Dad was somewhat insane, obviously. I guess he is somewhat insane. While walking the dogs one winter night in the early 1990s (I would guess I was about 10, and Stephen about 7), my father and I saw a light flash across the sky. He said nothing, wondering if he had one too many beers, but then I asked if that was a shooting star. Stephen had seen this thing, too, a star shaped like a tooth that seemed to hover in the air for a moment before it bolted off. Honestly, to this day, I don’t know what I saw. I don’t trust my own memory of the sight, and it could have easily been a shooting star or meteor, or perhaps a satellite or some kind of jet. The three of us, however, at the time, didn’t know what we had seen, and we spent a couple of days talking about UFOs and aliens and whatever. Naturally, Dad spent the next two years recording every UFO and alien related program on TV. I have no idea why.
Everyone’s favorite of my father’s obsessions, was when he decided squirrels–yes the bushy tailed rodents–were evil. Not nuisances. Evil. We were having trouble with them because they would steal food from the bird feeder that hung outside our dining room window. This would cause its own problems inside our house because our oversized, half-blind golden retriever, Caesar, had somehow learned that birds were okay, and squirrels were bad, and would start barking his immense, roaring bark whenever a squirrel made its way to the feeder. The bark would startle some poor person who was carrying the morning’s eggs or coffee, and before you know it, our carpet had added yet another stain, and someone would probably be picking up the broken pieces of a coffee mug or plate.
Anyway, to combat the Squirrel Problem, Dad found an ancient squirrel trap, and bought a second one. He went on the internet and learned two things: 1) squirrels really like peanut butter and 2) squirrels will find their way back home as long as they are within two miles (I think) of said home. So Dad loaded his traps with PB, and once they were caught, he loaded the them into the back of his truck, and hauled them at least two miles away, releasing them into the yards of people he didn’t like. Seriously. The great squirrel war ended near the end of the summer when Dad crossed the line and decided to get a BB gun. He was the only one home, at the time, and, bored, perhaps, he loaded the gun, went to the yard, took aim, and hit a squirrel directly in the stomach. Naturally, he mortally wounded the thing, but before it died, it scraped its way across our yard, spewing blood and guts everywhere, before croaking near the backdoor. Horrified, my father called my mother right then just to ask her, “I’m not a bad person, am I?” Thus ended the squirrel incident.
When I was 16, I received my learner’s permit, and was able to be taught to drive. And so, my father took me on my first driving lesson. We first went to Calvary Cemetery, which is an enormous Catholic cemetery a few miles from my house, where my father’s parents, and his deceased siblings are buried. The place is great for early lessons in driving because it have just about everything you might experience as far as road conditions are concerned: uphills, downhills, gradual bends in roads, sharp turns, stop signs. What it does not have, generally, is other cars.
We went around Calvary on a cool, cloudy day in my dad’s rickety blue van. The van was another fun thing to learn to drive in: the rearview mirror was useless, and the sideview mirrors were close to useless. If you can handle that thing, you can drive anything (short of a helicopter), and if you could learn to parallel park it (which I did) you could parallel park anything (which I can). We drove about aimlessly for an hour, I think, until my dad told me to turn left, turn right, and pull over. I did so, and he got out of the truck and so I got out of the truck.
We walked over to the family grave, where his brothers Tommy (called Murph for his love of potatoes), and Jimmy, and Henry were buried. Jimmy was very close to my father when they were children. He was 2 or 3 years older, and went through two tours in Vietnam, relatively unscathed. Upon the completion of his second term, he came home, and within two weeks, he was killed in a fatal car accident, and buried on my father’s 18th birthday. It’s tempered all of his birthdays since. Murph died the summer before 8th grade, for me, I think. It might have been the summer after 8th. Heart attack. He was around 60, I think. I don’t know when or how Henry died. I think that it happened before I was born, also, or when I was very young.
We stood in front of the tombstones, silent, for a couple of minutes, looking down at the names and dates. And he spoke, his voice cracking, “Hey guys. I miss you. I really wish you were around.” And then we turned and got in the truck, Dad driving, and we left the cemetery.
It doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but somehow, that was the defining moment of my youth, of my relationship with my dad. Standing in an empty cemetery, mourning brothers who were long lost. He expressed an emotion that wasn’t pleasure from something funny happening, or angst from something miserable. There was something new, to me, there.
