Father’s Day
My dad died back in February. Or the end of January, I cant’t remember exactly. For me, life without him here on this planet is basically the same as when he was alive. His breath, the only one I can smell pouring out of his mouth, it’s from the 1970’s. I didn’t really ever smell his older man breath. He kept it to himself, more or less, I guess.
The breath I did know though? Oh man. That’s his 1977 Parliament cigarette Pabst beer breath. It smells like narrow creepy woods along slow moving rivers. It smells like early morning eel, like fish rubbing themselves on the 6am sky. Like a musty basement with a homemade bar the morning after a night of real living. I smell his breath now. It comes to me on loan/ a memory belonging to a child who has passed it on to me in silence/ with only the slightest dip of the chin/ an old western nod of acknowledgement way past his years, this hombre.
But he’s a kid.
A fucking boy with no real proprietorship over the jar of breath anyways.
Why would he even want it?
Young men are going to move around, locally or far and wide, and each time they settle into some squalid apartment with a bunch of strangers or some foreign hostel bunk/ holding back tears/ horny and lonesome and lost in the beautiful way/ drunk, perhaps/ probably drunk/ each time they move in or out of another Earthly room: they need to travel light. Excess baggage is a curse. Your products only hold you back, hoss. It’s been that way forever. Just look along the old Mormon Trail or the old Oregon Trail. Besides the rotting bones of the snake-bit and the diseased there are sometimes soft patches of hard land where the hulking chests of drawers got thrown. The china cabinets from the 1700’s. The heirloom chestnut and cherry/ handcrafted by immigrants. The once proud status symbols of Boston blood or Baltimore breeding, tossed over the side of some prairie schooner like buckets of piss, so to lighten the load, so to lessen the severity of the real unfolding moment when not getting through these mountains just ahead of you before the end of August was life or death.
Fucking idiots. People back then were no different than me and you in a lot of ways. They thought they could get away with anything. They thought that God was real and that he sincerely wanted to thank them for their endless devotion by carrying their heaving steamer trunks of bullshit over the Rocky Mountains for them.
Only when they were standing there on a wagon that would not budge did they figure it out. So the old trails were littered with valuable furniture. Mountain mice moved into empty drawers and fucked like bunnies. Wild owls took steaming shits on antique four-poster bed frames and laughed at the moon. Elk stared at salon chairs that reeked of cigar and perfume.
A freshly dead toddler was buried by a landslide of books. Crows watched it all for hours. For days and weeks. There are still crows out there in the rustling Nebraska cottonwoods, the descendants of the original guardians, and they still keep watch over the old graves, the dust of bones, the ghosts of the lost children waiting patiently, lying lazily about on the ghosts of the discarded furniture.
I have carried my Dad’s long ago breath with me for so long now that I don’t know what to tell you. It was a loaner, but I kept it. It was a dickhead thing to do and I admit it, but people steal from kids all the time. It’s just how life goes. Father’s Day is just another heap of oily rags, man. It smells like the old days. In my bed, on that Sunday morning, I lay there feeling the deep sad in my breadbasket. Looking at the ceiling, looking at the asbestos or whatever the fuck it’s all made of, I inhaled right through the air conditioner cold to crack into what lays rotting in the cheap pioneer coffin.
I sucked his breath out of his skull like a kiss, like begging for something. And I hated the day before it even began/ the cigarette smoke/ the Pabst can tilting over in the backyard breeze/ the rattling of it on the uneven sidewalk by the old back door. The rat-a-tat-tat of it skittering across the warm pavement we once shared. Like some mean old snake slithering into the tall grass just besides the rutted trail.
I toss it overboard, this mason jar of my Dad’s old tired panting, his long ago laughing. I watch it land and shatter on a rock by a rock.
Then I wake up the next day and there it is again: on my desk by my phone charging: un-cracked and untouched.
It just refuses us to part. Dragging me down. Slowing me down.
Slowing me down before the snow flies.
The Two of Us Shining on Different Beaches Like Glass
Me and Charlie talk hard about our separate beach trips. They happened at the same time but we were not together. He was with his mom and that crew in Jersey while I was with Arle and my two step-kids, Milla and Piper, in Maryland.
For Charlie, his trip is worth recounting and he needs someone to bring it all back for. And I am more than willing. I want this as much as he does. But what surprises me is the back-and-forth that comes our way.
“Dad, want to talk about the shore?” he asks me as we are driving down the valley the other day.
“You’re goddamn right I do,” I tell him. It’s important to me that he senses in his bones that I’m not just willing to tolerate his 9-year-old travelogue or whatever, but that I am fucking down, dude. Like/ I am in this, my man. I am all in and fully committed so let’s go.
Of course, he starts the thing. He recounts a lot of stuff and in the spirit of true shared interest, we end up talking about these trips/ his full week ‘vacation’ and my three-night ‘getaway’/ several times across the week after they both ended. It is fresh in his mind and his eyes light up when he talks about it. It hurts, of course. I would give anything to be able to get all five kids and me and Arle to the shore at the same time, but it’s not possible really. The beach is expensive, you know. So this is what it is.
But Charlie’s stories are thrilling for me because they aren’t majestic tales of unobtainable travel. I hate shit like that. Instead, Charlie goes on and on about how he fucking loves Wawa (google it if you don’t know). He talks about walking from his condo every morning with his crowd over to the Wawa a couple blocks away. He talks about some kind of bacon egg and cheese croissant that he always ordered and asks me shit like: Dad, can you picture that breakfast sandwich? And: Dad, did you have any breakfast sandwiches when you were at the beach? And: Dad, how many times did you go to Wawa when you were on vacation?
The tone of his words are where it’s at for me. It would be for you too if you were there. And if you maybe have younger kids or have been around a little boy when he’s connecting the conversational dots as he hurls questions at you before wrestling back toward his own narrative, then maybe you feel me here. There is an inimitable charm in the air when a gap-tooth shaggy hair Popsicle mustache kid is nervously trying to ride the lightning balance between you answering his question about how much boogie boarding you did when it was actually raining at the beach versus his exploding desire to tell you that he boogie boarded on a wave so high that it actually rose up INTO a dark rain cloud as it carried him (flawlessly!) towards the beach.
Dad!, he starts all of his shit with Dad!, which adds years to my life, obviously.
Dad! Dontcha know when the seagulls are trying to get food out of your hand at the beach, dontcha know that when they’re doing that you can almost punch them back into the waves??!!
I don’t even know half the shit we say, me and Charlie. We look at YouTube vids together. I show him some stranger’s footage of the horses on Assateague that I saw and he shows me another stranger’s drone footage of the streets above the beach resort Wawa that he has fallen in love with. Sometimes we just talk about the sensation of saltwater rushing into your ear holes when you wipe out. Sometimes he tells me about being on the boardwalk, exhausted and sore from his day at the beach.
I didn’t ride any rollercoasters or anything, he sighs, because I was really, really tired.
I reach down the couch and pinch his ear lobe a little.
He ignores it.
I touch his right foot of toes and gently squeeze.
We are oceans colliding in space.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin. Once in a blue Muskie Moon, he backs away from the computer, straps on a guitar and plays some rock ’n’ roll with his brother Dave and their bandmates in Marah.
