Monday, July 1, 2013

Daddy, Watch.


The sepia tones awash in the setting sunlight.  He steps back and says, “Daddy, watch.”  There’s not a moment I don’t watch.  Take in like a breath, knowing the air and these moments will disappear in a matter of seconds, or so it seems.  If we get 18 years with our children, one-third of my time with him has gone.  Six years...how?

The news of him came just past daybreak and just before Thanksgiving in ’06.  We were new at this, she and I.  The smoke of childhood still smoldering, still slightly aflame.  In our second home, making it our own. Painting walls. Hanging frames. Smiling.  Dreaming.  Knowing there was more and, soon, it would come.  I still feel that: the unknown.

His middle-namesake, my father, still sits in those moments.  In that 30-year old mind of mine, he would be there always.  Or at least another 20 years.  He lasted 20 more months.  Cancer filled his brain and our lives, shattered them beyond recognition.  Just 11 months after my own son’s birth, he passed on. 

I swore I wouldn’t be him — my father. His tendencies were the ache of Achilles to me. They wore me to the core.

The cancer wore him, revealing the best and sometimes the worst, though not in his own volition.  It ravaged his mind and stole his dignity.  But he remained and still remains. 

I love him.  I swore I wouldn’t be him.

But, I’ll be damned. 

That evolution seems impossible, stopping a river of time and genetics barehanded.  He appears in swatches.  His figure shrunken in my son’s outline. An odd feeling, seeing your father in yourself and your son at once.  One smile echoes another.  The same big-eared grin, 50 years and two generations apart.

And there he sits as if on my shoulder.  The inflection of voice, the tone of empty threats, the days on the sidelines, watching, coaching and hoping.  I find myself wandering at times, wishing for the invaluable but inaudible.

Given the One More Chance, I’m not certain I could speak.  Only mimic my son: “Daddy, Watch” as I point to the blond haired boy hitting the baseball and reading a book or his little sister dancing and singing.

My son will begin his second year in school in just over a month.  He’ll grow out of his hiking boots and baseball pants.  He’ll need a new shirt and make new friends. He’ll have his first innocent kiss.  Smiling, unaware of what just happened.  He'll grow and learn and move out.  Write his own story.

Time won’t stop.  It is cruel.  It is vastly unsentimental. It steals and dismantles.

“Daddy, watch,” he says.  I can’t turn away.  The fear of missing all of it, any of it, really, rises with me in the morning.  If only he knew how much I watch.