as my own second choice, right behind the Viking funeral with the boat and the flaming arrows.

Beer and ice cream. It's so him, it's so Dad, and in that it makes me laugh and wince both, not least because massive heart attack, you say? hmmm. In reading the Schwan's history linked above, I discovered what is surely no more than an unsettling coincidence: that Marvin Schwan, the company's founder, died on May 9 (my father's birthday), 1993. Of a heart attack. At the age of 64. Ice cream: a dangerous, delicious business.

But I am treasuring this little second-hand nugget of irrelevant career advice, Dad's best effort at long-distance comfort in a moment of crisis. I'm so grateful to Sis for sharing it with me, because it reminds me that, whatever conversations we did or didn't have, Dad is still in me. In the mirror, in the music, in the firm conviction that there is no ill so grave that a frozen dairy treat can't cure it, can't at least put you on the mend. Except, well, that one ill, I guess.

I'm s'posed to get a raise next week, you know damn well I won't

It's annual review season at NerdCo; don't know if that's exactly why this has been stuck in my head for a week, but so be it: Huey Lewis and the News, Workin' for a Livin'.



I think the original MTV video was so plain, just the band jumping around on a blank white set, that no one has bothered to archive it on YouTube for the ages; you have to make do with Huey live on stage, sweating through his button-down and replicating the same little jogging-in-place dance at the song's big climax that, heaven help me, I remember from the video. (Also excellent: the guitarist's Tewtally 80s!!1! checkerboard guitar strap. I thought that guy was SO CUTE when I was 12.)

My dad got cable t.v. right about the time MTV launched, when Huey and the gang were in heavy rotation...and he became a huge fan, of the band in general and this song in particular. When Sis and I spent alternate weekends at his house--he was still in Seattle then--he used to wake us up with this track, at holy crap o'clock on Saturday morning: carefully dropping the needle into the vinyl groove with the stereo already cranked to 11. If he misjudged it a little there'd be a preliminary boom of static through the speakers, like a distant thunderclap, before you were blasted out of bed by the harmonica. Sixty seconds later he'd pop in the bedroom door, grinning, to see whether Sis had plummeted from the top bunk in alarm and fallen on top of me. Reveille.

Dad spent one afternoon resetting the needle arm again and again, carefully transcribing the lyrics on a yellow legal pad because he was so smitten. He couldn't spell; I remember looking over his shoulder to read Damed if you do, Damed if you don't in scribbly black felt-tip and feeling vaguely embarrassed for us both. (Later, transcription duties fell to me: I had to copy down Ray Stevens's Ahab the Arab from a K-Tel novelty album, for Dad to perform at a friend's bachelor party or some such.)

He could pick his way (haha) around virtually any stringed instrument, but that year, Dad asked for a harmonica for his birthday. He would have been 38. I'm 38. Oh dear god. We presented it to him in the kitchen--probably a Hohner, aren't they all Hohners? and why do I remember that? get me on Jeopardy!--and Dad beamed with delight.

"Okay! What's this?" he asked, and raised it to his lips, emitting an unidentifiable bleat and blur of noise. "Come on, guess," he prodded us, to blank stares. "Don't you recognize it? It's Love Me Do, by the Beatles!" More random squawking.

"Oh," we said, me and Sis and stepmom Kathy, probably in unison. "Oh yeah, it is! It sure is!"

I have no idea what must have happened to the harmonica, after that weekend. It is possible that Kathy lost it, and no jury would convict her. But a quarter-century later, I had to download some Huey Lewis from iTunes...tiny bits and bytes of a song, flying through the air and the invisible futuristic Internets into my computer, my iPod synching up with my brain. I get a check on Friday, but it's already spent, Huey complains, an aspect of adulthood that never occured to me when I was 12. I miss Dad. But the thought of him rattling the windows in their frames with that dopey song, every other Saturday, still makes me laugh. I don't quite leap out of bed, still, in a way that he'd respect...but I'll try harder.

