“I really have to go. Breakfast is ready.”
“Ok.”
“Wait! Don’t you want to know what we’re having?”
“Yes Beth.” He doesn’t mean it. But it doesn’t matter. This is part of my Teach Dad by Example campaign.
“Local eggs, sweet potatoes, quinoa and black beans.”
“Sweet potatoes for breakfast?”
“Think outside the box, Dad!”
“I only think out of the box.”
Pause.
“I don’t even have a box.”
This is true.
“Ok. Gotta go. Oh wait, John is turning 30 on Friday!”
“Good thing you’re getting married, you’re both old.”
“You think?”
“30 was the best year of my life.” Ignoring my question.
I can hear that thing in his voice, that time-traveling tone. Both reverence and sadness for the passing away of time.
“What was so great about being 30?”
“I was single and I owned a bar!”
He says this very matter-of-factly, like this is the universally celebrated Holy Grail of “Best Year of Your Life,” requisites. If we were sitting next to each other, and not talking on the phone, he might have slapped me on the back of my head for affect.
“That was also the year you got me you know!?”
I’m his personal historian, if for no other reason to ensure my place in the story.
“Yes. That’s another reason it was the best year.”
Yeah right, but I’ll take it.
“Bye dad. I’ll call you later.”
Dad’s best year gave me one of the best days of my life. I remember exactly no more than the first hour of this fantastic day.
I wake up in my new bed, a princess waterbed (don’t laugh!) a bar patron gave Dad to help him accommodate his new roommate: his seven year-old daughter.
I dress, put my hair in the customary ponytail, brush my teeth and then poke my single, bar owning, 30 year-old, dad’s arm until he wakes up.
On the way to school—the ancient and dilapidated only public school in town—he asks if I’ve had breakfast.
We pull over at a convenient store and walk in together. Is this the first time I’ve gone alone with Dad to a store? I think so. Until this morning, I never went anywhere without my little brother and sister in tow. Things are different now. They live with mom. I live with dad.
I pick out a plastic wrapped banana-nut muffin and a pint of chocolate milk. I play it cool so he doesn’t think he’s spoiling me. Every Roberts child knows: nothing ruins a good time, in our family, like an entitled kid.
Then, Dad does the coolest thing anyone has ever done in the history of cool things: he drives around the school block (twice!) to give me time to finish eating my giant muffin.
I hop out of the pickup truck just as the other kids are filing into the red brick building.
It’s the first morning I’ve ever walked into Roosevelt Elementary donning a chocolate milk mustache over a smile.
For this second grader, best days come easy but not often.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
SEX, BUSES and OTHER AWKWARD CONVERSATIONS
My dad never talked to me about sex or what it meant to be a woman, although he did ask me if I needed anything from the store once.
“Do you need anything from the store?”
A highly unusual question indeed. “Um, no.” Immediately wishing I’d
said ice cream.
There are plenty of great treats to be found when you live above a
bar: an endless variety of individual sized bags of potato chips, a
half a dozen choices of soda from the gun, deep fried anything,
barrels of ranch dressing, un-inventoried Zimas.
But never ice cream.
He asked again. “Are you sure you don’t need anything?”
What was the strange emphasis on “anything” for?
“Are you sure you don’t need something?” Third time’s the charm. I got it. He was asking his 13-year-old daughter if she needed “something” he wasn’t comfortable saying from the store. Gross! One of his bartenders must have told him it was time to start asking me what I needed from the store.
I’d rather eat raw onion than ask him for “something,” from the store.
I missed out on the New Kids On The Block phenomenon because I didn’t have the guts to let dad think I liked little-girl stuff. Instead I endured wearing Motley Crew t-shirts to slumber parties, when the other girls all donned full length JOEY nightgowns. Mothers whispered about my “street smarts,” and politely suggested to their daughters that I be left off the next birthday party invite list.
It’s true; I went to great lengths not to be mistaken for a kid. But I never said I wanted to be a woman.
I was across town visiting my mother for a weekend when she sat me down for what would be the only Sex Talk of my life.
She started into the conversation with the same subtlety I’d come to expect from her. “Your cousin Jenny is pregnant.”
Jenny is five years older than I. Only a few years earlier she was my favorite babysitter. Once, when I asked for cheese on my hotdog, she tossed a slice of American right into the pot with the boiling hotdogs. We still talk about it.
Mom continued, getting straight to her thoughtful advice, “Don’t have sex. But if you are going to have sex, get one of your friends”—she said “friends” kind of snidely, she resented my having friends—“and get on a bus and go to Planned Parenthood in Scranton.”
That was it. Everything I needed to know about sex in under a minute.
She stood up and left for another room. I slipped a single Marlboro cigarette from her soft pack—I’d been eying it the whole time—and walked out.
Who does she think I am? My friends and I haven’t even started to think about...Public Transportation. I’d only ever been on yellow buses, the kind you don’t have to tell the driver where you’re going, the kind of buses that haul kids around like cattle on the way to the slaughter house, or school, whatever.
Scranton was 16 miles north. Who knew how far away Sex was?
“Do you need anything from the store?”
A highly unusual question indeed. “Um, no.” Immediately wishing I’d
said ice cream.
There are plenty of great treats to be found when you live above a
bar: an endless variety of individual sized bags of potato chips, a
half a dozen choices of soda from the gun, deep fried anything,
barrels of ranch dressing, un-inventoried Zimas.
But never ice cream.
He asked again. “Are you sure you don’t need anything?”
What was the strange emphasis on “anything” for?
“Are you sure you don’t need something?” Third time’s the charm. I got it. He was asking his 13-year-old daughter if she needed “something” he wasn’t comfortable saying from the store. Gross! One of his bartenders must have told him it was time to start asking me what I needed from the store.
I’d rather eat raw onion than ask him for “something,” from the store.
I missed out on the New Kids On The Block phenomenon because I didn’t have the guts to let dad think I liked little-girl stuff. Instead I endured wearing Motley Crew t-shirts to slumber parties, when the other girls all donned full length JOEY nightgowns. Mothers whispered about my “street smarts,” and politely suggested to their daughters that I be left off the next birthday party invite list.
It’s true; I went to great lengths not to be mistaken for a kid. But I never said I wanted to be a woman.
I was across town visiting my mother for a weekend when she sat me down for what would be the only Sex Talk of my life.
She started into the conversation with the same subtlety I’d come to expect from her. “Your cousin Jenny is pregnant.”
Jenny is five years older than I. Only a few years earlier she was my favorite babysitter. Once, when I asked for cheese on my hotdog, she tossed a slice of American right into the pot with the boiling hotdogs. We still talk about it.
Mom continued, getting straight to her thoughtful advice, “Don’t have sex. But if you are going to have sex, get one of your friends”—she said “friends” kind of snidely, she resented my having friends—“and get on a bus and go to Planned Parenthood in Scranton.”
That was it. Everything I needed to know about sex in under a minute.
She stood up and left for another room. I slipped a single Marlboro cigarette from her soft pack—I’d been eying it the whole time—and walked out.
Who does she think I am? My friends and I haven’t even started to think about...Public Transportation. I’d only ever been on yellow buses, the kind you don’t have to tell the driver where you’re going, the kind of buses that haul kids around like cattle on the way to the slaughter house, or school, whatever.
Scranton was 16 miles north. Who knew how far away Sex was?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
