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My Father’s Conversion (cont.) “I have four aliases,” Dad informs me one night when he is feeling particularly cavalier. “L. Toro, Magellan, Night Owl, and L.V., which I reserve for my most special friends.” My father chuckles at that. There is a slight air of pride in his comment, as though I should be aware that my 74-year-old father, a senior citizen with gout and mild emphysema, twice divorced and once widowed, is not over the hill. “Nobody better count me out,” my father says as he logs on and checks his e-mail. “Nobody does, Dad,” I tell him as I straighten the cushions on his sofa. I clean Dad’s small house two or three times a week since he is unable to properly keep it up by himself. It is neater than I keep my own, which makes me feel a little sorry for myself. Even though I try to feel noble about what I am doing, I know my motives are not pure. I do his cleaning not strictly because I want my dad to live in a clean place, but to stop him from fixating on Wanda. Yes, his physical comfort is important to me, but that altruistic cause alone would not motivate me to come over here after eight hours of working at the bank when I have a son and a house of my own that need my attention. Wanda’s absence is felt most strongly when Dad’s house is a mess. So I do what I can to lessen the opportunities for him to flashback to Wanda, remembering her departure and her new boyfriend, all of which could lead to an arrest should he violate the restraining order. Just thinking about accompanying my father to court makes washing his dishes and mopping the kitchen floor totally bearable. My father says he has asked God to allow him to walk on water, like Christ allowed Peter to do. He adds that the Lord can take him on up to heaven after that, letting his body drop to the bottom of the bay, right off of Keegan’s Point. This is how he imagines his death: After he has walked with his gout-inflamed feet over the water from the pier where his Langtree Lady has been docked since his condition has worsened, after he has decided it is time to die, he will give some loud sailor’s cry that mimics the sound of seagulls. Then, he will raise his arms toward heaven, his body and spirit splitting, one shooting off like a NASA project into the atmosphere and beyond, the other dropping softly like discarded clothing into the wide, open arms of a sea that has been a more faithful lover to him than any of the women he has ever known. That is how my father thinks it is going to be. I hope he goes in his sleep so I won’t have to witness his disappointment. My dad considers the Apostle Peter his spiritual compadre, his fellow fisherman and aquatic equal. Although my father was just a recreational fisherman as opposed to a fisherman by profession like Peter, he doesn’t see that the difference should be significant to God. A man of the sea is a man of the sea. He applies that same simplified logic to women. A woman is a woman, whether she’s in the flesh or coming to him through his computer. I cringe when I think what my father would do if he discovered that some of those flirtatious ladies with whom he regularly ‘chats’ until 2 a.m., turned out to be men, enjoying a little role reversal. Such a thought has never occurred to Leonard Vance, despite the fact that he wasn’t born yesterday. I am bringing my father dinner tonight. It isn’t much, just some homemade stew and cornbread. I don’t cook a lot, and most nights he makes do with frozen microwave dinners. But tonight I will give him something that my mother used to make for him. He will like that, and perhaps he will spend the evening watching television like he used to do so many years ago, before all the women who ever wanted him, floated away. My father is typing with a pencil eraser, used as a finger, when I come through the front door with his supper. He nods in my direction as he slowly continues jabbing out the words that he wants to say to somebody, anybody who happens to be out there; words sent out like notes in bottles to the unknown, hoping they are well-received, praying they prompt someone to send some back to him. After he finishes eating, he will return to the glowing monitor where he will remain until the late hours of the night, waiting to see if he gets a nibble or a bite. If I could take the Langtree Lady out, I’d take my father out to his special spot and hope that God might have another message for him. Or for me. Surely, something has to be coming in the not too distant future; something that will do more than string us along. Surely, there is something waiting, maybe just beyond Keegan’s Point, which can offer us some direction. It may just be wishful thinking, but on evenings when I doze off in Dad’s recliner as he searches for someone on the Internet to respond to his SOS, and I awake several hours later only to see my father still searching, I long to believe in something as I tell him goodnight and head for home. On those nights, I feel like a self-appointed yeoman for all the marooned souls on Earth as I cry out my frustrations to the night sky. When I can’t find the words to say, I simply wail, sometimes with the car window rolled down so that the night air slaps my face and makes me feel like I have made some kind of contact. It encourages me to blurt out my requests in a rapid-fire fashion, invoking divine guidance, hoping to get it all said while I think God might actually be listening.
On other nights, when
I am calm, I see my father’s nightly computer time as mere entertainment
for an aging man who doesn’t like to play dominoes, and I drive home in
silence or listening to the radio turned down low, trusting the sharp,
crisp glare of my headlights to illuminate the road before me.
Gayla Chaney is big in Texas (but isn't
everything?) Her work has appeared in the Potomac Review, Natural
Bridge, Carve, Paper Street, RE:AL, Phantasmagoria, Concho River Review,
and she recently won the 2005 Predator Press Chapbook Award.
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