The last time we went bye-bye

My father was a pack rat and his house was a pack rat's house on a street called Regent in Detroit. For our final outing together—another unknown ending (see Feb. 8 post)—my seldom heard-from half brother Charlie and I gathered there to take lunch on the day of Christ's Passion with the parent we strangely shared.

I arrived just after noon. Charlie was wearing a white T-shirt over unbelted jeans. My father was typically attired: tuxedo-shirt; gold chain supporting cross and anchor pendants; dark slacks; black boots; navy blue boating cap with patent-leather brim just like the cap Frank Sinatra wore in Pal Joey. I have no idea what I had on.

The first thing I did on stepping inside was avoid being peed on by Fleur, Pop's yapping, wriggling, poodle-terrier mix. Dad scooped Fleur up and tossed her on the sofa (I would see her leap up and pee on it later) and made his way to a pile of second-hand overcoats he wanted me to try on for size with a view toward unloading the lot on me should they fit.

I humored him while eyeing an unbroken panorama of junk.

Assorted glassware and gimcracks covered the dining room table. The living room furniture—a pastiche of rummage-sale oddments—looked like it had been set down willy-nilly by moving-men who had then left for lunch and not come back. The upholstered parts were threadbare and grimy. A pink chenille bedspread served for drapes. Opened and unopened mail, crumbling paperbacks, yellowing magazines, water-stained photos, and battalions of kitschy figurines obscured most surfaces like preposterously thick dust.

But, seriously: What should I have expected from a man who flushed his toilet by removing the tank-lid and dropping a jumbo bottle of shampoo onto the flapper? ("I’m gonna call a plumber one of these days," he assured me on demonstrating the technique.)

The plan, it turned out, was this: through the tunnel to Windsor, Ontario, then down Front Street to this great seafood restaurant he knew of in Amherstburg. Detroit River view and everything.

We snaked our way to the attached garage through gaps in the waist-deep clutter and climbed into Pop's winter ride—a four-door Chevy clunker he drove to keep road salt off his latest pre-owned Cadillac. Heading south toward the Windsor tunnel, we made a brief detour through the neighborhood off Gratiot where I'd lived with my grandparents before my mother remarried.

The two-family house on Townsend still stood, but amid a sorry host of debris-strewn vacant lots—including those once containing Tommy Trumonte's red-shingle home and the corner market with the striped roll-up awning where my grandmother bought me banana and root-beer Popsicles.

We bemoaned these changes and change in general all the way to the tunnel, Charlie interrupting from the back seat now and then with hysterically funny impersonations of deadpan actor Sterling Haydn droning Broadway show tunes. Thirteen years my junior, Charlie was one of the world's true geniuses without a cause.

"We must have looked like narcs driving down Townsend," Dad kept remarking throughout the afternoon. Yeah: his no-hubcaps jalopy and funky skipper's cap; my full beard and aviator sunglasses; Charlie's mutton chops and manic mane. A trio of grubby undercover cops cruising Murder City, U.S.A. (I found myself liking that idea, actually, for suggesting a personal reality substantially more exotic and exciting than writing sales brochures about Ford medium and heavy-duty trucks.)

On the Canadian side of the Detroit-Windsor tunnel, my father said to the customs officer, "You've been here a long time, haven't you."

"Thirty-six years."

"I remember you," Dad said. "I used to work here in Windsor. I came over through the tunnel every day."

"Oh ... yeah!" the man said, recognizing him. "How are you?"

That was the thing I admired most about my father: his genuine interest in, and generous kindness toward, strangers. Unless you've seen the movie Harvey, starring James Stewart, you can't appreciate what a compliment it is when I say my father was as close as it gets to a real-life Elwood P. Dowd. ("Here, let me give you one of my cards.")

In the parking lot at the riverside restaurant, Dad, who'd promised to buy, turned abruptly to Charlie and me and said in a weirdly severe tone, "You can have anything you want except beer, because I am not going to pay a buck twenty-five for alcohol." I was taken aback. Me, a father of six, talked to as though I were ten! I bristled a little, but held my tongue and obediently ordered coffee with my fish and chips.
Our post-lunch conversation heading back to Detroit degenerated inexorably into yet another Charlie-bashing. I'd cringed at them before—pretty much every time the three of us had been together—and therefore only halfway listened while Dad held forth on Charlie's inability to stay off welfare ... all the things wrong with Charlie's marriage ... the various deficiencies of Charlie's children (Bryanna doesn't mind, Jason is a wimp) ... the lackadaisical approach to discipline displayed by Charlie's beleaguered wife.