Madeleine

About Kai in that grocery cart: when he decided he wanted me to drive, I accepted the assignment with the appropriate degree of reckless irresponsibility that befits a Fun Auntie. We slalomed--if slowly--through the aisles of King's Market, me making tire-squealing noises as we veered around corners in search of tortilla chips and chicken breasts. I took advantage of the wider space in front of the bakery department to do a couple donuts (no pun intended). Auntie Him was a hit!

Kai laughed as I spun the cart around, lolling in the child seat and playing idly with my hands where I gripped the push bar. I was making random funny noises while he squeezed my fingers in his own...and then suddenly there was my dad, a memory opening up in me as easily as a door, something I hadn't thought of in probably 35 years: a game he used to play, with me when I was tiny, tiny.

Dad would hold up his hand, fingers outspread, and let me squeeze each of his fingers in turn. He'd assigned a goofy sound effect to each digit, so that I would grab onto his hand and he would emit a wacko symphony of noises accordingly. The sounds, from thumb to pinky, were as follows: hooonk; beeeeep; toooot; whistle--all of these the words themselves, spoken onomatopoetically--and, for the pinky, zzzzzzzzzzz! This last was accompanied by a swift tickle in the ribs, which was a thrilling menace. You wanted to avoid that pinky! I'd honk away on Dad's thick, calloused fingers with my own, prolonging the hilarity and the ridiculous tune we were crafting together, before finally succumbing to the inevitable zzzzzzzzzz! right in the belly or armpit. Oh my God, Dad. Dad. Dad.

So I stood there in the grocery store openmouthed, the recollection thrown over me like a blanket, or a bucket of water. I had no idea I possessed this memory still, but suddenly there it was, my dad as real to me as if he was right there. I could see him, could see us, sitting in an orange vinyl booth at the Pancake Haus. I could smell him, the scents of my earliest memories of him: always, always Wrigley's Doublemint Gum and a freshly lit cigarette (though in truth he quit smoking 25 years ago). There was Dad, blowing the paper wrappers off of drinking straws. There was Dad, holding up his hand like a cornball instrument and letting me squeeze his fingers.

So Kai, I owe you one. You gave me back something I had no idea was even there, as if you'd put a little glowing pebble in my hand, something stashed deep away when I was no older than you are now. I won't forget it again. Thank you for that, buddy.

Boomtown USA

I'm not sure why I find the Fourth of July to be such a melancholy holiday. It just seems as if the Independence Days of my childhood were much more exciting (and thrillingly fraught with danger). The running joke in Seattle is that summer starts annually on July 5, and true to form it is humid and murkily overcast today, teasing at rain. But in my memory the day seems always blazing hot and sunny, full of wading pools and one-piece bathing suits with the elastic gone nappy and frayed in the seat. Fried chicken and Grammy's potato salad with hardboiled eggs sliced into it. Smells: of lighter fluid and Bain de Soleil (SPF factor: 0.005) and, dusk come on AT LAST, of gunpowder and slowly smoldering punk...and the melting cheap rubber sole of your dime-store sneaker if you mistakenly tried to stomp out a sparkler gone awry.

Personal fireworks aren't legal within the city limits any more, and for the most part I say good riddance, now that I'm a homeowner and want to turn the hose on the kids across the alley with their damn bottle rockets. The law does not, of course, deter the diehards in every neighborhood from heading out to the rez and amassing enough ordnance to make like Armageddon, every night for a week. I'm thinking of my dad a lot, too, this year; he loved this holiday, and when there used to be fireworks stands in town, like right in front of the Safeway, he'd always pick out the Amazing Colossal Double-Deluxe Detonator kit or whatever, a dusty cardboard box crammed with 64 different ways in which to blow your hand off. He'd supplement this with a handful of illegal M-80s, blowing up soda cans and plastic drink bottles in the street (the word that comes to mind now is "shrapnel"), and with Whistling Petes, those eardrum-tearing shriekers that he loved, loved, LOVED to set off somewhere behind you just when you weren't looking. I can remember being a kid, when Dad still lived in West Seattle; we'd work our way around the strange little cul-de-sac he lived on, LeDroit Court, going house to house around the block to check out what everyone else had to fire off...but Dad's array of fireworks was always biggest and best. If slightly terrifying. (When we were with our mother? The only fireworks that met her safety bar were snakes, those sad, sad little charcoal blots that emitted a slow, smoky coil of ash like a little black turd. Good times.)

