Raising Hell-ions

My Dad had a host of lesser “interests” aside from bread baking.   None of which seemed to operate fully simultaneously.  There would be varying degrees of overlap, but there was always one that was a main focus and the others would fade in and fade out or disappear altogether.  One of the interests constantly humming in the background was crocheting.  I saw the crochet needles like finger extensions.  It calls to mind the movie “Edward Scissorhands”, and much like Edward, he had no true “belonging” as a whole person; only performances that lent temporary solace within the various factions he oscillated in by duty (this could also be projection as I suffer the same predicament in this life).  There was no pleasure, no necessity; only duty.   For that reason, my dad; for all intents and purposes, was a true “gentleman”.  I do not want to get into complexities surrounding gender, morality nor any projected prohibitors keeping the reader from fully engaging in a journey they are not co-creating. 

Please trust that outside the confines of these pages, I am just as culturally competent, social justice oriented and insistent as the next well meaning asshole.  We all have an idea of the qualities of a “gentleman” in gender and ilk and sparing any argument regarding toxic gendered stereotypes, let’s use this general knowledge as a point of departure to discuss some of my father’s finer qualities.  The irony, of course, being that his having these less “manly” qualities does beg the question of which category of “man” did my father belong to?  With gardening, baking and crocheting, the answer could easily be that he belonged to no “man” at all, and no “woman” either, but a true child of  “God” the way it was meant to be understood, idealized and performed.   

Nevertheless, my father loved performing in sports when his ailing ankles would allow him, and he loved watching sports almost as much.  I would come home to find him on the sofa, his legs crossed and his knitting on his lap with the television tuned to a sports match.  He would have an array of snacks placed on a tray somewhere within arms length, a mason jar of juice or ginger ale or one of his own concoctions, and his reading glasses would be halfway down the bridge of his nose- watching the game over the rim and through them meticulously inspecting his stitches Or he would be fast asleep in the same scene only with his head pitched back, eyes closed, mouth agape aggressively snoring. 

When awake, if a big play was made or a ball was dropped, missed, intercepted or was found to be out of bounds, Dad would yell a series of half words and incoherent syllables and send his knitting flying.  When asleep, the same would happen, only Dad would not initially know the root cause, but would jump at the change in sportscaster energy or the resulting raucous sound from the crowd at a generic “completion of goal”, before rewinding it back to analyze the play.  He was less concerned with team loyalty, and more concerned with being the witness to a “good game”.  This meant that “the game”, any game, was ALWAYS on. 

Dad never ever cursed when displeased, and the closest he would come is yelling “I SWANY!” - “swany” being his substitute word for “swear”, something a good Christian, like my father would never do (and he would rather perish than blaspheme with the use of the Lord God’s name in vain).  He would eventually talk himself down from his furor by talking through the ideal game play to himself as it should have been, groping for his crochet needles and through his glasses correct whatever stitch might have been thrown free in his fit.  I always found these scenes endearing and they never got old to watch.  It seemed to me that in those times, my father was at his happiest.  There is nothing better than the stressless simplicity in things that bring joy (and money), and those knit hats would find their way into a trendy local craft store in a ritzy mall some miles away.  Underpriced, in that their true value was in the making, a genius piece of performance art choreographed by this massive man.  Taking that into consideration, it is hard to put a value on anything, writing about it is the equivalent to ‘performative pain/grief’.  I hope the reader understands the price that I pay here for my candor and finds it worthwhile.  

We were never poor come Christmas time. The holidays were celebrated with gusto and excitement.  Some time around Thanksgiving, I would dust off our Christmas records and the stairs to the attic would come down and the boxes of decorations would be brought down in an assembly line to be organized and untangled.  Dad would come home with a Christmas tree bargained or haggled for on a lot somewhere nearby.  If memory serves  me correctly, most of the trees had one bad side in which the branches and needles were sparse or nonexistent.  We would  simply put it in the corner or face it toward the wall, giving us two to three sides of lush tannenbaum to enjoy.  Dad’s homemade ornaments would be hung with care and popcorn would be made to string and hang, but mostly it ended up in our mouths, leaving the tree with only those pieces that were dropped on the floor or that were left when we had had our fill.  The house always smelled of honeyed ham and freshly baked bread.  The stove and oven were always on and cookbooks littered the counter.  Christmas was a time for cooking adventures and the kitchen became the social hub of the little house.

