“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”
— Diane Arbus
We did a tour. It was long ago now, before I had three kids. I had two then. And in the picture I have from the day we were leaving, they are in my arms, sagging in my grasp. It is a photo I hadn’t seen in such a while that I had forgotten it existed. With photographs you either are looking at them or you aren’t. And if you aren’t, then the memory is probably faded or even gone. But this one showed up in a clump of old junk and I stood there in the late afternoon slowness looking down at the girl, Violet, and the boy, Henry. And the man, me.
Back when I was younger.
Back when you were younger too.
• • •
Days gone by have left me more bewildered than nostalgic. Back when I was not yet a father or a husband or anything really, I used to suspect that later in life I would be able to sit on some old creaky porch rocker with a lemonade or maybe a whisky and stare upon a photo and everything good would come flooding back over me. The happiness. The joy. The sensations of a time when your children are small and fragile before you. They would hang there suspended forever in my manly embrace, I thought. Pictures would come down in which I tended to them in real time/ goofy smiles on my various faces/ real delight on theirs/ hoses spraying streams of water now frozen in time.
But back then I thought I would think they were flowing cool and fast, slapping down on the yard, slicking the blades of grass up and the kids darting in and out of the treat of it all. Something so exhilarating and unusual, they would have been thinking. Their childish brains still so undeveloped. Their eyes locked into a world that was pure and tempered with nothing but sweetness and racing hearts and real exhaustion.
I guess me writing all of that means I still think about it that way sometimes. Or that I wish it was all that there is. It’s not though. The years have changed me, made me rough both inside and out. To be honest, I laugh at the idea of a lemonade on the porch now. It would seem spurious as hell. I don’t want that. I’d rather sit with my own shattered remnants of something good that maybe hurts now. Or leaves me hanging. It’s better that way, I’m certain. Lying to the world is one thing. People do that to paint themselves in softer lights than they ever actually walked in. But lying to your own self is ignorant and foolish. No life story should be retold as to appear more palatable.
I know people who do that all the time. It’s a purple ribbon scar on their face. Just under an eye. And you can never unsee it again. And you never want to anyway.
• • •
I was thinking as I stared at the three of us that afternoon in Hublersburg, where we lived at the time. I was wondering what my kids might remember of the day. Probably nothing at all. But if they did, if there was maybe something, one thing even, carved into their bones to be discovered by accident some day long after I’m gone, what might it be? Selfishly, inexplicably, I hope against hope that it might be a musk. A stink. My impossible scent lingering. Years later, across so many miles that they will have run by then, I dream of it as a wisp, outside somewhere, starlings in the sky. Returning to them they are thrust into a memory that they had long forgotten. And I am reborn. Reinvented. Reconstructed from some kind of random ass honeysuckle breeze.
I celebrate it even knowing it is unlikely to happen that way at all. But still, to imagine my own return in such a gentle way fills me with bird song and fresh blood and breath. My smoky hair. My nervous spring sweat. Last night’s Rioja slipping from my pores. Like my dad once smelled to me. Looking at this old picture now, I want to believe that I ended up giving off my own scents, little traces of this and that floating out of me and into my kids that day. Up into Violet’s delicate curved-up nose/ up into Henry’s smile/ his tongue all curved into a U/ gently poking through his smiling lips like a baby bird over the edge of a nest.
Dad is back, Henry whispers. Not poetically or with a teary eye or whatever. He’s just back. Ten minutes ago he was nowhere to be had and now look at this, He is here.
Oh yeah. I smell it, Violet (Milo) responds. It smells like dark chocolate farts.
Henry just grins, his tongue poking gently from his lips.
• • •
I keep my own dad hidden now. I store him away in my own dank cellar/ his own smoky locks/ his silver tooth sunshine flash/ I keep it all hidden away inside me. From everyone and everybody.
My dad died in a bed alone, ravaged by who the hell knows what. Pneumonia, they call it, but pneumonia is code from the universe, don’t you know? When they say a man dies of pneumonia what they really mean is he died from the laughter stuck in his heart valves. The childish giggles he had forgotten completely, they came back to thrash him down with the pummeling force of ancient warriors.