I haven't been to one of the big municipal displays in years; I can't stand the crowds, and the freezing half to death, and the way that, 15 minutes before the big show, 100 people turn up and stand directly in front of the blanket you've staked out all day. I can watch the show on t.v., and then turn immediately to the traditional post-Fourth 11:00 news: traffic jams and house fires! All part of the ritual. For whatever reason, I tend to think of the big shows as either family-oriented (for people with kids), or couple-oriented; what dolt would sit out in a camp chair for seven hours all alone? No fun without a date.

I do have fond memories of having a date, though, and of spending one Fourth with grad-school friends who had an apartment down on Lake Union, where one of the two competing Seattle displays is held. It actually was warm, that year; we walked down the alley with our not-at-all-carefully concealed plastic cups of warm beer or vodka-and-cranberry, milled around with our heads craned back to the sky, bathed in lurid colors, feeling the concussions in our feet.

When things wrapped up our host Jim offered to drive me and the boy back to wherever we were living at the time. He hadn't counted on the traffic, though; huge ridiculous mobs of people poured into the winding one-lane streets all around the lake, an impenetrable logjam. We sat in the car, sweating and motionless, and eventually the dude in the car next to ours, facing the opposite direction, decided to honk. Because that always does the trick! He leaned on the horn, muttering and gesticulating, his open driver's-side window inches from Jim's. And Jim, in a laconic drawl I can't hope to properly convey in writing, leaned a bit out of his own window and mildly intoned, directly in Honky McRoadRage's face, "Aw, fffuuuuuuuuuuuuucck yoooouuu."

And then...we sat. Traffic still wasn't moving, and there we were, cheek to jowl with the enraged recipient of this retort, for what was probably five minutes but seemed like thirty. The cars were packed so tightly that the guy couldn't open his door and pull Jim from his vehicle by the face, and thank God. Jim calmly, but wisely, rolled up his window and we all stared busily at the floor, or at nothing, while inches away the other driver gibbered and snarled against the glass like the creature on the wing in that Twilight Zone episode. Man. I still think of that every year, like clockwork; I wonder if he does too? Wherever you are, Jim, I hope your holiday is just as mellow.

Happy Fourth, everybody, and a drawn-out sprawling expletive to anyone who might deserve it. I need a beer, methinks.

Death, take a holiday, fer chrissakes

I know, it's been too long. I'm sorry, Interweb friends, and I am so grateful to you, too: you have all been sweet and thoughtful and indescribably kind...and patient while I tried to get my head back in the game. I've written a lot, actually, in recent weeks--drafts and scribbles, much of it longhand, none of it quite fit for public consumption. But suddenly it is July, and so I thought I'd give myself a goal. It seems that NaBloPoMo is a year-round endeavor these days; you can pick a page of the calendar at will, and I chose this one. Thirty-one posts, a daily flexing of the writerly muscles! Good for me, like vitamins and ab crunches (neither of which I have been committed to lately).

But the big karmic boot was not done stepping on me and mine, yet. Yesterday morning, my aunt PJ, Mom's older sister, succumbed to a swift and wicked pancreatic cancer. She went to the doctor complaining of a backache and jaundice; she was diagnosed about a week after my dad died, and bounced from ER to rehab center and back for a month. She never made it back home, even, and I don't have any more eloquent words for that particular denoument than to say that it fucking sucks. It is the complete shits, and I honestly don't know, can't fathom what lesson I might be supposed to learn from this, from the last six weeks of the Shit Train Express. Unless it is, simply, that Warren Zevon was right: enjoy every sandwich. You damn well better, hadn't you?