I learned at the age of four that this man called “Santa” did not exist and I could not have been more grateful at having this illusion shattered.  I had woken up at around 3am on Christmas morning and went downstairs to the kitchen to get a glass of water, and I saw Dad in his workshop off the kitchen building me a toy kitchen set out of wood.  I knew it was mine since it had been on my list that year.  I felt my heart swell with pride and love for Dad, a man who never seemed to need sleep (unless it came by accident whilst sitting in his usual seat in front of the television), and who always found a way to give us our heart’s desire - or some modification thereof.  To be honest, having a chimney violated by a fat red-faced white man that may or may not leave you a lump of coal never appealed to me anyway.  I gave up that fairy tale without reluctance.  

I don't even recall my parents perpetuating any “Santa'' myth, come to think of it. But later, after moving to the “hand me down” house on Gemena Rd, I remember Dad canceling gift giving in later years in order to give presents to other children in need.  We were the poorest people I knew at that time, so it was hard for me in those days to wrap my head around the idea that there was anyone worse off, I just knew that those roller skates and the easy bake oven were not making it under our tree.  But even after saying that we would not celebrate Christmas, there would always be a few small gifts to open on Christmas morning.  My favorite was a travel screwdriver kit allowing me to discover the inner workings of the household’s broken appliances and to fix my glasses which were in constant need of repair.  

Most gifts did not come in their original trappings of cellophane and cardboard with bright pictures of the joy the toy would bring; but would show up in shopping bags or wrapped in newspaper.  These gifts were found second hand in shops or at garage sales, yet I found that if you scratched at the  plastic on Barbie’s forehead and gave a sniff, it smelled like “new doll” and fresh plastic - that was the same as far as I was concerned.  Dad would remind us to give God thanks for the blessings and gifts we had received and praise him that we had lived to see another Christmas day. 

I think by eliminating the myth of the fat white man, we were not made to feel punished for being poor.  Believing in Santa meant that we were “bad”/”naughty” kids and that was why gifts were in short supply; instead of the fact that Mom and Dad provided what they could with what they had.  I remember those Christmases as being some of the best and most joyous.  It was those memories alone that spurred my desire to have a family of my own one day.  A child could romanticize almost anything, poverty included; especially when fueled by biblical texts touting that the meek will inherit the earth.  I figured it was just a matter of time before I would claim my birthright and take my throne. It is a shame that Dad would not be witness to this coronation, for he was the most devout man that I had ever known.

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Something else that Dad believed in with religiosity was sports.  I have already discussed his love of watching sports while knitting, but my father believed religiously in his children’s need to engage in sports.  Fall, Winter and Spring, we would need to come to Dad and declare which sport it was that we would be playing, and we all had to take part in something every single season.  It was a way to keep our hands and minds occupied.  It taught discipline and kept us out of trouble, and the extra few hours after school worked as an after school program of sorts delaying the time in which we would come home half crazed and at each other‘s throats; irritable with hunger.  

Dad was a big man.  At 6‘4, he presented an intimidating picture- all the more reason why those scenes of him crocheting in front of the television were so amusing.  At  times, I suspected that one reason Dad pushed us into sports was to live vicariously through us.  After he graduated from university in the seventies, he was drafted to the NFL and played tight end until an injury forced him to quit.  I think the story goes deeper than that since that was the same time that my parents separated.  I had heard of stories of infidelity which are not uncommon in the professional sports scene.  I would like to think that if the rumors were true, Dad quit the NFL to eschew any bad influence it had, wanting to remain a “good man” or become one once more.  

