squatting too long. In the distance, I see one of the hunters walking along our property line. We have red laminated signs nailed on trees that warn them not to hunt on our land, but they aren’t all to be trusted. A deer comes into view between the hunter and me. The hunter turns. I can’t be certain that he sees me on the other side of his prey. I duck. He doesn’t shoot. The deer moves on.
It’s easy for me to make up a history of my father, whom I barely know. To imagine him a cold man, a feckless army cook, a heartless father. It takes little imagination and less creativity to construct this caricature.
But on the Fourth of July when deep within his being a tremor moves slowly and constantly like water at the bottom of a frozen river, it’s difficult for me to hold on to this image of him. Instead, I’m left with a feeling that resembles empathy, which makes me uncomfortable.
July 11th
I spend too much of my life on guard as if I were a dutiful soldier patrolling the parapet and waiting for the enemy to approach on the horizon. I’m obligated to guard against the intrusion of my father’s morals and ethics, which have no room for people like me.
Normally, I catch these intrusions before they can form into thoughts. When they are still fragments of unconnected memory, I quickly stow them away in a portion of my brain that I keep locked down like an impenetrable vault where stolen treasures are kept.
For example, when I’m driving to the house upstate and come up behind a slow driver on the Taconic Parkway, a curse rises up in me that has its origins in my father’s mouth when as a boy I sat in the front seat of his Oldsmobile. We were going to the hardware store for a replacement blade for his jigsaw so that I could complete a birdhouse for my 4-H project. He didn’t like for his sons to use his tools because we inevitably broke them or misplaced them. My mother, though, had insisted that I use the jigsaw because she saw my participation in 4-H as a way to get me out of my shell. The blade broke when I tried to move the jigsaw against the grain of a piece of plywood.