The optional theme, for July's NaBloPoMo, is "Food." Well, there you have it: run, don't walk, and make yourself a fried-baloney-on-white, or a PB&J, or an egg over easy, mashed between a couple of toaster waffles. Or, hell, a huge obscene Dagwood hoagie, folks, because damn, it is a short trip. Even the long trips are.

* * * * *
I don't want to end on a totally black note. Instead, I'll share PJ's 15 minutes of childhood fame. After WWII, my grandfather, her dad, was stationed at the local Sand Point NAS (now decommissioned and a park, where things like the Friends of the Library book sale are held). For Christmas, 1950, they flew Santa in to the base on a Navy PBY Catalina, "specially painted"--though to look like what, it's hard to say--a reindeer? At any rate, for some reason my aunt was chosen to be Santa's first guest; she made the back cover of the December 1950 Naval Aviation News. She's about six, here:

I love how unperturbed she is, held aloft by Santa Claus astride a bomber. In the full-size version, there's a glimmer of tooth in her smile, and a visible gap where more teeth are pending. Every page of the magazine says "Restricted," top and bottom; on the front cover, beneath a cartoon of another Santa hitching a ride on another military aircraft, a subdued but direct headline in small type mentions "Warfare in Korea." But this picture takes up the entire back page, bigger and brighter, its "XMAS GREETINGS" dominant. This little girl is looking forward no further than Christmas...certainly not as impossibly far ahead as 60 years on. In this moment, she's anticipating only the very best things: toys, sugarplums. Would that we all could stay suspended in that kind of jolly bubble, for just a minute or an hour or half a century longer.

That'll be the day

My father had always been...not a hypochondriac, exactly, but something of a fabulist--given to embellishment, in things medical and otherwise. Oh, he was always having something stitched up or snipped off or blasted with lasers, in the last decade or so; he weathered dramatic and vaguely suspect injuries, and their equally spectacular remedies, with vividly described aplomb. For years, I'd been wanting to say You pulled what doing what, now? and Put the doctor on, I want to talk to him. So when the fire department chaplain called Tuesday evening, I was very slow to catch on. He said things like, We found your father in his shop, and collapse, and finally that he was sorry, we didn't get there in time. And I, I said mostly Yes? and Oh? and Yes? and I was waiting, honestly, waiting for final instructions--what hospital was he at? was I supposed to go pick him up?

Oh, I said, again, at last. Oh.

* * * * *

I posted the obituary notices to four papers this afternoon, the gentle facts, the list of survivors. I'm writing this one for me.

* * * * *

I was not an accident. My parents had been married for three years, though they were still ridiculously young. This is the first picture I could find, of me with my dad, of all of us together. I am two weeks old; he is 25, my mother 22.

I look at this picture and think, here are three babies. All of us look apprehensive. A month later, we are marginally more confident, but still, this? is the face of a man who doesn't much know what the hell he is doing.

Though, also, maybe he's just woken up.

* * * * *

As far back as I can remember, the common thread between me and my father was music. When I was still in footy pajamas, he'd play his guitar and sing me to me, mostly Johnny Cash. Not necessarily the best toddler lullabies, those prison laments and hard-drinking tales, but the one I remember specifically is "Ballad of a Teenage Queen."

There's a story in our town,

'bout the prettiest girl around,

Hair of gold and eyes of blue,

and what those eyes could do to you.

He worked my name into the lyrics, coupled it somewhere with a rhyme for Kimberly. Even at three, I was aware that I was neither blonde nor blue-eyed, and was a little bothered by it. At any rate, I didn't remember anything past this verse. When, 30 years later, I bought a giant CD compendium of early Johnny Cash, I played that one with dread. Didn't all his songs end up with someone on the wrong end of a gun barrel or a blade? But no! After a spin through the Hollywood machine, the Teenage Queen shrugs off the trappings of fame and goes home. She marries the boy next door! From the candy store! "It has a happy ending!" I laughed to my dad over the phone, in goofy disbelief.

