I used to believe all stories had that Lewis Carroll thing…‘Start at the beginning and when you get to the end, stop.’ That's changed for me over the years. I hadn't planned to tell anyone this story, and I’m not sure how it will end.
You are a good listener. When you asked how all this happened, I had no idea where to start or finish. Despite making plans and setting goals, I have no idea of the consequences of my behavior. Everything seems to have its own way of working-out, and despite all that's happened, I don't feel victimized. I'm just part of the dance. Sometimes I do it well. Sometimes I fall down.

Chapter One

I was born the middle child in a family of three boys. Childhood left me with muddy-water memories, but some things I remember, clear-water pools into which my little-boy dreams dive.
My parents told us they loved us. What was love? I wasn't sure. I swam in my daydream world, escaped into Huckleberry fantasies. Heroes and fair maidens filled my favorite books. They were always in love. My parents weren't in any of the stories I read.
Mother was an only child of an Old World doctor and a very proper lady of English heritage, and Father; one of eight children in an Iowa farm family, though one died at age two. We were a family with traditional mid-western values. Mother worried too much. Father drank too much.
Mother was ill throughout much of our childhood. I remember being whisked off to the hospital to say good-bye to Mother. Tucked between white sheets, tubes attached to her small frail body, she smiled weakly into my curiosity-filled bed-level eyes. Good-bye, Mother, good-bye. I'm not saying it was intentional on her part...the dying thing. Mother spent over half of my life dying. She taught me stoicism and stubbornness. I still haven't let go. Her face was so beautiful even when she was exhausted. High cheekbones, aquiline nose and large deep-set eyes gave her an aristocratic, Barrymore appearance. I wondered why they used those bedside rails. Drained of any strength, she couldn't lift arm or head, let alone roll off the bed. I remember all those hospital smells. Antiseptics and ether made me dizzy, sick to my stomach. They still do.
Father was hard working and jovial. When God invented laughter He made sure Dad had a lifetime supply. Dad. He only had a few close friends, but everyone seemed to like him. I remember him as sparkly-eyed overweight and balding; yet, in photos taken when he and Mother first met he appears slim and debonair. It was his laugh and large nearly square hands, the hands of a farmer, I remember most. Whatever else he did, Dad took care of his family. He put in grueling hours at his small business, but had a few pleasures that seemed to ease any stress.
Years before, Mother and Father stopped sharing a bedroom. She complained that his snoring kept her awake…Dad said he couldn't stand her bickering.
Mom met Dad at Camp Funston in the last days of the First World War. They married twelve years before my older brother was born. Mother was thirty-eight when I appeared on the scene. Dad was forty. Time performed its paradoxical magic. He died at age sixty-four. In her sleep, Mother took her last breath one morning seven months after she turned eighty-nine.

*

For some reason I remember what seem to be unrelated events that haunt me like ghosts. Incidents like this one with Dad reoccur in my dreams:
“Mica.” Dad opened a bottle of beer he fished from the ice bucket. He’d put his fishing pole into a metal post he stuck first thing in the sand so he didn’t have to hold it until he got a strike. Then he sat on a dry spot. “That’s mica.”
He took me surf fishing with him at La Jolla Shores. Pants rolled up above knees, he waded out to make a long cast with his sturdy bamboo surf-rod. I was only eight, hadn’t learned to swim, and huge waves scared the hell out of me. I waited further back on the beach where foam-bubbles were bursting, and salt water magically disappeared into shimmering sand. I didn’t know much about fishing, but I loved the dark and light patterns that formed where beached waves rolled back to meet sea. Every time we went I wondered what made those lace-like crisscross rivulets look so similar, what the tiny sparkly gold things were in the sand.
“Mica.”
He had short answers for my never-ending questions. Like calling the moon a moon, they never explained anything. It looked like gold to me, and for years that’s what I believed, until some guy I met at a mineral show told me about mica. I remember wishing it had been gold instead. Those kinds of ideas fitted better into my fantasies.

