On My Watch

house in mist — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Joyce Tomlinson

My only job for the next few hours is to stay in this small home in the outskirts of Seattle with my ninety-one-year-old father and make sure he doesn’t start a fire in the kitchen or wander away from the house he built himself, but now doesn’t always recognize. Every other Thursday, I show up here to give my stepmother a break. Dad seems more confused every time, but his wife, Donna, says that he has good days and bad. I like to take him out to lunch or for a drive, but today Dad is tired and wants to stay home. He’s asleep now, his recliner tipped back and a quilt covers his long legs, even with the thermostat set at eighty-five degrees. A scrawny slippered foot dangles out from under the blanket; a gnarled hand grasps the quilt’s edge. From the sofa across the living room, I look up from my book every few minutes to watch his chest to make sure there is still movement. I’m petrified that he’ll die on my watch.

Behind Dad’s chair is a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking North Seattle’s Thornton Creek, and a forest of alder trees. My father designed this A-frame house for Donna soon after they were married in 1965. The small rooms are uncluttered: my stepmother’s piano against one wall, a few stacks of books. A seashell collection is arranged next to pictures of their thirty-eight-foot sailboat on the coffee table. Although for years a visitor would find no evidence of my father’s children here, these days, there are also photographs of my sister Linda and me on the kitchen counter labeled with our names, so that Dad will be able to place us in case we stop by.

Dad’s normally thin frame has become skin and bones, his slacks cinched in at the top with a belt on the last hole. When he goes outside, he uses a cane, or sometimes a walker, but in the house he hangs on to the wall or the back of the couch, lurching from one stationary object to the next across the room. Around noon, when he rouses for lunch, I’ll watch each precarious, rickety step he takes from his chair to the kitchen table, and whisper under my breath, don’t fall, don’t fall.

Dad can still recite stories from his distant past; snatches of childhood are sometimes clear in his mind. More recent information becomes confused, bits of one event merging with another. Faces become indistinguishable. One day he might see his deceased brother in the room, or I might register in his brain as his mother or his wife.

I wait for the moments when I’m me. Over the years, I’ve longed for time alone with my father. I’ve called him on the phone once or twice a month for decades, but Donna invariably picks up the extension to join the conversation. Back before his mind went, he and I occasionally arranged to meet for lunch at a coffee shop. She came along. Now, when I finally have my father to myself for a few hours, he will no doubt wake up from this nap today, look at me quizzically and ask, “Who are you?”

•••

Before my parents divorced in 1961, my family lived in this same neighborhood, the one where my dad and Donna live. On the way here this morning, I took a detour and stopped in front of my childhood home. Dad built that house, too, overlooking the same creek and woods. For years I’ve avoided driving by the old place; too many memories. But on this day I felt compelled to see the home where our family started out.

Back in the 1950s when we moved into our house in the suburbs, this was a new development teeming with young families. I ran with a pack of kids around my age, splashing in the creek and racing on our bikes. Our dads, mostly salesmen and small business owners, barbecued out on the carport, while our housewife moms sipped cocktails on the patio.

I remember my mother in an apron, singing as she cleaned the house. Showing me how she walked the runway as a part-time model for the Ship ‘N’ Shore Blouse Company. My dad, the jokester, hung our clothes in the branches of a tree outside our house if my sister and I left them on the floor. He owned a construction company, and between jobs he took on the task of packing our sack lunches and getting us to school. On those days I peered into my brown bag with apprehension, expecting to find a raw potato or a lemon, waxed paper between the bread of my sandwich. He didn’t like to discipline; instead, he commiserated with us behind our mother’s back after we’d been scolded. He was stingy with that part of himself, and with his time, away for long stretches working in other cities or out on his boat alone.

If I turned left and headed west down a short hill, I’d end up where my mother’s lover Bruce once lived with his wife and their three children. Back when I was seven, when I was eight and nine, I was oblivious to any friction between my parents, though plenty existed. My mother’s infidelity might have triggered their split, but based on the rigor with which she clung to her bitterness toward my dad, I believe she had her reasons for being unfaithful. All her days, she held fast to anger, the only emotion between my parents for a good forty years.

My sister Linda severed her relationship with our mother ten years before Mom died in 2001, and, in the last few years, has done the same with our dad. Maybe Linda can’t face our parents’ aging. Or she may have decided peace of mind is possible for her only if she’s shed of her family. She’s lumped me in with our parents and refuses to speak to me about it, so I have lost my sister, too, at least for now.