I can still be made a fool of, by a good-looking man with an acoustic guitar. When we were very little, riding around in Dad's truck, he'd sing doo-wop and make me and Sis sing backup. Elvis, Simon and Garfunkel. I remember him telling me about discovering Buddy Holly, that early, gritchy rock-and-roll rhythm seeping out of the radio and into his rural Snohomish childhood, the thrill and the shock of tuning that in. The year he got the Compleat Beatles Songbook for Christmas, all the tablature, we spent two days poring over it and singing ourselves hoarse, while Sis rolled her eyes in the background and probably secretly longed to drown us out with her Madonna albums.

In the last decade, Dad developed a consuming obsession with folk and bluegrass music. He went to festivals, he played at community events and little local bars, jammed with strangers and with a regular group. He sent me a variety of banjo-player jokes he found on the Internet, and made me several mix CDs of the roots music he most loved. Here is a confession: I sang along with some of these in the car, the high harmonies, training myself for that hillbilly wailing. My dumb secret fantasy was that, at some point, I'd join him and his band, somewhere public, sing on stage with my father, surprise and impress him with how I could belt it out. House of Gold. Angel Band. Oh, bear me away on your snow white wings.

The last time he came to stay with me, when I bought my house, he brought his guitar...but he wouldn't play a full song for me, just bits and snatches, fiddling around, faltering. He seemed embarrassed, suddenly, to perform for just me, adult me. He sang me part of one he'd written, trailing off after the chorus, and I couldn't prod him into continuing. Sis says that on his most recent visit with her, he brought the guitar, too, but it made the dog howl.

I was making him a mix CD myself, for Father's Day. I wanted to introduce him to The Knitters, throw in a little Lyle Lovett swing.

He didn't have a will, of course, or any kind of plan at all for this eventuality. Goddamn it, Dad, I have said, more than once, this week. "I know you get the guitar," my stepmother said, apropos of nothing, Wednesday. He'd alluded to this, for years, but of course neither of us actually expected it to happen. When I was very little, actually, a toddler, I wasn't allowed to touch the guitar--though I did, when he wasn't home to see it. I don't remember ever getting caught. I am longing for it now, I am desperate to have it, and I am frankly terrified to go down there and actually have to take it into my own hands.

* * * * *

Dad and my stepmom left Seattle for La Center in 1982, trying to recapture something of his rural childhood, I think, in that then-tiny podunk farm town. From what I know, that childhood was rather shitty, so I don't know what he might have been looking for. At any rate, he tore down and rebuilt their rotting farmhouse one wall at a time, though he was never quite satisfied over the years, always tinkering: nah, I don't like the deck over here, and he'd rip it off and add a skylight, extend the porch instead, move the bathtub to a different wall.

This might be as good an opportunity as any to admit that I find Jason Lee's incarnation on My Name is Earl weirdly compelling and even attractive, in a way that I am really NOT entirely comfortable with. Go figure.

We grew a lot further apart, with the physical distance and my own adolescence. For years he coached girls' softball there; we'd play with some of those kids on our summer visits. He quit abruptly when Sis turned 18, and I asked him why. He said something like, "Oh, I only did it to know what girls your age were thinking and doing, you know? To be tuned in to what you guys thought was cool." I heard this and thought awwww, he was doing it to be closer to us! How sweet! It was a couple of years--YEARS--before I realized, hey--if you wanted to know what we were thinking, you could have picked up THE PHONE, maybe.

I find this next picture devastating and hilarious both: the visible disconnect. We're at a figure skating competition--so I guess, technically, he was attempting to pay attention to what I was interested in. But I am fifteen, and I am trying so hard to be Fancy, and he is so, so...not.

