When I was a child, I thought my father was invincible. He
wasn’t a man of large stature, quite the contrary, in fact. On his best days,
he may have been 5’9”, but his gregarious personality always gave him at least
another five inches in height. His lopsided grin would light up a room and his
outlandish stories were larger than life. My father didn’t walk as a typical
man. He pranced about in a way everyone just knew he loved life.
My dad was a landscape architect in Los Angeles. He kept a
lot of high-end clients and big name Hollywood-type jobs, but he would joke
that he was just a fieldworker when he surveyed sites for large commercial projects.
His olive skin would bake to a golden bronze for the duration of our Southern
Californian summers, making him the envy of middle-aged men his age; they were slaves
to their indoor cubicles while my father wandered endless properties of The Santa
Monica Mountains. I can remember very concrete characteristics about my dad,
like his soft, feathery, sand-colored hair and his gray-blue eyes, stormy as
the Pacific Ocean on overcast winter days.
My mom said she fell in love with my father for his sense of
humor, and my earliest memories of him are punctuated with silliness. He was
the one to give us horseback rides through our seventies orange shag carpet, runaway
wagon rides down the steep hill behind our house, wrestle us to the floor—tickling
us until we begged, “Uncle”, and the one to create nonsense in the kitchen for
the sake of entertainment while we ate our meals up at the bar. My dad loved
the attentive audience, I am sure of it, but as a kid, I was certain we were
the center of his world. He had four kids, but my father tended to each of us
as though we were his only.
He had a size 9 shoe and wore an impeccable manicure, though
he never did his nails. I remember thinking he had thoughtful hands. They were
never idle, and distinctly purposeful in their actions, both work and play. He
always wrote in capital block letters, meticulous as a typewriter. I think it
was all of his years over a drafting table that made him seem like he was artistically
sketching, even if just jotting down measurements of something around the house
that needed fixing. I still associate
the smell of Sharpie pens with him because I dare say my father knew few other writing
utensils.
I remember my
father’s mannerisms, like wincing while eating food so spicy, his eyes would
bleed tears of protest. “Tom!” my mother would scold him, “why do you insist on
using so much horseradish/salsa/jalapeno sauce/red pepper/Tabasco?” The
offending condiment was subject to change, depending on the dish de jour. He absolutely loved Mexican food and made no
apologies for his laughter over said suffering at the dinner table.
I think of him sitting at that dining room table, poring
over the morning newspaper, with his forehead cradled in one hand, while the
other casually balanced an unraveling cigarette. Those were the days when smoking was still
widely practiced and highly acceptable even indoors. Even in California. I can vividly
picture the looming cloud of tobacco exhaust scribbled around his head with the
morning sunlight streaming through our oversized picture window. For as foul as
the thought of that habit is to me now, smoking was somehow synonymous with my
father, and I likened the smell of it in his hair and clothes with an immortal
man.
Turned out my father wasn’t immortal at all. He was very
much human. He died unexpectedly of heart disease at 54 years young. A track
star in adolescence, and while not the portrait of health, my dad wasn’t
exactly the heart attack victim profile. He was never even slightly overweight,
though his often eighty-hour workweek didn’t agree with his blood pressure. His
sudden death in sleep was shocking and left me void of acceptance and
understanding for a very long time. I was twenty-three when he died, but
overnight I found myself feeling like a lost child.
My father wasn’t a perfect man. He made many mistakes and I
hated him for the years that followed my parents’ divorce. In life, it’s so
easy to keep a record of wrongs against people, but when they die, it seems we
manage to only remember their really beautiful qualities. I think knowing what
I know now about life and love and marriage and mistakes, it’s so much easier
to forgive a man I wanted to forget for so long and instead keep the precious
few memories I have of him to honor all of the things he did right.
As an adult, I find so many of the memories of my father
have faded. It was never something I intended to happen…they just sort of got
away from me as new experiences began to occupy the forefront of my brain and
the older ones were slowly filed into the dark, less assessable compartments.
It was too painful to think that my father had lost his invincible status and
easier to just think of him as invisible, out in the frayed periphery of my
past life but no longer in the forefront.
It’s been fifteen years since my father passed away, and I
still cannot bring myself to rummage through old photos of him. It’s actually only
very recently that I can willingly retrieve some of the memories I have of him
from my childhood. Somehow the pictures
of him in my head are less painful than those on paper. Perhaps I still want to immortalize him in my
own way, not as the camera depicted him. I don’t think of his soft, sandy hair
slowly giving way to gray or his weather-worn face wearing any wrinkles. Photos
would betray the vibrant picture I keep of my youthful father in my head.
I know that one day I will want to go through the old photo
albums for a more authentic story of my father and I will be willing to share
the photographs of the grandfather my children came up shy of meeting by only a
handful of years. I will use those pictures to illustrate the hilarity of him picnicking
with us on the beach in Malibu, making pistachio pudding as he danced on the
avocado green linoleum kitchen floor, and building intricate clubhouses in our
wooded backyard. And if my kids ever ask, I am going to tell them to take an
abundance of pictures of their own father, because we know no man lives
forever, and the details of his life—no matter how noble or insignificant—inevitably
erode over time.