On this day, as I drove to my father’s house to face the deterioration of his brain, his slow fade from life, I asked myself why I still try to connect with him. Do I think caring for him will fill a hole in me, created when I was ten, twelve, fifteen, and he repeatedly left me behind? Am I bound to him by blood, no matter what has happened in the past? Why can’t I turn away like my sister has and wash my hands of the whole sad and messy process of death? Am I still the child who wants the thing she can never have, or is what I feel simply a daughter’s love? The only way I know to find the answers is to look hard at my memories of the fifty years since my parents’ bitter divorce.

I drove on then, east toward my father’s place, past houses where my playmates once lived. There are no signs of children in the old neighborhood now, no bikes in the yards, or basketball hoops mounted above garage doors. I should have expected these changes, after so many years. But I was surprised to see those barren streets, the graveyard of my childhood. I stepped on the gas, and looked at the road ahead.

•••

When my father wakes, I watch him try to figure out where he is. His eyes scan the room, and he blinks and shakes his head slightly before he asks the inevitable question, “Who are you?” Once I say my name, he smiles at me, relieved. In ten minutes he might decide that I’m Donna or his mother. He’ll need to be told many times why I’m here, that his wife is out shopping.

I take the sandwich out of the refrigerator that Donna prepared for him before she left—she knows better how to make it the way he likes—and warm up some canned soup. He ambles over to the kitchen table and lowers himself into his chair. I put his lunch in front of him and kiss the freckled top of his bald head. He smells of Old Spice, same as always. He thanks me, calls me “honey” so he won’t have to conjure my name.

While he eats his lunch, I show him pictures of my children’s families—his great-grandchildren—and try not to be hurt when he recognizes no one. He points a crooked finger toward a hummingbird hovering at the feeder outside the kitchen window. Along the windowsill are cards that he and Donna have saved, with pictures of boats on the fronts, or special notes inside, mostly from relatives. All but one or two of his friends have passed on.

I ask him about building this house all those years ago on what the city considered an impossible lot; the place sits on a steep hillside and is supported by wooden braces. He’s pricked by memory and recalls details that surprise me. He tells me that he built two houses in this neighborhood but lost the other one in his divorce. “I guess she sold it,” he says, forgetting that “she” was my mother, that our family lived in that house together.

I mention nothing about the past; instead, I pull my chair around to sit next to him. I lay my head on his shoulder and take his hand. We sit for a time. The only sound is the creek rushing past, the occasional birdsong from the woods. I point in silence to a fat squirrel, and we watch him scramble up the side of an alder and fling himself like an acrobat at a neighboring tree.

Then Dad clears his throat and says, “You know, honey, your ma and I didn’t plan for things to turn out the way they did.”

Startled, I lift my head and look into his momentarily lucid eyes. I find myself willing him back into his fog; the memories he might dig up are painful, and in that moment I want him spared. Or is it me I want to shield?

“I know, Dad,” I tell him before he forgets again. “I know.”

•••

JOYCE TOMLINSON is the mother of four and lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband of forty-three years. She received her MFA in Creative Writing for Pacific University, and her work has appeared in The Gold Man Review and in We Came to Say, a collection of essays. She is working on a full-length memoir about learning to accept human flaws and frailties, including her own.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

girlinwindow — By Gina Easley www.ginakelly.com

By Kim Kankiewicz

With the first lilting chords of the piano, we take the floor. The snare drum eases into a 6/8 shuffle. We melt into one another as the strings sigh the opening notes of the melody line. The horns respond with a glissando in the second verse, and we are afloat on liquid gold. We are bodies swaying in a collective embrace, in love with every-other-body in this place.

My dress is buttercup yellow, strapless with a sweetheart neckline. The chiffon skirt cascades over a crinoline of nylon netting. My hair is combed into a sleek bouffant, its curled-up ends grazing my bare shoulders. My dance partner wears a white sport coat and a crew cut. His face is indistinct, but no matter; he is not the point of this imagined memory.

The point is the convergence, the enfolding of each of us into all of us. The song, to which I have never really danced, is “Theme from A Summer Place.” In my reverie, we sway to the familiar instrumental recording, Percy Faith’s 1960 orchestral arrangement. But other artists—my favorite being The Lettermen in 1965—have recorded “Summer Place” with vocals. Listen and you will hear a song less about romance than about sanctuary:

There’s a summer place

Where it may rain or storm

Yet I’m safe and warm

For within that summer place

Your arms reach out to me

And my heart is free from all care…

•••

Since childhood, I have cast myself in fantasies with soundtracks from my parents’ youth. I was six years old in 1980, when my family moved to Nebraska and settled into the Craftsman house where my parents still live. The formal living room, unfurnished for nearly a year, was the theater where my brother and I performed “Rock Around the Clock,” “At the Hop,” and other teen anthems from the American Graffiti soundtrack.