And oh my GOD, people could SEE him, in PUBLIC. I was mortified, then. I am sorry, now. I am angry, still, a little.

* * * * *
We had a very bitter and cathartic fight, once, on a terrible visit that included a trip to Reno, The Saddest Little City In the World. (Oh my God, he loved the slots, loved the blinky lights and pretty girls, loved to stand over my shoulder and say oh, so close, two lemons and a cherry! just think, if only it had been THREE lemons! wouldn't that be amazing! and I could never convince him that THIS IS THE WAY THIS WHOLE TOWN WORKS, IT IS NEVER NEVER THREE FUCKING LEMONS.) He accused me of not respecting him, of not taking his advice, financial and otherwise; I maintained that he'd moved away, neglected us as kids, that he had his wife waiting on him hand and foot, that no one else was entitled to so much as the fucking remote, let alone an opinion.

"When you're an adult, you'll understand some things," he shouted.

"Well, I'm 27 years old, Dad; when do you think that'll be?" I snapped. I left in a fury, drove home at speeds surely not legal in any state, hurled the ridiculous, immense takeout cinnamon roll he'd pressed on me into the dumpster behind my apartment building. I fantasized about his funeral. I knew what song I would play, bitter, snotty, triumphant. Buddy Holly. You say you're gonna leave me, you know that's a lie. Wait. Which one of us was speaking, through that song?

And for a long time, we didn't speak. But when we did, at last, things were different. I don't know how to explain it except that we saw each other clearly, in complete. I was an adult, and he'd finally noticed; I, too, had realized that he was who he was. Often, that person was a 6'2" ten-year-old...but he was entirely himself, always had been. And in figuring that out, we achieved a kind of peace with each other.

* * * * *

He was, truly, an enormous kid. He owned an electronic Fart Machine, which he would tote to bluegrass festivals and deploy around the campfire. He laughed so hard at the pie-eating contest/vomit scene in Stand By Me that he gave himself a nosebleed and we had to stop the tape. He built marvelous Lincoln-Log fortresses on the living room floor, and then would stand across the room lobbing the smaller logs into them like shells, making the long whistle, the explosion noises, destroying his creations while we hollered at him to stop knocking them back down. The Fourth of July was his favorite holiday; he loved nothing more than blowing shit up all over the driveway, and somehow he left this earth with all ten fingers still. When his diabetes could no longer be controlled by diet and he had to start taking insulin, the first time he gave himself an injection in my presence he retreated to the bathroom to do so...but then he ran back out into the den, shirt hiked up to show the needle still buried in his belly, syringe dangling from his flesh, yelling GAAAAHHHH! Going for the gross-out. Here he is, sporting the Dr. Bucks fake snaggleteeth he happily wore to the weekend farmers' and artists' market. I love how hard Sis is laughing, trying not to wet her pants.

* * * * *

When we were really little, he'd do this one thing, all the damn time: he loved hide and seek. We'd be goofing around on some construction site he was working, the skeleton of a new house--safe, Dad! Nice!--or walking idly through enormous, woody Lincoln Park, in West Seattle...and Dad would edge behind us, and then just...step off the trail. Slink into the bushes and see how long it would take for us to notice. Suddenly, he'd just be...gone. There Sis and I would be, two dummies, Hansel and Gretel, clutching at each other and looking around, increasingly nervous, jumping at every twig snap and bird tweet. He'd lob tiny pebbles at us from his hiding place, bink! on the shoulder or head. Or, eventually, he'd get to laughing, and that would finally give him away.

Mama don't allow

What you need to know: my father has mastered the Internet, by which I mean that he has figured out how to buy and (finally, eventually) to sell things on eBay and Craigslist. (The balance skews way, way more to the former, and so I am expecting to inherit a veritable sea of officially sanctioned Collectibles, one day.) Anyway. Dad's selections from the wide wide world of Web goodies, however, remain...inscrutable.

