When
I raised my eyes again, I saw him deep inside his doorway, waiting for me,
watching me. When my courage began to
falter, he knew. Just when I was about
to turn back, he stepped forward out of the shadow to show himself more
clearly. I recognized him by the shirt
he wore, a popular style that year with large panes of pastels, blue and pink
and yellow and green, colors I associated with safety the rest of my life.
My
father knew me well. As a child, I sometimes wondered if he read my mind. Later in life I recognized we had almost
identical ways of thinking and brooding, doubting and procrastinating. Mentally, we might have been twins born
thirty years apart.
Mostly,
he left me alone. I wasted much of my youth in a manner that would scandalize any
modern parent, intent as they are in ensuring their child's efficiency and
productivity. When I look back on my
high school days, I see misty mornings and lazy afternoons, with time on my
hands during the long stretch of summers.
The early hours of a day held so much promise, but my young fires burned
hot and quick, leaving me drained, spent on myself. There were myriad mornings in July and August
when the hours lay before me full of interesting tasks … things to write, to
draw, to plan, to accomplish. As the day warmed and the katydids raised
their whining voices in praise of the hot sun, I squandered my time, letting it
seep away until I burned with disappointment.
And having wasted the morning, I would fritter away the afternoon, first
in self pity and later dreaming about the wonderful day coming tomorrow and all
the projects I would finish.
In the evening I crawled into bed and sleeplessly
worried about tomorrow, doubting I would fare better in my struggle to be free
of the ennui that gripped my young soul.
Always focused on a fuzzy point somewhere in the future, I neglected the
present and the need to engage it, as though I was unaware of the obvious, that
I would never be here again. I seemed
always to be somewhere else, not where I should have been.
My father didn’t push me. I was fifteen before I wondered why he never
complained about my lethargy. Perhaps he
remembered his own youth and knew I would survive, that inside me a small clock
was set to ring at the right time. And
it did, although by then my father was gone.
I was still a young man when he died.
I stood beside his bed as he sighed for the last time. His soul got up and left. I felt as I had years before as a little boy when
I sat crying on my mother’s porch in the
hot afternoon sun, the whining katydids mocking
me as I stared down the block and wished my father would come home.
And after a year he did. But like everyone the world has ever held,
eventually he left for good.
After Dad’s grave-side service, workmen
stood by ready to roll up the fake grass and lower the casket into the
earth. I didn’t care if they waited all
afternoon, I wanted a few more minutes
with my father. I needed to say things
to him I had neglected.
I stood staring at the newly dug pit and discovered
I had no words. I thought only of that early morning when he watched as I
walked to his house, and how he stayed in the shadows until he was sure I couldn’t
go on without a little help. Of
everything he ever did for me, I remember that as the most caring.
As a chilly spring wind blew through the
rows of headstones, I walked up and placed
my hand on the casket. To the east, the
clouds broke on the horizon and scattered into pinks and warm greens and
golds. Inexplicably, I heard my father
shout and I swung around to the west where his voice had come from.
In
the distance, over the roof of the little chapel and beyond the tall pines that
circled the cemetery, I saw Eternity in
a sunset emblazoned on a sky of deep indigo blue, and knew my father had gone
there ahead of me. He was finally where he was meant to be.
A
majestic bank of purple clouds rolled up and away from the fiery sun and marched
toward the blackness of clouds gathering above me. The harsh, dark colors spoke
of danger, power, birth and death. I
tingled from head to toe with an exhilarating renewal of my spiritual nativity.
A strong spirit like a woman beckoned me away from the pastel skies of my
boyhood and pulled me towards a mature life, a tumultuous expanse of the
heavens above and ahead. I could have
refused, but my psyche burst from my soul and my head spun with delirium at the
possibilities to be lived.
Born
in that moment was the day I call my adult life, a bright morning of promise
and an afternoon of achievement, love, loss and a few times of failure. I often forgot I had the same mind as my
father, but with different opportunities.
Still, I would re-make many of his mistakes.
As
the years went by I seldom noticed the slanting sun telling me it was getting
late. The hours rolled on and on and
seemed not to be numbered, but they were.
My
life has now reached its evening and someday when the purple sunset rolls up to
crown my journey, thundering upon me as a great cloud of blackness, I will
dread it and I will have no words. I
will have to accept that it is finished and I must leave. I will never be here again. I will be elsewhere, finally where I’m
supposed to be, but hopefully not where I deserve to be.
copyright 2011, David
Griffin
The Windswept Press
Murrells Inlet, South Carolina
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