Dear Papa,

Remember when I was stick-thin? All bones and bruises with a bowl cut? I went to the big old school house, with four rooms and a quarter inch of shellack on the floor. I learned about phonics and Dick and Jane. I watched Ms. Keene every Friday as she drove in her little orange M.G. up to New Hampshire. The rest of the week, I just went home with a head full of nothing and dirty plaid pants.

Do you remember when I was the kid, and we stalked around your filthy ramshackled workshop making little wooden puzzles with your jigsaw. I’d play with them until they broke, or I lost my interest. For some reason, I never painted pictures on them. The color of the walnut stain and shapes of the wood and the grain were enough. More than enough.

After, we’d go to the refrigerator pull out the brown mustard, the cheap liverwurst and the american cheese, and make sandwiches on buttered Wonder Bread. I remember the sound of our chewing in the dusty smokey sunlight. More than thirty years later, and I still smell your Vantage 100 burning to ash in the ashtray and in your lungs. I hear the serenity of a spoon against a department store glass – stirring the generic brand iced tea & sugar before the ice cube could be added.

I was young, and you were too – in a way. Your back hadn’t hunched yet and your eyes were still steely strong. I talked about baseball, and you talked about The Kid. We played with a tennis ball and a stick in your backyard – I was Jim Rice and you were Warren Spawn.

“Always a Braves fan, kiddo, always a Braves fan,” you’d smile.

The ball would slip in a friendly arc through the gentlest evening air – too soft for stars as yet – and land upon the merry swing of that stick.

We both laughed as I ran around the places where bases might have been, then after you’d say, “Spawn.. then Saine … now pray for rain.”

“What does that mean, Papa?”

“Hahahahaha,” a laugh would roll out of your lean strong frame, “Oh Stephan, my back is tired, I think it’s time we go inside and watch the game.”

I did not know, not really, how bad it was for you. How your disks were gone and your back was crunching as you ran. You were tougher than anyone, and I was soft and young and weaker than I imagined.

Inside, I’d sit with the old tarnished door-stop lions and look at your feet. I’d think about the dry dead toe-knuckles and the cracks and the monster-thick nails on every toe but the last – where instead, the nail was just a pebble.

“Papa, Papa, I’ll put some lotion on your feet and they’ll get better.”

You smiled at me, because you knew sometimes things are beyond saving, but you knew that a good heart must true. And I tried. And I tried. And I tried.

Later, when it became obvious how the game against Jim Palmer and the God damned Oriole’s would turn out, we’d go out to get the lottery ticket at the little greek place – I think it was called Massota’s Market. It was on the corner of Main Street and High Street. You’d smile at the old man’s little girl and say, “50 cents on 447 any order.”

“Ok Mr. Fitzgerald!”

Every week, I thought we’d win and so did you. When we did, I’d get a comic book. A super hero comic book with impossible characters wearing bright colors and saving the world from the likes of me. When we didn’t it was just the sweet sadness of a pack of wild-cherry Lifesavers.

Papa, do you remember when you said someday you’d be gone, and I’d be ok. You said it’d be ok. I told you, “No, I can’t live without you and Nana. I can’t.”

You gave me a hug, do you remember? Do you remember how you told me I’d be older and more able to handle it?

When Nana died, you said, “I can’t live without her” and your body shook as you wept and I held you in my arms for an hour or more. I told you, “Somehow, you’ll find a way.”

How we stood there and watched her slip away without slipping away with her, I’ll never know. I thought, perhaps, I was a man. I did not cry. I never cried then. I just held you up and carried you until you could stop your tears and breathe.

Dear Papa, do you remember how cold it was that day when we buried her? Do you remember the hard bright sun and the endless parade of cars and sirens and despair that followed us to Reading where we laid her there to sleep away the world?

I told you, “Papa, I can not live without you, please don’t ever leave me.”

“Stephan, I’m old. I”ll be gone and you’ll go on without me.”

You were wrong you know, there is no going on without you.

Years later, a lifetime or more really, when you died the first time, the doctor in the emergency room said, “there’s a DNR, I can’t do anything without your permission.”

I told the doctor, “yes, yes, please, save him.”

Your heart was stopped, and so was mine. I didn’t cry then either. Not for days. Even then it was only enough tears to remind me that my heart was still there.

You came back and told me, “It’s ok. It’s ok.”

A week later when you got the dying right, I remembered how you told me, I’d go on without you. But I didn’t.

Geez, Papa, it’s been a decade, and your’e still here with me. Your body is rotting in Reading with Nana, but I hear you. I hear both of you. I see you in the dances of the dust in the last long rays of afternoon sunlight. I hear you in every cheap glass as I stir in something sweet. I taste you in every sandwich and I smell you in every cancerous breath of smoke in every seedy bar.

You were wrong. Do you remember when we put the deck on the cottage and it was supposed to last for 40 years. You said, “I intend to be here to make sure it does.”

I want to go check, to see how the pressure treated lumber held up. I want you there with me to laugh at the warping and the cracking and the occassional new planks that had to be nailed in to save it from the world that breaks us all in time.

But even the cottage is gone now. The lake still laps on the blueberry dappled shores, but the concrete walls have broken every year when the ice goes out. The tops of the mountains slide lower every year from wind and rain – and I remember how you told me as we let our worms bob for perch, “These mountains were the top of the world eons ago. Higher, by far, than Everest.”

You’d catch a kibby and toss him back, “Don’t come back. Send a bass instead.”

Do you remember the nights on the dock watching the bats, listening to Ben Oglivie smack the crap out of the ball and us down the standings to irrelevance?

Nana would call down to us over her Seabreeze from the porch, “time to come in boys, the bread pudding’s ready.”

And we’d head up for another sweet moment.

Papa, do you remember me? Who I was? Papa, tell me, who am I?

Love,
stephan