Sis says:
I talked to Dad this morning, and he had picked up a stand-up BASS on Craigslist for a steal ($695) and thinks I should learn to play.
Kim says:
ha!!! well, yeah, since you're not doing anything, right?
Sis says:
isn't that odd??
Kim says:
da-dum dum dum dum DUM dum dum dum...
Sis says:
that's EXACTLY what he did over the phone

Yes, this is entirely as random as this snippet would suggest. Neither of us plays any instrument; I muddled through two years of flute in elementary school and retained nothing, while Sis had something like a semester of Electric Piano as a freshman elective. Is Dad entertaining visions of finally launching that family jug band? Regardless, he didn't call me. I... don't know. Maybe I should start boning up on the comb-and-tissue-paper kazoo, from sheer jealousy.

I'm lookin' through you

I drove 300 miles, round-trip, yesterday to visit my father, who lives in a bleak little farm town just north of the Oregon border. My parents divorced when I was in kindergarten; Dad and I are friendly but see each other rarely, our visits out of sync with the typical holiday calendar. This was our belated Christmas.

My father and stepmom are a guileless and awesomely taste-free couple whose life would drive me to drink if I were forced to live it, but they seem to get along. Dad endures the Kountry Kitsch favored by my stepmom, made manifest in a tide of teapots, teddy bears, milk bottles, and geese in sunbonnets; he contributes to the overall decorative impact with his own collections of model tractors and antique gumball machines. So the service-for-four set of dishes I'd picked out, officially emblazoned with the John Deere logo, achieved the desired effect. In turn, I received two books and the Pyrex two-cup measure I'd asked for, hooray!...and another gift.

Some backstory: I didn't know my paternal grandfather, who died when I was very young. The sole memory I have of him, from a lone meeting, is of his physical presence, his body: a tall (to me), broad-shouldered, seemingly headless torso looming above me. I couldn't have picked him from a lineup.

So I was surprised to see his unfamiliar photograph framed on an end table in Dad's house. Dad told me it had fallen out of an old dictionary he'd been preparing to throw away: my grandfather, in full Army uniform--long-faced and formal, looking like no one I'd ever known.

I love old pictures. They fascinate me: cracked and faded, the inscrutable faces of my ancestors (or anyone's), wordlessly concealing their thoughts, the history of my scattered and estranged family. Dad knows this about me...but then...he misses. Just a tiny bit.

He's found someone with an elaborate, laser-etching tool that can scan a photograph and reproduce it, in minute detail, on any flat surface--a headstone, say, or...a sheet of glass.

So, my final gift: a 5'x8' laser-etched portrait of Master Sergeant Albert S. Douglas, U. S. Army, on clear glass, set into a beveled, leaded glass frame. His name and rank inscribed below; convenient hooks for hanging on top.

What do you say?

The details are striking, really: every crease, every shadow, the woolen texture of his uniform, captured in pin-dot, pointillist perfection, like a newspaper photograph. At different angles, the image of my sandblasted Grandpa takes on weight and dimension, verging on a hologram. "If you hang it in a window, the bevels will make rainbows," Dad said proudly.

I couldn't stop looking at it. My somber, grave grandfather, about to ship out to Germany to rout filthy Nazi bastards...now immortalized in a craft-fair suncatcher. What would you think of this, Albert? I swaddled the portrait back in its flowery tissue and a pink shopping bag, took it home. Dad is eager to come help me hang it in my new house. Oh.

One thing that I enjoyed, though. Dad takes after his mom, and I take after him. At first glance, Grandpa Douglas was utterly unfamiliar, no hint of recognition or resemblance. But...

"Look at his eyebrows!" I burst out. Dark, straight, square. The same eyebrows I'd looked at in the mirror that and every morning; the same brows so in need of a little waxing or pruning that I despaired of them. Absolute and unmistakable, a weird little genetic blip asserting itself down through the generations, on Dad's face, on mine. Not another trace of him, but damn, those eyebrows.

Hello, Al. I see we have something in common.