Father's Day

After the weekend I've just had, I certainly am inspired to write a great deal about my life. Unexpected things keep happening to me and it's been extremely gratifying. I sold my first article this week, and am really excited about getting my stuff out there. I've recently met some fascinating people, and have lately had such a perfect time discovering how to just be myself again. This has been the most surprising and wonderful time for me. The last few days have yielded nothing but smiles on my face. I feel like I could write quite a bit about things that have happened recently, and I will indeed, BUT... it's Father' Day. So instead of rambling on about me, I'm reposting this piece about my dad.

Happy Father's Day to all the Dads near and far. I know mine is with me today and everyday.

Chasing The Dandelions

When I think about all that has inspired me throughout my thirty three years, I recall friends and family that have made an impact on me in so many ways. More than anything, however, I think about my father. He died when I was twelve after a long illness, and sparked an inspiration that still flows in me today. I have been writing since then, and my passion has only gotten stronger. The way I recall our time together—though it was short, allows the words to flow.


I can remember tossing fuzzy green tennis balls across our hilly backyard until my arms felt like Jell-O and I thought they might come unhinged from their sweaty sockets. I remember the hot summer sun reddening my cheeks and warming my shoulders. It was three in the afternoon and I was nine years old. My catching counterpart was my dad, my best friend. It was a Saturday, and he was trying to teach me how to pitch better for the upcoming softball season. It was a day in August of 1986 that remains as fresh in my mind as this morning’s commute. My minds golden frame holds this memory so tightly, that it is impossible for it to become loosened, or fall apart with age.

Snuggly soft scents arose from the basement windows where my mother did the wash, and the squirrels danced along the clothesline, narrowly avoiding knocking the clean sheets to a dusty peril. We talked about life, however deep that can be at nine. Covering all the major concerns of soccer and baseball, and why mom made me go to bed when I could still hear my friends playing kick the can on the block well after the streetlights were on, made me feel like a real person.

Each Saturday was special. My dad and I would do all the tedious errands that did not fit into a sixty-hour workweek. After a hearty helping of his fluffy scrambled eggs that were legendary in our suburban bubble, we would drive to the dry cleaners, the post office, the bank, and the supermarket. Perhaps it would have been mundane if I was with anyone else, but I was in my glory every weekend. This particular August afternoon I had not bothered to apply the fifty proof sun-slime that my mom followed me around with each morning. It was a bit overprotective on her part, dousing me even as I went down the steps to get the mail. Yes I was fair, but the sticky sloop of lotion onto my shoulders was not a feeling that remotely inspired a fond summer memory. Neither did she, come to think of it.

On May 22, 1989, my father passed out of my life. Though it was a devastating time in my life, it also is the only time of my childhood that I can look back upon, and come away with a smile at the end of my musings, because thoughts of him could never get me mad or produce regret. At twelve years old, you have no idea what it will be like when someone that close to you dies. Sure, I knew what loss was. I lost my grandmother. I lost my dog. I lost my best friend on the block when she moved to California. But I could not comprehend that I had lost the greatest source of support that I had known.

Dad’s gray hair would stiffly remain in its fixed Navy style, even though a slight breeze came about. His Levis were crisp and ironed but his soft flannel shirt signified that it was a weekend indeed. The comforting scent of Old Spice wafted through the freshly cut lawn as I tried to jump for those hard catches that I never thought my arm would stretch to grasp, until I felt the ball in my glove.

As the soft leather was filled again and again with the thwap sound of the ball and the adrenaline surge of “I got it!” I smiled all over as I thought about how I was going to pitch the best on Wednesday and how lucky I was to have dad to teach me. My heart would do a little leap-plunge each time I heard “good catch” or “nice throw.” The dandelions on the outskirts of the yard marked the status of my catches. If I was standing amongst their bobbing, yellow, amused faces, I had made a catch of something thrown farther than I could previously reach. As I practiced more and threw farther; caught higher, the dandelions were more and more within my reach, tickling my Converses with their buttercup heads.

When I had surpassed the dandelions altogether, I was the captain of my grade school softball team, and the starting pitcher in most games. When I had come that far, even when I did not need to be further coached in the backyard, the smiles that wafted to me upon Old Spice breezes kept me throwing and catching with the same heartfelt want to be the best for my dad as it had on that August Saturday in 1986.

Saturdays were my time alone with my dad, and they were filled with trying to make me the best girl that I could be. There was never any pressure, or unreachable expectations. I loved practicing, and perfecting each little task that I did so I could show him what I had learned; show him how much of an impact he had on my life, show him how much I loved him.

When I was in school, just minutes from home, I wished that it could be the weekend every day. When I was invited to a sleepover, I think I was the only grade school girl that pondered whether it would be more fun than Parcheesi on the porch with my dad on a Friday evening. When I had a soccer game, I would look for my coach on the sidelines, and see my dad running alongside him; seeming to be the only parent that looked interested in the game and actually knowing how important it was to their kid to see them there. He was always there.

