Outside Jim Thorpe

It’s been six hours since I got the call, yet it feels like six minutes. Six minutes filled with packing, phone calls, texts, uneaten food, questions, blank stares, chairs, waiting, car rentals, driving, and memories.

Memories are full of details that focus you on what their eyes looked like rather than what they looked at, or the way they talked rather than the meaning behind their words. You care more for the players than the play and remember them for how they entered or exited the stage rather than how they actually performed their roles.

The white noise of the road hisses under my tires, skipping at concrete intervals or popping on the sun-soaked black-top, keeping my ears filled with personal sounds of reality. Grounding me with the bass of engine hum, the static of a remnant radio signal, and the whistle from a rear window, not quite closed.

I try to remember my father and all I can think about is the grey in his hair. Even as a boy I remember my father had grey temples… and the way the stems of his heavy glasses tucked his hair back behind his ears, but if I try to remember my father as a whole? As the man who raised me, as the man who I debated with, then argued with, then gave up on? All that surfaces are choice words. Words I used, and he didn’t. Words I should have used, and he did, and then how we exited from each other’s life.

I try to move beyond those wounds but emotions derail my thoughts and instead black incites and twisted judgments get pulled malformed from the incandescent kiln of my past resentments into the light of this day. Sharp rotting smells, flashes of blinding rage, the sandpaper of my skin, and the bitter copper of adrenalin on my tongue, are all physical manifestations that fill the car’s confining cabin with the malignancy of life as I see it. A world of words, images, and colors burning the chalk of black coal into fiery reds and yellows until their grey faded embers crumble into the dust of exhaustion that fades in the emptiness of the car and that hissing of tires.

That’s not how I want to remember him. That’s not who he will be for me. I try to look past the wounds once more to remember the love he had for me but that emotion feels faint compared to the personal space of pain that I’ve built and fortified over the years. Faint and faded like a photograph bleached in the sun; now neglected, having fallen during a rush to get out of a home on a morning some nine years previous, never bothering to return to save it from weathering until only a damp white square remains to rot among the rushes.

I try once again to remember his face, focusing on the details in order to distance my attention from the whole of my own prejudice. The grey temples, the heavy glasses, the way they enlarged his eyes, magnifying them as they looked down on me from a distance.

Then another thought surfaces. The next time I’ll see that face it will be a dead face. I try to envision him alive, but instead, I vividly imagine flowers, coffins, pillows, a nice suit, and his grey hair, combed, thinning, a fresh cut above shoulders that are spotless of dandruff. And his eyes, lacking the protection of those heavy glasse appeared small and diminished, sunken, exposed, unrecognizable, and closed.

My eyes follow the road too closely. I can’t tear them from the center lines, dashed, dotted, telegraph hypnosis. If I lifted them from the pattern, I don’t know where they would land, and I just want this trip to be over, to be home. I grip the wheel and drive.

“Here, let me show you.”

His hands are huge, enormous, like tarantulas gripping bananas, covered in coarse hair and rough calluses. Skin stained with sun and scoured with earth. Nails cracked like flint, bitten short to stubs. These hard hands engulf my small pink clumsy things into an awkward grip of a golf putter. Alien. I’ve never held anything like this. I don’t like it, my hands fidget.

“Thumbs do…thumbs… here, thumbs down, like… Fonzie, right, only upside down? Look. Ayyyyy! Say it. Ayyyyy!”

I’m cool, “Ayyyyy!”

“Right, now point them down, like, here…” Again his hands fold over mine, holding the club in wrist-bending weirdness. I try to look over them. Through his arms that drape around my shoulders and press my ears flat. “See? Left first, thumb pointed down. Right? No. On top. Stop fighting.”

It feels weird.

“You want to do it right, or do you want to go home?”

“Hey, buddy. Let us play through it, will ya? Go on the practice green, for Pete’s sake!”

I try to look to see who's talking and catch a glimpse of a line forming behind us just before Dad’s forearms squeeze me back in place.

“Don’t pay them mind. Now, just keep your thumbs down, right? Grip it easy, easy, like, like Buster’s paw. Don’t hurt Buster, but don’t let him go. Got it?”

His hands release me and his weight moves away following his shadow as he steps off the green.

I lift my eyes. The Wildwood Pier Put-Put Arcade is crowded. Seagulls swing, shipwrecks sway, clams snap, octopi do what octopi do, and a whale swallows a ball next to my green causing a kid to cry in frustration. All around a summer crowd pushing for fun. I look behind me at the audience in line, coiled in wait, kids and parents waiting, waiting, waiting for me to swing, and fail.

I suck.

“Come on! Let us play through, huh?”

“Sean, keep your eyes on the hole, not on them.” He stands in front of the lighthouse and holds his own putter out, pointing it toward the left of three mouse holes. “Just aim it here. Aim it like I showed you. Grip it as I showed you. Hit it gently, like I showed you. Ready?”

I nod. I close my eyes.

“Open your eyes or you won’t hit anything.”

I open my eyes. I breathe, I aim, I grip, I swing, gentle like he showed me.

My father watches as my ball rolls toward the hole. He is leaning on his putter, watching with pride in his eyes. Eyes that are framed by those heavy glasses that tuck the grey behind his ears.

I don’t remember pulling over, but I did. I’m halfway home, somewhere in the Pennsylvania moraine. Just outside Jim Thorpe.

I shouldn’t be driving, not now.