There was never much focus on school work that I can remember.  Maybe it was because I, myself, was always a very good student.  Even still, my siblings that struggled academically were never grounded or punished for bad marks.  I remember once receiving a C+ in a college course I was taking junior year of high school and my father’s punishment was to send me to bed without getting any Bojangle’s chicken, a treat from the local fast food restaurant.  I am of the mind to believe that if I had been a poor student all along, there would have been no chastisement, but since I was normally such a good student, the poor mark surprised him and he felt he had to show his disappointment in some anti-chicken disciplinary measure.  I was able to eat everything else, just not the chicken.  After graduating 10th in my high school graduating class and getting into an Ivy League school, I recall no celebration or ceremony, pomp or circumstance.  I received a “Goodjob, Pumpkin.”; nothing more. 

It was excellence in sports that was of the utmost priority.  Sitting through classes throughout the school day was simply a waiting room until practice began or a match started. 

In this way, intellect became a bi-product (if at all present) of sports; or maybe a conduit to the court - which was where the real work was performed, according to my father.   The idea was that an athletic scholarship would grant entrance to a university, wherein the relationship (or war) between smarts and sports would then change in favor of smarts.  To groom us for these various athletic endeavors, my father would rouse me and "The Others"’ up at 5AM on summer breaks and take us to the football stadium of the nearby university where we would run the steps and do sprint exercises, followed by tennis and a swim at the YMCA if we had performed well.  This was a love/hate relationship with exercise in which I hated the pain and effort of exercise but loved how I felt being in shape.  And so I became, at that time, a slave to the practice of perfection in performance.  “Perfect practice makes perfect”, as Dad would always state.

My father was a ubiquitous fixture at sporting events.  If I had a match at one location and one of "The Others"’ in another, I would hear and see Dad coaching and yelling from the sidelines, then he would disappear around half time and reappear on the sidelines, sometime in the fourth quarter or second half to “back seat” coach again and would either disappear once more and reappear with whichever of "The Others"” game overlapped my own, or excuse me from coach’s closing speech and rush me to watch the end of  one of "The Others"’s’ games.  In high school, my father gave up the pretense of being a spectator and eventually negotiated  for the position of assistant coach for basketball, track field, tennis, volleyball, football and cross country. 

His tireless and persistent presence is remembered as being a frustrating annoyance, although it touches my heart now in recognition of his dedication and love for his children. The man could exhaust a child even if he seemed inexhaustible himself at the time.  When I got older, the strain of poverty and the pull of many kids in college and various schools and extracurricular sports programs wore him down, and my pity on him extended to me downplaying the importance of my particular sporting event; freeing him up to sideline coach one of "The Others".  I would sometimes regret making myself so small, when left in a deserted middle or highschool parking lot, waiting for parents that would never show, before calling a close friend’s parent to pick me up and me stay the night.  Besides, even being the highest scorer on my team and giving consistent effort for his approval did not compare with breaking school records or joining state and national teams, as some of ‘The Other’s’ had done.  My value to the overall collective was not as visible, but I was allowed my space in the family anyway. 

Nevertheless, he had all his children’s best interest at heart and in mind at all times and his myriad of interests were given to us either directly through his teachings, or indirectly when sold off as quaint artisan wares.  Of course not all interests were winners and evidence of these failed attempts to turn his passions into pecuniary gain piled around the house and eventually took the place of his children both in physical space in the house and in his devotion.  It was on a trip home shortly before his death, when Dad first admitted to being seriously ill; and it became apparent that his collecting had slid almost seamlessly into hoarding.  I was made to stay at a friend’s house for the first month and a half until a space could be made for me in my parent’s home. 

In two months of cleaning, I never got as far as the couch.  I would find dead roaches whose deaths were a mystery, having not been crushed underfoot and there being no poison traps laid out for any unwanted intruders.  I chalked it up to “bad vibes” since there was nothing cohesive or in “flow” in that space.  Even the air seemed to stagnate and although there might be a breeze outside, even with all the windows, the wind refused to enter.  It was as if the house was dying and taking my father with it, or vice versa.  It was a shame that this shattered an illusion I had about my dad regarding his wisdom in all things, for there was no discernment to be found in the debris.  Still, for all of Dad’s faults and idiosyncrasies, he was still indisputably a “good man”. #nofilter