Thanks to the team at The Rush Magazine for providing a home for this very short, very personal piece.
(More about my relationship with my old man and his father, excerpted from the memoir Please Talk about Me When I’m Gone.)
Inheritance
I never heard my father tell his father he loved him. His dad, a man of few words, said how he felt to everyone, often, toward the end of his life—as if he’d been saving up for it, or silently practicing for years, waiting impatiently for a time when it would be appropriate, even necessary.
They did, however, always kiss one another. It was, somehow, neither perfunctory nor intimate; it was part instinct, part ritual, an inheritance of sorts.
As a child, like most young boys, when I’d awaken, with a start in the darkness, I’d call for my mother. When she’d arrive, she usually didn’t have to say anything, and within seconds I’d fall back asleep, as if I’d climbed back into her womb, magically calmed by the warm waters within her.
Other times I would lay for seconds that stretched into tiny centuries, calling out the same words in a singsong voice cracking with expectancy and anxiety. Eventually, my father would come in, always wearing only his pajama bottoms, no matter what time of year. I would feel the peculiar combination of fear, disappointment, and reassurance that only boys of a certain age experience when they wake up in the middle of the night, wanting a mother and getting a father. (Why fear? It was something about his bare chest; the skin and hair at all other times concealed by collared shirts or t-shirts with stained underarms—this authenticity vaguely unwelcome; the opposite of what I saw in cartoons and coloring books.)
And my father, also a man of few words, would say softly, at once a command and request: go back to sleep. Before he left me, alone and in the dark, he would always lean down and give me a kiss. It was never enough, but it had to be. And, no longer an infant, I was beginning to accept the obligation of some accountability, this understanding handed down like an heirloom.
