Sames of Am
By Julien Levy
“My father moved through dooms of love through sames of am through haves of give…”
-E.E Cummings
Coffee sits in front of us, steaming and dark and I notice that I take mine the same as he takes his and that given our similarities there is absolutely no doubt that this man, whom I have never met before, is my father – who after being absent, lost, finding out what this is made of, my entire life, has agreed to meet me in this diner in middle of nowhere, Washington, where he crams his large frame into a booth and displays nothing but guilt and the reflection of raindrops on his face as he asks me questions about my mother and the circumstances of my growing up and whether my strengths are in science or math or reading to which I reply that not only am I finished with school, but I want nothing more than to write— a prospect which causes his chest to rise with a deep breath and a disappointed gaze out the window past the parking lot and into the dark corners of the woods in the distance and as he loses himself there, I lose myself in the feeling that he knows, in this elongated moment of time, that I could have been— should have been the son he always wanted: burly and barrel chested, rough hands from day’s work and beers in coolers on weekends when we would fish or hunt— if only he had stuck around and made sure that his wife didn’t baby me, push me to be too creative; the kind of person that asks nicely for the waitress to please come around with a refill of the coffee that neither of us are drinking fast enough to dull the impact of the moment when I am suddenly stricken with the urge to ask him everything that made him, about the long nights that drove him to seek the seclusion of the wet, Pacific coast and a log cabin; what he escaped from, who knew him; if we are the same person in the most abstract of senses and how when I found myself doing something totally devoid of familiarity, did he do the same thing, did I get it from him?—question upon question piling up as he looks over at me and finds himself as he would have been 35 years ago if he himself had parents and me, searching desperately to find the right words, but knowing that my time is running out, that he’ll motion for the check soon and will insist on paying because— it is the least, the very least he can do— after which he’ll stand up and shake my hand as I will go to hug him and he will awkwardly appease me as his scent permeates my clothes and hair and fingers and breath and becomes a memory that I can, from that moment on, only identify in one or two places thereafter and know: this is my father— this odor, this specter on the opposite side of everything, who will break our embrace and walk to his truck and drive away from our experience bitter and feeling worse off than he did before he even knew I cared, will turn on talk radio when he gets home and reflect on his life and the choices he made in moments of passion with women who thought he was handsome and he’ll realize that from then on that he will never be alright and that I will be his only shot at a redemption which he never knew he needed—or wanted—so, he will write me years later and I will write back that I don’t hate him and that it is okay and that he should feel proud because I have a family of my own; that I’m happy and that my life without him is still my life and his is his— and I’ll get no response, no, neither one of us will speak to the other again until the moment I whisper goodbye, tucked into a crowd of people dressed in black, each one of us taking turns to shovel dirt onto the box, six feet beneath the Pacific mud where he’ll lay and when I get home my own kids will ask me about my father and I will protect them from my rough edges by telling them that, from what I knew of him, he was a great man— I will let them know: my father understood that character is defined by action and my children will tell me that they understand and that they’re glad I’m there with them, so I will tell them the same —every day— because he wouldn’t do that for me.
——
Julien Levy is a New York based writer currently attending Skidmore College.
Photograph used in conjunction with Flickr’s Creative Commons Agreement. It can be found, in its original form, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootbearwdc/.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 2:05 am and is filed under Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
