Today is my father’s birthday. He would have been 90. I made a lunch-time drawing of a bicycle, curbside, with a milk crate to the left and a trashcan behind it. The milk crate is a twin for the bicycle’s basket. The mouth of the trashcan rhymes with the bike’s front wheel. 7/12/10, I write in the corner, inside the two lines which mean a stone curb, draped down the page’s left margin. I stood in the shade and, having finished my work, realized it was an ok drawing. Then, it was for my father. Crossing the street against the light a car coming slowly on, I said, out loud but softly, in the glare and profusion of mid-day, "I love you, Dad. I love you, love you, love you. Happy birthday, here you are, with me." He didn't like to talk on the phone, and I don't like to talk on the phone, so I just squeezed my phone, smooth and cool as stone, and didn't feel sad that I couldn't call him. I entered a mass of dappled shade, and was glad.
This morning I was in the classroom: despite my concerns, I’m in the classroom every day, but only briefly, glancingly. This morning there was a long phone message from Frederick’s mom, explaining that he would be late – they would be late because there was a GIANT water bug in their apartment last night. “We were up late,” she said, chasing it, presumably. The place was all in disarray, she went on, “It’s hard to maneuver.” I imagine couch and table overturned, the microwave and television lying prone and smoking on the floor. Frederick doesn’t seem worse for the wear. “Why are you wearing a red shirt?” he asks me. “It was clean,” I say, “why are YOU wearing a red shirt?” “It was clean,” he admits. In a few days he will fly to another place and visit his father. “I love my Daddy,” he sometimes says when asked about his weekend – even though he hasn’t seen his father for months. One day children respond to Frederick’s mention of his father - they talk about their own fathers (which they do anyway, including discussions of their fathers’ penis size – but that’s only when the context calls for it, in the bathroom, for instance.) They talk about their fathers’ attributes: tall, very tall, not very tall. For no good reason, one day, I join in the conversation: “I had a dad, he was kind of tall, he was taller than I am. You know what? He was bald, he was very bald with NO hair. That is the kind of dad I had.” The children stop, their arms, hands, heads, feet all still – imagining my bald dad, I thought. Rita asked, “You had a dad?” “Yes,” I said, “sure I did.” Ryan, whose father died a year ago, is drowsy all day, he looks at me, his brow gently wrinkled, fatigue and interest kindling a faint smile. “Why did you have a dad?” Ken asks. “Every person does,” I say, “you cannot be born without a dad – everyone has a dad somewhere, whether you can see him or not.”
My father abides in sketchbooks, in the potent empty pages. He dwells in the ink of lines I draw. He is the arc between derision and determined stoicism which defines my relationship to the indirect and arbitrary nature of institutions. My arms remember his ribs, my face remembers his heart beating. On his birthday, for many years, Hanauta and I would eat an ice cream for him, so she could know he was once alive and he would want her to eat ice cream. When we do, we are his tongue for tasting, we are his mind for finding summer again. We love each other as he would have - deeply and without sentimentality. But he is somewhere else, I cannot fly to him; I try, sometimes, instead, to be his rhyme.
