His son was in my college class so he agreed to speak at our senior banquet, tablecloths and ties in a high-ceilinged dining hall, and during dessert a slide show of our baby pictures, after which he stood at a podium and mused about what it must be like for us to see ourselves as toddlers. Hearing him imagine reality from our perspective of watching remembered reality made me think that this was what made a person a writer and vice versa, because it was him up there too, snapping away with an Instamatic. What he said could have been said by any of our fathers— teachers, postmen, lawyers— but the banquet committee knew who we wanted to hear and I knew what I wanted to be.
She’s nothing like her older sister, May— no waving her hand, blurting answers, borrowing my books, lending me hers. The younger sister, you could say, suffers by comparison— quiet, slow to smile, hard to read. When class ends she gathers her things and leaves, none of May’s leisurely post-class “Isn’t there someplace you’’re supposed to be, May?” chats. Here’s the thing about personality— it’s like a great fancy coat handed out, neither asked for nor earned. That’s the part of May I miss, that makes me feel petulantly un-responded to and un-entertained by her sister, but what’s underneath the coat is personality too, not its lack, no matter how we act.
She moves muttering along the car, and it’s unclear if she’s selling or telling or channeling or answering voices or who knows? a prophet, as it’s always on even this unbeliever’s mind to note whom he turns his back on, and fails to hear, heed, help, or humble himself before.
He’d visit me on weekends and vacations, the usual custody deal, staying up later as he got older, watching reruns of Seinfeld or Raymond, and long after I turned out my light I’d hear him guffawing, a sound I still summon when stress or sadness reminds me to dwell on something good. All he needed was a sofa, TV, refrigerator access, the impunity to let his stinky socks lie where he’d toed them off his feet, and, I like to think, present if not visible, me.
He called me polite, as if this set me apart from the other fathers, none of them so polite that their sons would think to say so in an English assignment. They’re civil in their greetings, but I’m exceedingly cordial, an almost aggressive pleaser, or non-displeaser, who thinks of gruff types as more capable of intimacy because politeness makes for a kind of veneer between people, a ritual of consecutive oaths like formal bows that brings them no closer to one another than if they sent ambassadors to negotiate on their behalf, whereas the guy who barges, blurts, and leaves leads with his personality as it were, diplomacy be damned. I can’t say how my son would feel about having a barger/blurter for a dad; he’d probably just call me tough, tall, or a good driver, leaving manners out of it. He doesn’t know how growing up with alcoholism leaves one loath to rile or oppose, which makes politeness a quality that I have more than one that I want, but still one I want for him, even intimacy be damned.
1. Dillinger’s toe tag humanizes him the photographer must have thought, admitted into the morgue with his flashbulbs, a gangster’s mythic toughness reduced to corns and shiny skin. 2. Waiting for the train, I stand next to a guy who seems average everything, height, dress, looks, and wonder whether at times of great anxiousness I exude blandness, no inner turmoil showing through like hot spots in a thermal image. If only appearance ran deep enough to inhabit. 3. JFK once said about grave decisions he had to make— “These things have always been done by men, and they can be done now”— a frail man in a regal room following his mortal judgment.
She’s so blandly curious, blandly creative, blandly articulate, blandly a good writer, I crave a new category grounded in originality to grade her down on. A’s on essays, 100&rsqujo;s on quizzes— how to address her deficiency, the need to be less competent at this and more inspired at that, like the boy whose answers with half the minimum required words show twice the maximum expected imagination. Knowing her, she’ll press for specificity on what she can remedy, when all that she needs is to be a little bit worse.
Let’s just say I was hardly light of tread and if it hadn’t been apt, perfect in one boy’s whispered approval, and I hadn’t immediately, stupidly let on my dismay, it wouldn’t have stuck. As for the kid a grade ahead who liked me but thought it funny when I clomped down the hall in a crowd at his heels after a teacher caught a whiff of cigarette smoke and neared, knocking on dormitory doors, how could he fail to foresee what I knew instantly, the swarming content of what he said— a label I hated based on a physique I regretted in a school where I was unhappy and hungered for both the affection contained in his and the familiarity coloring the others’ naming, just enough to make me think that by virtue of being branded I belonged.
I used to counsel her like a grizzled sage, reminding her more than once that I was twice her age. She wanted everything the way youth does, as if exuberance created opportunity and time, as if one could go out and stay home, partake and decline. Then she moved away and had a child and now she’s back, no longer half my age, and with maturity, I assume, however one acquires that— through time or trial, or having to protect a life more knuckleheaded and fragile than one’s knuckleheaded, fragile own. I look forward to seeing her, full of the gravitas she lacked, though it would be welcome if she’s not, if what I took for youth was character—hers— and she could teach me this time, minus the patronizing words.
I know my place as a man who never has had and never will have this experience, meaning shutting up is advisable and I would, not wanting to field any arguments of the what could you know about it kind, or let down the liberal side, except insofar as I might ever feel or have felt the pain, more grief than guilt, borne, not banished, by which one knows there was something and then there wasn’t and it was something one would have loved.
Michael Milburn teaches English in New Haven, CT. His poems have appeared as a Mudlark Poster in 2014 and a Mudlark Flash in 2015. He has essays published or forthcoming in Kestrel, Eclectica, and Antigonish Review.