In fifth grade, I pictured my sixth grade crush pining for me as I listened to Frankie Valli crooning “My Eyes Adored You.” Carried your books from school, playing make-believe you’re married to me. You were fifth grade, I was sixth, when we came to be. I knew no sixth grade boy would carry my school books—not least because I was the kind of kid who listened to the Four Seasons in 1985—but envisioning such a scenario made the unfamiliar territory of adolescence feel navigable. The same was true in the final months of my eighth grade year, when I sweet talked my dad into deejaying a sock hop at my middle school. With high school on the horizon, I imagined joining the letter jacket crowd, the clean-cut kids with social status. (That the sock hop itself was not imaginary is equal parts mortifying and miraculous.)

At no time were my retrospective daydreams more persistent than during my first year of college. Living in Kansas I was homesick, so homesick. Studying to the oldies and wearing vintage clothing bolstered my spirits, but the image that sustained me emerged from a trashcan in the bathroom of my residence hall. On my nineteenth birthday, I discovered a date stamp on the trashcan’s raised lid: October 10, 1967—the month and day of my birth and the year my mom entered college. Never mind that she had attended a different college; it seemed profoundly significant that this trashcan was installed when my mother was a freshman, seven years to the day before my birth.

The date stamp became my talisman. Glimpsing it as I left the shower each morning, I would borrow my mother’s courage for the day ahead. She too was homesick, so homesick, when she arrived on campus, but she came to regard her college years with fondness. In her footsteps, I would do the same. I was into The Ventures that fall, and as I ascended the stairs between my residence hall and the main campus, a mental guitar loop from their 1960 hit “Walk, Don’t Run” propelled my steps. In my sophomore year, my confidence as a returning student was affirmed when Pulp Fiction made Ventures-style surf rock popular again.

I more or less maintained that confidence through the transitions of marriage and motherhood, relocations to Colorado and Minnesota and corresponding career changes. I believed homesickness was for kids and for people who moved internationally or under duress. Even as a college student, homesickness seemed to place me in an immature minority. As an adult, I did not expect to come unmoored when my husband’s career took our family from Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest.

•••

Here is a partial catalog of things that have made me cry since we moved to a suburb of Seattle last year: a parking structure where all the spaces are compact, because I miss the ample welcome of a Midwestern parking lot; the opening page of a novel dedicated to “the great state of Minnesota”; an area car show, because it was to St. Paul’s annual vintage car show as “Rock Around the Clock” is to the entire American Graffiti soundtrack; a photo of John C. Reilly, because I once noticed that Minnesota’s eastern border looks like his face in profile.

I am ashamed of my emotions, ashamed that I am not content to live in a comfortable house in a safe neighborhood between the Puget Sound and the Cascades. Our new hometown has good schools, a downtown with an art gallery and a live theater, hiking and biking trails, a farmers market. Our new neighbors build community in many ways—educating and caring for children, volunteering at the food bank and soup kitchen, protecting natural resources, creating art—and they have welcomed our participation in these activities. We’re surrounded by beauty: trees, lakes, mountains, and a creek where the salmon run every fall. My husband says he is still astonished that we get to live here.

I know how he feels. When we moved to Minnesota, I was overwhelmed with gratitude. We arrived in autumn, my favorite season. I basked in the low-angled sunlight reflecting off St. Paul’s Como Lake, the red and gold leaves crunching beneath my feet as I circled the water. Our family picked apples at a local orchard, watched squirrels and birds at an urban nature center, and met other families at a park where my son learned to ride his bike. In winter, the season that defines Minnesota for people who have never been there, we discovered sledding hills and indoor playgrounds, and the tropical plant room at the free-admission conservatory, where anyone could find warmth and color on a bleak day. We found that we lived among neighbors who would clear our driveway with their snow blowers without being asked.

But I loved Minnesota before I experienced those things. I loved it before I lived there because my grandparents had called it home. I had spent Christmases and summer vacations with them, and with the aunts and uncles and cousins still living throughout the state. I knew something of Minnesota’s history and its coalescence with my family’s history, and so moving there felt like a homecoming. Moving away felt like an evacuation, like being emptied from a vessel made from parts of myself.

