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This week’s featured essay focuses on father and son bonds–those that were foundational and those that were desired.
Weekly Featured Essay
Be With Me
by Joseph O’Day
“Kris, I can’t believe he doesn’t want to be with me. We’ve had so few chances to spend time like this together.”
“Kids are like that when they’re thirteen, Joe. It’s not personal. They’d rather hang out with friends.”
Thirteen is the age I started hanging out with my father at his carwash, and when he took me bowling on Sundays and dinner afterwards at the restaurant across the street from the bowladrome. The Massachusetts Blue Laws prohibited the carwash from staying open Sunday afternoons, so bowling and dinner became our weekly routine. It gave my father a chance to relax and me a chance to be with him. I remember sitting across the table at those dinners. He’d have a beer or two with his meal. I’d have a boneless chicken dinner. Depending on the season, there’d be a Patriots or Red Sox or Celtics game playing on the wall TVs. If a major golf tournament was on, like the Masters or U.S. Open, we’d watch and root for Jack Nicklas, one of his favorites. A few years after my father died, I brought my son to the Senior U.S. Open at Salem Country Club to see Nicklaus. We stood alongside the fairway rope line, and as Nicklaus walked by, he gave the spectators a smile. My father would have loved that.
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A Ki Ta La?
by Saul Siarras
Almost every night for the two months that I lived with her, I heard Paulette’s relentless pleas in the middle of the night: prayers half-remembered, calls for her estranged son, discussions with someone who wasn’t there. I couldn’t make out every word she uttered as some of them were in Creole, a language I knew but not enough to grasp all its meanings and nuances.
One of her caretakers had warned me that sleeping would be a challenge in this apartment whose permanent resident was a ninety-four-year-old bedridden Caribbean woman who religiously spoke words into the darkness as soon as the sun set.
Pictures in the living room told a far different story. Paulette had once been a striking woman, her skin so light she could pass for white, and in a country notorious for its colonial past, I could only imagine what doors that had opened for her. She had been a wife, a mother, a grandmother. The photographs showed her at the center of things, surrounded by children, grandchildren, and friends. She was a woman people gathered around. Her husband had died some twenty years earlier. He was survived by a son, Pascal, and a daughter, Monica, now in their late fifties.
Her story followed a path worn smooth by thousands before her.
Garland, Texas, 1993
by Curtis C. Morgan
I had spent much of the previous year working out of town and had accumulated a small nest egg. I decided to try my hand at flipping houses. What I expected to find in Garland, Texas, were the usual things—cracked foundations, bad wiring, leaky roofs. What I found instead were two stories that had nothing to do with the house and everything to do with the people around it.
I was looking at the vacant house when I saw a man working in the yard across the street. On the theory that a neighbor might know something about the defects of a house, I walked over and introduced myself. His name was Neal.
He told me a family had lived in the house. The father had died unexpectedly. The daughter, a teenager, had taken it badly. She kept saying she wanted to go be with him. One day she went into the bathroom and shot herself.
Old Poets, Old Mills, Old Women
by Sydney Lea
Despite my academic degrees and my forty-plus years on college faculties, I’ve never considered myself a scholar. I’ve always found it too hard to communicate the crucial effects on me of the literature I love, found them always beyond explanation.
That’s the case, for example, with my favorite Wordsworth poem, “Resolution and Independence.” I’ve immersed myself in it so often—along with assorted poems by many other poets—that I can almost recite it. I mention all this because I re-read it a few evenings ago, then went about such minor chores as still fall to me. Or I thought I did. As it turns out, the poem’s spirit would soon reassert itself in ways I’d never have foreseen.
The speaker of “Resolution and Independence,” out walking the moors and brimming with youthful enthusiasm, sinks abruptly into despondency:
… fears and fancies thick upon me came;
Dim sadness—and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name.
Amazing Grace in the Valley of the Plain People
by Stephanie La Rose
When I arrived, Mom’s garage door was up, which was not unusual. She’d perch on the threshold, Christian Science Sentinel in lap, and hail neighbors. In the kitchen, a pan of soup crawled with ants. As I advanced from the kitchen’s mess to the living room’s stench, I troubled over how long the house had gaped open for passersby. I tiptoed the hall toward the bedroom. I heard a rasping breath in, then nothing, nothing, and finally a cough out.
I took two steps back. I bowed my head and considered fleeing. I’d dreaded this day since Mom had returned from spending eight months in the Christian Science nursing home twenty years ago. The bewilderment, the impotency, I didn’t want it. I’d rather have found her dead.
“Cora?” She called. She’d heard me and mistaken me for her neighbor.
Recovery on Four Skinny Legs
by Linda Dixon
I came home in the quiet, early part of the pandemic after surviving a sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) and a weeklong medication-induced coma. I was released into a world that felt hollowed out. The hospital was stretched thin, and whatever system usually caught people like me—those whose brains had been starved of oxygen—was no longer functioning.
No rehabilitation was arranged. No follow-up calls came. No one offered a roadmap for what anoxia had done to my mind. I was wheeled out of the hospital with a packet of instructions and a body bruised from chest compressions, but without anyone to tell me how to rebuild a life that had abruptly collapsed.
I was one of the 6 percent of people who survive an out-of-hospital SCA. A congenital defect dismissed as harmless stalked my every breath until it ambushed me in the middle of the night. I returned to a house that looked the same but felt foreign, carrying a mind that drifted like fog. I had trouble swallowing and shuffled when I walked. I sweated profusely inside a bulky vest attached to an external cardiac defibrillator-charged and ready to shock me back to life. Due to the impact of anoxia on my social skills, I had trouble maintaining proper physical space. In the months that followed, losses accumulated steadily: my career aspirations, gone in an instant; the spontaneity of travel; even the simple breathless thrill over a new movie-all of it slipping away before I could understand what was happening. My life became a muted version of itself, and I knew I had to cobble together my own path back.
A few months later, an emaciated rescue dog stepped into the wreckage of my days. His execution in a Mississippi shelter was imminent, but the day my home was approved for his adoption, he was lifted out of the life that had failed him. We named him Dewey.
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