Forward
September 2021

Juggling bags and a tangle of layers I have been slowly removing since I landed, I finally drop my things with great relief at the foot of the bed in the room where I always sleep at Dad’s house. I’ve been traveling back to visit him in Florida, in the same town where I grew up —though not the same house —every other year for 22 years or so. A number too big to be real, but I’m trying to get better at accepting abstractions like time and age. 

Looking around at the brightly patterned quilts on the twin beds that occupy the bulk of the space around me, it’s hard to call it my room. I didn’t grow up here and save for a few photographs of my younger self, confronting me from the top of the dresser, there are no other signs of me. And yet, it is the only place I stay when I am here so it is nonetheless comforting in its familiarity.

This house and this town tend to stir up blurry long ago aches that are packed away most of the time. Packed away along with picture books and dolls and other bits of youth, up in the farthest corner of the attic, that I promise I will sort through at every visit and fail to do every time. The attic is dark and drafty and requires a precarious ladder to reach but those are excuses, I know. The truth is that it is just easier to leave it all up there, boxed and labeled, safely in the past.

After changing into something more suitable for the tropical surroundings where I now found myself after only just a few hours ago escaping an early morning snowfall, I walked out to the screened-in courtyard, that Dad had proudly included in the design plans when he built this place so many years ago and I accepted the glass of welcome wine he handed me. I had just propped my feet up on the faded patio furniture, and taken my first sip of wine when Dad, without warning let me know this was likely my last visit.

“Somebody wants to buy the property, and I’ve agreed to the offer. I’m selling the place.”

Putting the glass down, I swung my legs from the lounge chair and sat upright.

“Wait, what? When?”

“Where will you go?”

Dad shrugs, “I’m not sure yet,” and he walks out of the courtyard, wine glass in hand, wearing his favorite floppy sun hat with the chinstrap pulled tight to his face.

“And what are you going to do with all of this stuff,” I said, fanning out my arm like a game show host or a circus showman but with the added tone of an indignant teenager. I follow him out of the courtyard and around the yard as he stops to pull weeds out of planters and points out a rare fern he has growing underneath a type of palm tree that neither of us can remember the name of, and quite frankly, has grown much larger than he had expected. We pass by my favorite grapefruit tree, the one that supplies the Ruby Reds for Christmas breakfast, and I stop my line of questioning just long enough so that I can rearrange my wine glass in order to receive the three medium globes Dad is placing in the bend of my arm.

“Dad, where will you go?” 

He shushes me and I follow his gaze to the small pond where there is the smallest baby alligator, no more than 3 or 4 feet long perched on the bank taking in the last of the late afternoon sun.

“And when will you leave?”

I realize now, Dad had always been the constant. He prized practical and predictable above all else so I assumed —naively, I am now aware— that when he finally rooted himself, he intended to stay. And though the specifics of his news and the thoughts of what comes next took me by surprise, the structure of the exchange was not new. Dad was a master of withholding information until absolutely necessary, finally dispensing the basics without fanfare on a need-to-know basis and only when it was too obvious to hide. The dance remains the same and my typical sequence of rapid fire questioning after such an unveiling leads nowhere. He never discourages these inquiries, but he rarely offers up answers. My campaign for details, for insight and depth, would, as usual, stop short of the emotional place I was seeking. He was simply fulfilling the obligation to inform me, transaction complete.

“June, I think, July at the latest. You should have a look up in the attic. I think you have some things up there.”

Dad only moved into this house once the dust had settled. He had built the home he’d always wanted way out at the edge of town on the property that he had acquired long ago but held on to for years; an exit strategy he had saved in the wings for just the right moment. He waited until Mom had left town, and our family home was sold, and everything I’d known before had shape shifted into something unrecognizable. 

I hadn’t seen it coming at the time, and no one had warned me. At the very same moment I was leaving home for the first time myself, everything I had known dissolved behind me ensuring that my only move was forward. The pieces culminated, as if choreographed or written in from the very beginning, at the most poetic point, blindsiding me from seeing the subtleties at the heart of it. The details took years to unravel, but this house, this place where my dad went to recoup after it all, became the surrogate connection to my hometown, to my childhood and this sudden announcement of its liquidation just didn’t sit right.