*

That same year we moved fifteen miles out into the foothills so we could have horses. A persistent if not talented handyman, Dad always had half-completed projects around home. Building a patio, working on rustic corrals, manly tasks kept him out of Mother's sights. He rode a horse better than he drove a truck and taught us kids to ride. I got on…got thrown…got back on and rode again. According to Dad we spent our early teenage years riding like ‘wild Indians’.
Until we graduated from grammar school, my brothers and I walked to Congregational Sunday school, not by choice, every weekend. Mother went to church. Dad didn't. Mother insisted we take piano lessons. Dad insisted we do chores: mow the lawn, rake the corrals, bury garbage and care for the animals and orchard. Topping his list of musts was showing respect for Mother.
Father was a man of principle, a stern disciplinarian. A razor strap in his hands was a powerful reminder of unbending rules. Remember the barbers in old movies? A razor strap is a double layer of three-inch wide leather some two-feet long, like a wide belt but with a wooden handle. Its primary use was to sharpen the edge of those pearl-handled straight razor blades with which men used to shave. Father reasoned it had a perfect second use.
The day the handle broke, the strap was making a wooooooshhhing sound as it came through the air. I knew exactly when it was going to strike my pants-down tender little butt. Maybe it was the third or fourth blow when the strap flew across the room, leaving Father holding the strapless handle. Never to get together again, the empty handle followed the strap, mad dog after hissing cat. Swearing violently, frustrated past patience, Dad stormed from the room.
Maybe God was listening when I prayed for intervention. Not getting the usual ten or fifteen strokes was hallelujah kingdom-come deliverance. I'd be able to sit at dinner. Each spanking hurt, yet I don't feel we were intentionally abused children. Our parents loved us as best they knew how.

*

Lake fishing was Dad’s major pleasure. He began taking us with him when we were small kids. It was more than an escape from Mother.
Dark early morning starts and the intimate smell of breakfast cooking in our small kitchen, sizzling sounds of bacon fat popping in the black iron pan, all are so nostalgically tied to my father that the aroma of freshly brewed coffee makes me think of him each time that redolence reaches my nose.
Then the long winding drives into country foothills, hours in the back seat of the old sedan. The twisting curving country roads made me carsick. Here’s a formula for trouble: three kids in the back seat of a car.
"Knock it off or I'll stop and take my belt off!"
That threat usually got our attention. Kids haven’t changed much. We must have driven him nuts.
I swear I can still smell those fishing boats; the bouquet of gasoline and stagnant lake-water: Look. There’s Father, bent over the engine, trying to start it with quick pulls on a worn starter rope. Bubbly choked sounds as the prop pushes the little boat away from rickety wooden docks, planks bleached gray by weather and sun.
Out on the lake, Dad released the furry anchor rope. It disappeared from sight into a dark mystery. How deep was it? What was down there? How could fish find the bait in that immense wet darkness? What were we going to catch?
Clutching bamboo rods with inexperienced hands, we watched Dad bait those awful hooks, impaling worms or tiny wiggling bait-fish. I close my eyes now and see daybreak light on still surfaces, the liquid mirror of heaven. I hear sounds of water lightly lapping gunnels.
We fished in silence, waiting… waiting for the strike…the anxiety, the thrill of the strike, followed by a quick sound as the fishing line suddenly cut the water, bending the slender rod.
Father's voice filled our ears. "Tip up! Don't let it get away! Keep reeling!"
He adjusted the reel. We struggled with the living pole. Mystery fish came up from murky secret places. Silver-light rainbow-bright colors flashed in their world, but changed when scaly creatures, unable to breathe air, lay in the bottom of the boat. Absolute magic. Holding a live fish in my hands, my heart pounded wildly. After removing those terrible hooks, Dad put the fish on a stringer, then over the side it went. I bet I spent half my time trying to keep an eye on the fish. They always swam under the boat.
Dad's voice like God's: "Put the stringer back in the water or you'll kill the fish."
Weren't they gonna die anyway? I had to keep reassuring myself that the fish were as big as I remembered.
What could have been more exciting? My Father; a fearful hero in a wooden boat.

©
david coyote
10-13-04

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