Daydreaming with Dad

Today would have been my father’s 74^th birthday. When I’d call him each May 5, my first words were always “Happy Cinco de Mayo!” which typically sidetracked us into an animated discussion about the many margaritas we’d consumed in our lives, especially the ones we’d consumed together, before I got down to the real business of the day. (On my birthday, he’d return the favor with “Happy Daughter’s Day!” or “Happy Halloween!” or some similarly silly and peripheral greeting.)

Dad, 2007

Last year when I called, it was late afternoon on his Virginia farm and Dad was putzing around the kitchen, thinking about getting ready to be taken out for dinner to the local café in Flint Hill, 24 Crows, or maybe even sneaking in a passing glance at the early news (surely he was the last person in the world to watch network news?). My stepmother was out in the barn feeding her horses and had not yet been kicked in the arm by Spike (or was it Mouse?). That would happen shortly after my dad and I hung up, derailing birthday dinner plans and resulting in a fractured forearm and a long night in the E.R. Looking back, that was the beginning of it all, the long hot dry summer of trouble, when the news from Huntly Stage was grim and getting grimmer: My stepmom’s arm wasn’t healing, it hadn’t rained in weeks, the fields had dried up, the vegetable garden was a husk of its former self, it was hot as blazes, but—glimmer of hope!—at least the air conditioning still worked. 

You’d have to be deaf not to hear the distress signals, but I was having the opposite kind of summer. I was pregnant and then Maisy was born and I was cocooned in baby bliss (or was it sleep deprivation?) and far too preoccupied by this tiny, new precious life to fret too much about drought and disgruntlement on the farm. I hate thinking about it now—what I might have done or could have done had I known what I know now. 

Because of course there was more to Dad’s angst than he let on. He’d been filling sluggish for several months, leftover lethargy from what he thought was a kidney stone. After he died, I found a small spiral pocket notebook on the shelf of his closet, on top of a lopsided stack of sweatshirts. In it, he’d recorded his weight in thick black magic marker, every day for three or four weeks in August and late September. Just a date and a number, no comment. The trend was down. Not precipitously, but by the date of his last entry, just before his diagnosis on September 16, he’d dropped four or five pounds. Dad was a data guy, an inveterate observer and amateur scientist. He dutifully logged every inch of rainfall the farm saw in the 30 years he lived there and practically every penny he spent every day, but these entries, however unadorned, seemed to radiate a new kind of emotion: fear. This time he was more than just the observer; he was the observed. 

Then he found out just how sick he was, and the doctors gave him six to nine months without treatment, but his disease was a runaway train and he didn’t even make three. Now it is his birthday and staggering to the fragile, grief-whipped mind to contemplate that a year ago none of this had really begun, or was just beginning, only we didn’t know it. 

Today Steve and I planted a peach tree in his memory. He and my step-mom used to have a one on the west side of their house that was like a caricature of a southern peach tree. It literally drooped with fruit; the branches scraped the ground. In the sweltering sticky heat of high summer, when the fields grew knee-high overnight and needed to be mowed by my dad every other day it seemed, you could not pick the peaches fast enough. They practically grew as you watched. Eventually the tree wore itself out with all its fecundity and had to be taken down, but I’ve always fantasized about fresh peaches from my own tree. 

Dad's peach

After the tree was planted, I got Dad’s favorite Rappahannock County baseball hat and a copy of his long road-trip journal, "American Heartline," and sat beside tree. I put the hat on, black but faded from long days in the sun on his tractor, with a single raggedy pinky-sized hole on top, perhaps from an errant spark (once Dad almost set his own fields on fire, accidentally, but that’s another story), and flipped the laminated book open to a random page. The first words caught my eye were “Bye, Dad.” I took that as a sign, so I started reading aloud to the peach tree. In that day's entry, Dad was in St. Aubert, Missouri, and had met some men, as usual, and was knee-deep in friendly, ambling conversation. There was a joke, of course—that was Dad’s way of making people feel comfortable—and talk about farming and rain, too much of it that year, the summer of ‘95. 

Then I lay back on the flagstone path and tilted Dad’s black cap over my eyes. When he was alive, Dad used to lie on his shrimp-colored living room carpet after lunch and daydream for 20 minutes or so. He was an exceptionally industrious, hardworking person, almost to a fault, but he allowed himself this one respite each day. It was, he told me once, a chance for his brain’s alpha waves to recalibrate. He'd looked this up in the dictionary, he wrote me in an email, and found that alpha rhythms are“a pattern of slow brain waves in normal persons at rest with closed eyes, thought by some to be associated with an alert but daydreaming mind." He concluded with this cheerful afterthought: "Glad to know I didn't just make it up!" Dad didn’t doze off but lay there in a hazy state until he felt ready to get up, at which point he usually felt refreshed, if not tingly with new ideas and clarity. Leave it to Dad to find a practical use for daydreaming. 

Lying there, with Dad’s large cap perfectly screening my face from the midday sun, I crossed my legs at the ankles and folded my hands on my stomach, just like he used to do. I heard the cottonwood tree’s thumbprint leaves rustle in the breeze and the miniature, falling-apart wind chime I’d hung years ago in a branch of a nearby juniper begin to tinkle. I don’t remember ever hearing the pathetic specimen make a noise before. I smelled the sweet lilacs and felt ants scurrying up my bare shins. 

I didn’t think of Dad as much as feel him. He was all around me in the air, and I could smell his farm—not just the farm, but Dad on the farm. The farm and Dad were one, indivisible. I had a sense of him—his hands, his voice, the way the barn he built sat on the hillside. These came to me not in specific images but through the sounds of the day, as a weight that passed overhead and lingered just long enough for me to know he was there. 

As you probably know by now, I’ve become obsessed with slowing down lately. So I’m going to remember this feeling today, and take every chance I get to lie down beside the peach tree with Dad and be still. 

Happy birthday, Dad.