346/365 – MY FATHER

Word Count: 683

When I think of my father I think of him tucking me into bed, in the old house, an apartment above my grandfather, his father. A hard candy slipped between lips in a goodnight kiss even as the plastic wrapper crinkles in his hand. Don’t tell your mother, he says.

Just like his father. Sssh!, he’d say, taking me into the bedroom he shared with my grandmother. I’d stand in the dim light of the oak-heavy-furnitured room while he opened a top dresser drawer, took something out, slid it into my hand which I dutifully stuck in my pocket as I followed him out. My fingers could make out the size of a quarter, enough to buy candy during recess at school. Don’t tell your father, he’d say.

Being awakened on Friday nights at 11:30 for pizzas, when he’d get home from the night shift, every fifth and sixth week of his three, two-week revolving shift schedule at the factory.

Spending Saturdays on the New Haven green while my mother and oldest sister shopped downtown. Feeding the pigeons, playing with my other sister while my father sat on the bench accepting compliments from strangers on his little girls. Sometimes, at Christmas especially, waiting in the car after dark for the shoppers to return, playing I see something red, or naming the cars, make and model, as they drove by. He taught me to easily guess the Fords by their huge round headlights, the Chevys, the Plymouths, the “rocks in the head” Oldsmobiles like ours.

He’d read stories from Golden books while I sat in his lap in the rocker. He’d wrap flannel imbued with Vicks Vaporub around a sore throat when I was sick.

He taught me to trim out paint around windows when I was ten. To fix plumbing and electrical wiring when I was a bit older. He believed in burning the lawn and the bottom lot every spring, to get rid of dead grass. He and I, watching the fires spread in circles, ready with rakes. It sometimes got away on us and we could depend on my mother, near hysterical and threatening, to finally call out the fire department for help.

He’d get poison ivy just like me, the two of us awash in calamine lotion for days. He’d disappear just before some young dude showed up to take me out on a date.
His reputation alone as a good honest worker as factory foreman got each one of us called into work in the offices without even having an interview. He never minded the hooting and teasing down in the factory when my sisters or I brought him goodies from the bakery, or an ice cream on the night shift. He grinned and his eyes would light up.

He was locked in the garage once, for hours because we didn’t hear him when he was fixing the spring on the garage door. He came quietly in when we got him for lunch, went upstairs, sat down on the bed. Didn’t want to go to the hospital but we insisted where in the emergency room, they set his broken radius and ulna.

Years later, when I told them I was taking an apartment with a girl that I worked with, my mom made him talk to me about leaving home. I felt so bad they didn’t quite understand it. I almost backed out.

He kept horehounds in the glove compartment of his car. I used to get him a bag of them for Christmas for years later. He’d get me a pomegranate for my birthday even after I was married and my husband took over the gesture.

He was so proud when I went back to college. It hurt him to know that back then, he didn’t have the money to send me. There’s so much he kept inside that I found out years later. I can’t think of all that he did without missing him, tearing up again and again at the loss.

But when I smell butterscotch or licorice, I can’t help but smile.