The Summer He Died

 

The summer he died

My father discovered plants.

He grew sunflowers that leapt

over his tiny house, tomatoes

that burst in the heat, stunted

corn and rows of string beans

eaten over one July night

by a pack of ravenous moles.

He could hardly stand; he’d

lost fifty pounds—his hair,

thick and brown into his 80’s,

simply disappeared. We rose

together at mid-morning; he

ate Wheaties with strawberries

that I bought at the Farmers

Market—he told me he hated

the thought of dying and missing

his breakfast, the newspaper,

the thought of that first cigarette

(he’d quit a decade before—like all

men his age he’d ash his Lucky in

the orange half-moon of his eggs.)

Then we’d reminisce for an hour:

I knew nothing about him, nor did

he know a thing about me: fathers

and sons practice silence like monks

locked together in a desert of love.

After lunch we’d find a ballgame.

He would fall asleep and quietly fart;

I’d go for a walk, up and down blocks

of large empty houses--I never saw a soul.

Later I would drive to the store for corn

and steaks; he had no appetite and would

vomit while I cooked. I wasn’t

sad—we were standing on the edge

of something we couldn’t name or feel--

time ended in the blackness of his dying.

On the phone my wife told me about the

children; I could picture her in our bright

living room, thousands of miles from where

I stood. The house would be hot and loud

with music—my father’s house was silent

and smelled of rust and mildew;

the cicadas chorused in a manic circle—

the heat pushed the outdoors

onto the porch where we sat, remembering

the lightning bugs that I had caught

in Mason jars, the cool nights when we

could smell the faintly salty Eastern breeze,

the far off sound of fireworks from the

boardwalk, the men laughing as they

played bocce and drank beer,

the way your hand would hurt as you

dug into the icy tub for a Coke,

the snap of the church key and the cold

that hurt your throat and eye—

my mother calling us in for dessert,

my father telling me to go ahead, he’d sit a while

longer on the stoop, watching the kids play

stickball in the gathering darkness.

And the way the house was so full of us,

the five of us, the rooms dense with our

lives, the dishes drying in the sink, the

tired way my legs would feel after another

day of being alive. And my father would

come in the sit and not say a word: he was

locked up in himself even then, as I would

be when I was his age, a silence that was

watching and waiting for something better

to come along, when there was nothing better,

when there was nothing better to come.

In Memory of George Ovitt, Sr. November 13, 1919-July 6, 2010

Happy Fathers Day to all of our readers....(that's my sister, Patricia, with my father, mid-1950's)