Dad has often, in desperate and fleeting moments, dreamed of escape. Escape from the life he so diligently constructed according to the guidebook he was given as a young man. He feels bound to this structure by multiple factors: his mom, my mom, the often changing women in his life, and if I’m looking the things in the eyes that need to be seen, my brother and I are factors too. Though we are more than adults at this point, and have been on our own for years, we are the key elements that he can’t quite figure out how to negotiate to make his final bolt viable. We are the very last hitch to his freedom. I remember once, a number of years ago, after many glasses of wine, when he confessed with uncharacteristic detail and punctuation of his latest plan to flee. He was to buy a sailboat, take off without notice and go off the grid. He would be in touch when he could, he wouldn’t abandon us, but he just needed to disappear. My questions went unanswered that time too. Notification delivered, transaction complete.

I brought the grapefruits inside and after leaving them on the kitchen counter I walked around the various spaces of his house trying to match up what I saw with the new information that this visit may be my last. I had never really given this place much thought before or appreciated its impact until now. I was going to have to hurry if I wanted to catch up and find meaning before it was gone. Scanning the room I saw piles of crime fiction best-sellers, a long abandoned treadmill, art and tchotchkes from various stages of his life arranged without much thought, scattered projects started and then stopped, and the remnants of past relationships still on display. I took a long look at the things a life could collect and pondered the challenge of paring that down and moving forward at 75. It finally seems like he might have his chance to disappear after all, but I had a sinking feeling that perhaps it was too late.

The year I graduated high school and then later left home for college, my parents decided to call it quits. They both remained in our house, together but separate, setting up camps on either end of the flat roofed single-story structure, typical of mid-century Florida, until things got worse. Mom took up residence in the guest room that adjoined my bedroom and had her own phone line installed. Muted conversations and muffled fits of tears leaked from behind closed doors into my adolescent sanctuary via the shared bathroom. Dad stayed the course in their bedroom, moving along as closely as he could to normal, without much conversation.  

The new boundaries Mom had built around her: the phone line, the private space, were ultimately too feeble to protect her from what was coming next.  She finally snapped and transformed into someone unknown. She was hospitalized on a number of occasions but nothing was really able to bring her back completely. Unlike my younger brother, Brian, who was on the front lines the whole time, I learned all of this from the safety of my college dorm room in a neighboring state. I was informed but few details were revealed through the protective filters of distance and the cloud of my own coming of age. I cried alone in the dark but otherwise proceeded with exploring my new existence without letting anyone know. It floated to the surface, of course, in the form of fake IDs, minor brushes with the law, experimentation with drugs and men, and I kept myself distracted with escape routes of my own. I took great care in making alternative plans over all holidays and summers and by the time I was graduating, Dad was finally moving out, and Mom was leaving town. Our house was sold and on her way out of town Mom left a few boxes labeled “KIDS '' on the driveway in front of Dad’s new place.  

The chronology of events stayed pleasantly out of focus for many years. Dad got settled in his new home, Mom and Brian moved north and I kept propelling myself forward. I set up my own camp on the other side of the country, factoring in a 3000-mile buffer, hoping it would blot out what had been undone. We had all scattered from the center, retreating to our separate corners, spinning along our own orbits. We were satellites circling the same hub, but alone, collecting information and dispensing it only as needed. Things stayed this way for years. I had successfully turned down the volume on the past, only thinking of the boxes and everything else on my biennial trips to Florida, and even then only briefly and with Dad’s reminders. I liked knowing it was all there, and that it would be there should I want it back, but it was so easy to ignore and I wasn’t confident that what I would find inside would even mean much after all this time. This house and this attic had become a stand-in, suspended and forever linking us to a time I was no longer sure I wanted to hold onto.

About an hour before heading to the airport, back to the snowy city that was now home and not a surrogate, not a placeholder for things that needed to be released, I remembered the attic. I realized that I had forgotten it for the entire trip, once again. I decided to lower the rickety ladder and ascend for the last time. Surely, there was something I’d want to bring back with me, to unpack from the past. I reached the top and fumbled around in the dark for the light, and finally located what I had been avoiding: three medium-sized boxes taped shut and untouched. In permanent marker fulfilling its duty I saw Mom’s perennially bouncy print, in all caps, announcing the owners of the contents inside. I was surprised no one had tampered with them all these years, and slightly unsettled that there were only three. Could a childhood, two childhoods, really be neatly contained in three medium-sized boxes? I had my doubts and wondered as I hesitated what the impact of opening these boxes would be. I was sure I would be disappointed, knowing that no miniature house or stuffed animal or old record player could really hold that much significance anymore and certainly couldn’t resolve the pangs that still hovered around them. Could we really let it all go? Could we let go of the house, the boxes, the connection to a home long since dismantled? Why were we holding on? Was this escape or just moving forward?

I heard Dad shuffling things around below me, putting my bags in the car to send me off again and I switched off the light.