My dad choked to death on me and my brother running through Dutch Wonderland so many moons ago. He died understanding, at long last, that no man is ever a tried and true man at all. We are nothing but lame trimmings. Nearly every young lad ever cut from the branch doesn’t even exist anymore. There are no Hercules left. There’s only pictures, and only if you’re lucky. Or only if you give a damn.
• • •
I didn’t want to go. The tour would be some kind of attempt to salvage something I knew even back then was gone. Bands, music, it has a shelf life, and if you abuse that by insisting it doesn’t exist then you ultimately destroy a lot of what you had once nearly died trying to create. In the photo on the porch of the rented house in the tiny country town, I wear my bandana and my loose cowboy shirt with the snap buttons. I had put on weight by then. Dad life, a dispirited marriage, returning home to Pennsylvania from a life in the west, it had all caught up to me.
In the photo I see Violet’s look away as tenderness, although there is every chance that it was more autism than love. I am not certain that they really were sure what was happening. Not because they weren’t invested in my presence everyday, but more because they had never known a world where I wasn’t there in the next room, at least by dinner time. Her eyes fixed on a distance and I yearn to know what she felt/ how she saw me/ where her mind was at. I can never know that stuff, of course. Only they could tell me and maybe they might if I ever show them the picture. But at the same time, I think it’s not really something I have a right to go digging for.
Her world is her own.
But god, I did not want to leave her. Or Henry. I remember the promises my brother and Christine made. This amount of money if you do the tour. It will be great. We will have fun. I was out of shape though and there were missing band members now and it all felt so forced and not like the old days. Philadelphia/ our years there and the city in our blood/ it all seemed such a long lost planet to me by then. Being immersed in what had made us/ our white boy amped up soul/ our comic book grit and our endless mega-desire to please you with hard labor upon any stage, upon every stage: it felt compromised that afternoon. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, I guess. People are such fools, me included. No one wants to say goodbye to the things that define them. Ego, distorted old hunger, and the ever lurking chance for American poor people with unsmashable dreams to make a little loot: it all caused us to cling to something that wasn’t even there. Now I understand that, for some people, the past is all they have. And letting go of it is impossible to fathom. Until one day the winds change and what was once so scary crinkles up and blows down the street. The chittery sound of a Coke can rolling down the block. You finally just let it go.
I wanted to tell them I wasn’t getting in the van right as this picture was being taken. I wanted to tell them that I wasn’t going on the three hour drive to the airport in Philly and I wasn’t going on the overnight flight across the Atlantic to Spain and I wasn’t going to Madrid or Barcelona or any of the other towns because I wanted to stay with my two kids more than anything in the universe right then.
Can you see that in my eyes? Can you look at the photograph and notice me begging you to come rescue me from the songs and the miles and the loneliness and the drinking and the meanness and the drama?
I wasn’t trying to stay as a husband. My wife at the time would have likely been counting the minutes until I was off that country porch, completely gone from her eyes for several weeks. But that was grown-up nonsense/ our cold dumb prison/ a tiny spark on the ground I could put out with a piss. The real fire was the one in which I was burning to stay home, to stay right there with the two in my arms, as a dad. Not in some heroic style either, though I wish I could tell you that was it. It wasn’t tough. I wanted to stay because I felt safe with my children in my arms. I felt grounded with both children at my face. I felt alive and well and untouchable with my baby son and my toddler daughter right there in my path. Their elfin heads at my nose/ mellow intricate meadows of love/ their righteous scents/ day in and day out/ rolling through across my prairie/ pushing through my skull/ into my tale.
My dad never needed that as far as I can tell. I hardly think he even knew it was a thing available to him as a man in the moments of his life unfolding. To have embraced a kid in the style of a pussy man probably would have made him uneasy. I wonder about all that sometimes. I know I can’t speak for him or for anybody, but there is little left for me if I don’t at least try sometimes. This is me, after all. Me, my writing. Here comes my memory miasma sliding out across my landscape like the 6am mist slipping out of the cornfield down by the movie theater parking lot. My mass of ghost. My earth cloud blues.
And you know what? I think of all these people from my past. I see them again, standing before me in a dream. What they smelled. What they thought. What they desperately wanted to accomplish or achieve or eliminate or express back when we were only a few feet apart, our lives smashing into each other with reckless abandon.
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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.