I assumed that these feelings would fade after a brief adjustment period. Months after moving, I wrote off my ongoing melancholy as stress or Vitamin D deficiency. When it occurred to me that I might be homesick, this self-diagnosis seemed so implausible that I Googled “adult homesickness” to verify its existence. My search turned up several recent articles on the subject, including an op-ed in The New York Times by a writer named Susan Matt. Based on a decade of research, Matt concluded that feelings of displacement and depression are common among adults who relocate. Yet we are reluctant to acknowledge “the substantial pain of leaving home” in an era that regards mobility as a virtue.

Matt’s byline referred me to her book, Homesickness: An American History, in which I read about homesick colonists and nineteenth-century immigrants. I learned that homesickness became taboo in the twentieth century, when embracing progress meant surrendering ties to the past. What most interested me was the connection between homesickness and nostalgia, which are literally synonymous. The word nostalgia was coined in the seventeenth century as a diagnostic term describing a painful longing for home. It combines the Greek words nostos (“return home”) and algia (“pain”) and remained in use as a medical term through the Civil War. It was only during the rapidly changing twentieth century that nostalgia gained distinction from homesickness—longing for a lost time as opposed to a lost place.

I recognize these desires as twins, but how do I understand twins born years apart? What does it mean that I am nostalgic for a time before my own birth? It’s notable that when I cry for Minnesota, I am moved by my sense of its shape, of a history that predates my life by decades. Like the homesick freshman I was, I am again sustained by popular music of the past. I recently bought a turntable and have acquired on vinyl the greatest hits of Bobby Vinton, Herb Alpert, The Brothers Four—artists who were on the charts the year my dad graduated from high school. My most common earworm, the song that both rouses and soothes my sentiments, is “Theme from A Summer Place.”

•••

In 1960, when Percy Faith recorded “Summer Place,” my grandparents owned a creamery in Fingal, North Dakota. My dad was fourteen years old. His parents had purchased the creamery when he was four and would operate it until 1968, when my dad was in college.

My grandfather was a butter man. He bought cream from farmers, pasteurized the cream in a heated vat, and churned it by the ton. By hand, he scooped butter from the churn into 64-pound boxes that were trucked to school cafeterias and military bases. He kept two boxes from each churning and parceled that butter into one-pound cartons sold locally. The town was proud of its butter, deeming it the best around. Fingal butter was served in restaurants and at the Woolworth counter in Valley City. Fingal natives who had moved to Fargo or Grand Forks filled shopping bags with Grandpa’s butter on return visits. At a reunion just months ago, a former classmate showed my dad a yellow carton with a Fingal Creamery label that she has saved for almost fifty years.

Butter unifies. It absorbs and concentrates flavor. It creates texture and emulsifies, blending ingredients that would not otherwise mix. A man who makes butter connects farmers with townspeople, towns with cities, schoolchildren with soldiers. The butter maker’s family is embraced. His wife is esteemed, his children golden boys and girls.

This is the refuge I seek in my father’s past. I want to know the butter maker. I want to break bread with the butter maker’s family. I want my children to walk to school with the butter maker’s children. I want to be the butter maker, and the butter, melting into the place where I belong.

•••

I have become a broken record. At some point the longing to be absorbed becomes self-absorption. I must reconcile my butter-gold narrative with reality. In 1960, Fingal was homogenous as milk. I imagine it was possible there to feel separate from the world, from the civil unrest churning the nation, from the state’s native population. Even so, I hear whispers of Fingal residents who did not find sanctuary in small-town North Dakota.

Nostalgia is too easy. It saddens me that the Fingal Creamery ceased operations in 1970, two years after my grandparents sold it and returned to Minnesota. But to romanticize an era when mom-and-pops outnumbered franchises is to overlook disenfranchisement. My own comfort and safety are not enough, after all. I am out of my element where I live now, like frozen butter unevenly spackled on toast, and maybe that is the point. Maybe I am here, in this place and time, to be uncomfortable in a culture consumed by comfort. Frozen butter will keep safe indefinitely, but safety is not its purpose. Butter is for flavor and texture, qualities that are lost after too long in the freezer.

In other words, it is time to expand my soundtrack. I’ll always have a soft spot for golden oldies. But there are living voices singing songs I want to hear, street musicians and symphony members I want to know. I want to feel the pulsing of every drum in the beating of my heart. If the asynchrony is jarring, I am ready to be shaken.

•••

This is KIM KANKIEWICZ’s second essay for Full Grown People. While writing it, she discovered that The Brothers Four are from Seattle and are still performing. She has tickets to attend a Brothers Four concert the next time her parents are in town and hopes to hear a live performance of her dad’s favorite road trip song, “Blue Water Line.”