So sorry, Charlie.

It was dark before we got back to the rat house on Regent. I'd had my fill of surrealism and was happy as hell to blast off for home with just two secondhand topcoats in the trunk.

# # #

21 years ago

... Kelly hunted me down to tell on Erin.

It seems Erin had left her book-bag somewhere where Kelly could trip over it, and Kelly had gone ahead and tripped over it and fallen hard on the hardwood floor. An affront of this magnitude, Kelly felt, could be remedied only through swift and sure corporal punishment at the stinging hand of me.

So she stormed out to the kitchen and demanded a pound of Erin's flesh by parental proxy, expressing in no uncertain terms the length, width, height, and depth of her older sister's culpability.

Fortunately, generously dished commiseration was enough to carry the day, and, mollified, Kelly began scribbling a circular pattern in the condensation on the kitchen window—that irresistible magic slate. After a moment or two she settled into inscribing her name:

She formed the K, the E, and the two L's before running out of room at the frame; then, without hesitation, drew the Y in front of the K.

And this is what our children teach us if we're paying attention: All things are possible. All things make sense. Boundaries of thought and action do not exist. But, alas, the sublime solution of placing the Y before the K becomes ever more elusive the older we get.

# # #

Profile in courage

There seemed to be several hundred kids on the sprawling soccer fields of Oakland University that muggy July evening, but I picked out Thea from about five hundred yards away. There was no mistaking her trademark all-legs lankiness, swirling copper hair, or reckless abandon.

Her team, "Scotland," was winning its Mini-World Cup final. Thea waved to us from her sweeper position then redirected her attention to the pitch.

Her coach, Billy Gilmore, a ruddy, paunchy, balding, thin-legged Englishman in his latter forties or early fifties, strolled up and down the sidelines in a white T-shirt and blue shorts, whistle in hand, checking his clock and pronouncing his judgments with cordial calls of Play on! ... Free kick! ... Well done!

He shouted "Well done, Thea!" after Thea got knocked down hard while tackling the ball away from an opposing player; kept asking her if she was all right after she was back on her feet chasing the action.

Thea assured Coach Gilmore repeatedly that she was fine. But the ferocious collision with her male opponent had hurt her a lot. The boy had basically run right over her. I knew Thea would not cry no matter how much she wanted to: I’d seen her take a vicious ball in the face at age 9 and keep right on going, suppressing the tears-impulse for all she was worth. (That, in an age group where most kids screamed for their mommies and writhed on the ground after stubbing a toe.) Years later I would unknowingly watch Thea play an entire soccer game with a fractured forearm.

So I knew Thea would "play on," which she did.

My feelings at that moment were actually a mixture of pride and shame—pride in Thea's bravery, shame for her parents' oversight in forgetting to include a bottle of sunscreen when helping her pack for a five-day camp. What weren't we thinking? Yup. Poor fair-skinned Thea had been "playing on" most of the week with a painfully sunburned neck, arms, and thighs; paying the price for her parents' pitiable lack of foresight.

Then the match was suddenly over and we were hugging Thea and apologizing all over ourselves for her salmon-colored skin.

There was a short farewell ceremony at a distant set of bleachers, where awards and certificates got handed out.

Thea, unfazed by physical insults ranging from stomped-on to sunburnt, began crying at that point—dismayed and deflated by the average grades she'd received from Coach Gilmore in the skills section of her final evaluation form.

Walking back to the van, I tried as best I could to help her see the light: Coach Gilmore's "average" ratings had all been levied in things like passing and dribbling—things she could readily improve through dedication and practice.

In truth, Thea had succeeded well past admirably in all the categories that mattered more—in life as well as in soccer. Had received uniformly glowing praise from Coach Billy Gilmore for demonstrating, for example, the courage and determination to get back up and play on whenever a boy ran over her head.

# # #