When I was twelve years old, I was about to apply to high schools, and decide which sport I would take along with me: soccer or softball. Both were my favorites, and it was a hard decision to make. If I went to New Dorp High School, I could play softball, and be attending a school that was five minutes from my front door. If I went to Notre Dame Academy, I could play on the citywide championship winning soccer team, but would have to travel for an hour, taking two busses every morning. As the time to make a choice drew near, I was unsure and nervous that I would make the wrong decision. Yet through all of my uncertainty, there was only one person who was beside me, telling me it was all right to just do what I wanted to do. Assuring me that if I happened to pick the wrong school for me, we would work it out, and I could transfer. If I had chosen softball, and ended up wanting to play soccer in high school, I could switch teams next year, and still be close to home. If I chose Notre Dame, I could always transfer to New Dorp if I hated the commute.

Any time I was stressed about the harrowing decisions of a grade school kid, there were words of reassurance from my dad waiting to console me, You’ll do the right thing or most importantly, I trust you to make the right choice. There was always an “I love you no matter what” following every moment of ten, eleven and twelve year old panic I might have experienced. I was never afraid to ask, and I always did what I wanted rather than follow all the other kids.

As a teenager, my mind was more wrinkled at the edges than it was wrapped around the thought that my dad was gone. I did not remember the sickness, which had devoured his powerful stature to a frail frame in a matter of ten months. I did not see hospital visits in my memories of him. I did not see a single ambulance through the bottom of the whiskey bottle I carried with me, nor did I catch a glimpse of tearful family through the cloud of smoke that I enveloped my exhausted mind with, as I drifted on that discarded piece of plank that was high school. Through the whole damn misery that was thirteen to sixteen, I was waiting to get over something that had not even fully hit me yet.

When I was seventeen years old, I decided that I could not keep my anger in my heart anymore. That heart was now far from empty, even broken another time by then. I refused to let loss become a thing that I had to embrace. I wanted to tell every single person that I had ever met, and then the rest of the world even louder that it hurts! It hurts more than being in three car accidents, breaking ankles skating, cracking kneecaps on the soccer field, jamming fingers on the basketball court, and breaking your nose in a fistfight. It was a worse pain that cutting your wrists, having your stomach pumped for combining Valium and vodka, and by all means, it hurts far, far worse than losing a child.

And then, the pain was dulled for the first time in six years. For the first time since I had a little piece of my existence rubbed away as I held a cool cloth to my dad’s balding head after radiation and chemotherapy in the same week, to form the first of many fruitless cocktails that only made my best friend suffer more...I felt less. Not less love or less memory for the man who was my life. Certainly not less of an empty space in my heart where the Dad Place was. Yet for the first time since he was gone, he was right there with me.

As I sat in the woods behind a schoolmate’s house, furiously scribbling in my black and white notebook, sitting amongst dead leaves, broken glass, and burnt remnants of someone’s house, I felt my father blow my hair out of my eyes, tell me to put down the joint, and peel me off of the crumbling foundation where we sat passing the days from eight to four. I walked back up to the road, got on a bus to my mother’s house, which I had never felt was a comfortable place for me. It was surreal the way the brown oak door loomed over me. It took every ounce of strength I had to knock on it. The door I used to peer out of for his car each evening was stupendously huge. In the putridly rose colored living room, the words refused to come. Collapsing on the kitchen floor in tears, where I used to do my homework while my dad ate dinner, he managed to squeeze a single word out of me, “sorry.” And the numbness coursed down my pink cheeks in streams of frustration and years of pain and loss.
It’s a powerful thing; the hate a young girl can feel for the world. More powerful is the hate she can seethe onto the people around her. Even stronger is the reckless thought that no one else has been where she is. No one feels what she feels. Yet most overwhelming of all is the process of learning how to spill her anger, hate, and her love onto a page. I think this girl may have exhausted the supply of blue medium point Bic pens in the early nineties trying.

Though I had been through the mill by age eighteen, I also had seen that the pain of my own and that of others around me was only growing. I decided to erase the opaque specter that had been inflicting so much hurt with my pencil, and redrafted my life in ink. Not only did I manage to find consolation and understanding in a mom who was there all along, but I found that she was hurting as much as I was. She had not only lost a husband, but for a while, her daughter was simply gone from life.

“Pick a sport by what you feel better doing. Would you rather beat the crap out of something for four years, or be constantly running after something you never know if you will be able to catch and control?” At first I thought that this analogy between softball and soccer was too dramatic. But it did narrow down my choices. I could control anything...right? As long as there are words to express it, I will sit each afternoon on the porch with my dandelions and tell my dad all about it. There are so many choices that a young person must make. Losing someone who had always been there for you can undoubtedly make those decisions all the more terrible. Yet it is crucial to remember that there is always someone who knows what you are feeling.

I know now that as I live day to day, that my father is right here, with me. He is in my heart, my thoughts, and in my mother’s eyes when she tells me she is proud of me. I always think about how wonderful the years that I shared with my dad were. Remembering the trips and outings that he would take me on was a huge part of how I began to write. I will never forget all of the fun we had, all of the laughs that were between only us. And at the risk of sounding extremely wistful, I will never overlook how special the inspiration of my dad was in getting me through all of the rough times I have had. Whether I brought them on myself, or life just kicked me in the ass, he has always pulled me through. I finished college, moved out on my own for the right reasons, and begun to understand the incessant ramblings that fill 23 black and white notebooks with the pain of life and loss. Through cherishing memories, I have learned to love myself.