matchbook

Because I am full of love, I am full of sorrow.

~Kristjana Gunnars, The Prowler

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1.

From here you can reference endings, beginnings, and all in-between. We had accepted the offer, four days of a back-and-forth that continued to put our days on edge. What if someone else had stepped in during that period, turning our attempt to reduce the price into a bidding war? What if, after forty or fifty showings, we were forced to continue looking? We had already come home. Both girls in their sketchbooks, in process of picking, sorting and designing their bedrooms.


2.

Here, we do not discuss my father: he withered, as the cancer replaced him. My father, a dried shell: focusing his personality into a pinprick. He’d been always a prick, my wife countered. A needle, driven deep into the hearts of whomever came close.

A mistake rarely repeated. There were always exceptions.

 

My cancer-father, the lepidopterist. His family and friends reduced to a sequence of pinned insects. A shadow-box, butterflied.


3.

During hospital stretches, chemo burned through his layers. I sat mute, reading Don Quixote. I read in patches, more often rereading. Sections that would not absorb.

The hospital smelled of pennies, burnished steel. Of blood. Incrementally beige. Technologies tear us to pieces. My father, who raged into deflation. There was no air for him left to breathe.

My greatest achievement: my failure to properly read Don Quixote.

           Failure, perhaps, being all I required.

 

 

4.

As a teenager, I raged, and I raged. We, each, a mirror. Then my best friend’s father introduced me to the game of golf, slow putts in the backyard of their suburban duplex. A singular, meditative sport. A game of scotch and poems that rhyme may have saved my stupid life. I began to dream of languid greens, and small white specks that disappear in baby blue.

Perhaps it is impossible to know.


5.

My grandfather, who, over the course of five decades, won and lost enormous fortunes.

       A curious pleasure inherent to the telling of old stories. With each subsequent exchange, the story modifies, refuses to remain static. Neither, storyteller. To say, you cannot step into the same river.

        After reading his biography, I am re-reading a novel by Richard Brautigan. The novel, too, has changed.

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6.

Homeowners. We tear at the topsoil, attempt to correct the exterior grading, touch up moldings, add new gutters across the boundaries of a roof that will require eventual replacement. We feel terrified, grown up, abandoned. Switching from renters to owners, my wife and her binder of house-related mathematics, from mortgage to water bill to property taxes.


7.

The difference between renting and owning: a series of phone calls, an interruption of work, and an outlay of cash. Handyman, eavestrough company, foundation guy, plumber. The woman who helped replace oil with gas. She had large hands, a kind smile and practical eye. Proudly showed us digital snaps of her toddler.


8.

Not all good deeds remain unpunished.

I abandoned Don Quixote. I could not even keep up with failure. I began to see ghosts, staring through my periphery. An anxious exhaustion, both physical and emotional.

           God draws out his plans, Sheila says, attempting a comfort. I don’t know what to believe.

 

When the girls were born, my father laughed. Twins, he said. It’s almost enough for me to believe in a higher being. Someone is obviously punishing you. He wouldn’t refer to them again.


9. 

Misery might love company, and in many ways, he was a company man. Since the death of my mother, he simply folded. He became untenable.

Without her support, he no longer floated above the surface waves of anger.

And yet, with the completion of his estate, and I the only remaining living relative. Enough to allow a considerable down-payment for a three-bedroom bungalow.

We required the space. But still.

Can I allow this as a gift, a parting?