Now I am sitting at the dining room table for another of my nonnegotiable rituals: I am eating my corn flakes and reading this morning’s edition of the
Billings Herald-Gleaner.
I see by the big headline on the front page of the newspaper that Barack Obama won. The headline says, in all capital letters, “OBAMA’S TIME.” I am not impressed by that headline; it sounds like a beer commercial. I have half a mind to write a letter of complaint to the newspaper editor, but then I think again and realize that another of my rituals has run its course. I think I am going to see if I can get out of the unsent-letter-of-complaint business and try just dealing with the frustrations as they come. If they require complaint, I’ll complain. If I can let them go, I will try to let them go, even though I know that will be difficult. A bad headline in the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
, while irritating, is the sort of thing I need to try to let go.
The newspaper also has a story about my father’s now-empty seat on the county commission. He died so close to the election that there wasn’t time to line up candidates for the job and put them on the ballot, so the county leaders have decided to have a special election in January to fill the spot. The Billings mayor, Kevin Hammel, says he is going to run for the position. As he has just been roundly beaten for the position of state schools superintendent
—another story in this morning’s
Herald-Gleaner
—he should have the time. I don’t like his chances of winning, although that is merely an informed opinion and not a fact. I prefer facts.
I also see that my old boss in the court of clerk’s office lost her race. I bet that Lloyd Graeve and the rest of the people who work there are celebrating this morning.
I glance at all the news I want to read and check out other parts of the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
—especially Dear Abby, who answers a letter from a fifty-nine-year-old man whose eyes are so bad that he can’t see his girlfriend when they’re having intimate relations. A good headline for that Dear Abby column would be “Love Is Blind,” but of course the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
didn’t do that. They have terrible headline writers at that newspaper. But I will let it go.
By the time I’m done reading, it’s 9:05 and I have to hustle or I’ll be late to my parents’—my mother’s—house.
– • –
The living room of my mother’s house is uncharacteristically cluttered today. She has been bringing down armfuls of my father’s clothing and sorting it into piles.
“What’s this, Mother?” I ask after she lets me in the front door.
“I’m giving your father’s clothes to charity. Go through them and take anything you want.”
“I don’t want anything.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I don’t like golf shirts.”
A glance around the room tells me that he has hundreds of golf shirts, and slacks, and golf sweater vests, and fleece pullovers. These clothes, destined for the Salvation Army and the Montana Rescue Mission thrift stores, will be fine items for someone. I
would not be surprised to see a homeless man in a St. Andrew’s sweater this winter. That would be funny.
“Why are you doing this now, Mother?”
“Why not? No time like the present. And, frankly, it’s too much. Your father is no longer here to wear it, and it’s not right that we should have so much when others have so little.”
That makes a lot of sense to me. And my mother seems invigorated with this project.
“There’s another benefit to doing this, Edward.”
“What’s that?”
“Come here and smell this.” She’s holding out one of my father’s shirts, an aqua-blue long-sleeved shirt with the Augusta National logo on the left breast.
“Smell a shirt?”
“Yes, it’s not something bad. Give it a whiff.”
I lean over but don’t let my nose touch the shirt. Even so, I can smell the faint essence of my father’s cologne, Canoe, on it.
“You spend forty years of your life in the same house with a man, and you come to know his scent,” my mother says. “It’s like he’s here in the room with me. And that gives me comfort.”
She smiles at me, and I back at her.
“Maybe I’ll take one of them, Mother.” She hands me the aqua-blue long-sleeved shirt, which I place away from the stacks of clothing, and then I come back and help her fold and sort the piles of unprocessed clothes still to go.
– • –
“I’ve made a decision, Edward.”
My mother and I are eating tuna sandwiches and carrot sticks in the kitchen.
“What?”
“I’m selling the house.”
I am surprised.
“Why?”
“It’s too much for just me. I wouldn’t feel right living here alone. It’s too big and…Well, it’s something your father and I shared. Now that he’s gone, I think it might be time for me to find a place that’s just mine.”
“What sort of place?”
“There are some lovely new condos just downtown. They are small enough for just me, and they’re near the places I like to go. As nice as the view is from here, I’ve never much cared for how far we are from town and for driving down that hill in the nastiest days of winter. I think I would like downtown living.”
“Yes.”
“Also, I won’t be spending as much time here anymore.”
“Oh?”
“Yes,” she says. “It’s like this, Edward: I’ve decided that I would like to split my time between here and Dallas. Your Aunt Corinne still lives down there, and I haven’t seen nearly as much of her as I would like.”
“Didn’t Uncle Andy die last year?”
“Yes. We can be the two crazy widow sisters, on the loose in Texas.”
“That’s funny, Mother.”
“Would that be OK with you, if I spent more time in Texas from now on?”
“Yes. Why would you ask?”
“I don’t know. You’re a grown man, Edward, and I know you can take care of yourself. But if you thought I was abandoning you, I wouldn’t want to leave.”
“I know you’re not abandoning me, Mother.”
“Good.”
“I might even come see you sometimes.”
“Edward, I would love that.”
“I think I would, too.”
She reaches out and clutches my right hand in hers. I squeeze back.
– • –
“Are you angry with me over some of the things your father did?”
My mother and I are in his office going through photo albums. She thinks that I should take some and keep them in my house on Clark Avenue, and I think it is a very good idea.
“No.”
“I feel horrible about all the things I didn’t know. When I saw those letters in Jay’s file, I…I felt so betrayed. Betrayed by your father, and even Jay. Then later, I felt so stupid. I wondered, ‘How could I have not known? How could I have become so detached from your life? How could I have let him make me so detached from your life?’”
“Dr. Buckley says that I should try to remember the good in Father and give him the benefit of the doubt that he was doing what he thought was best, even if it was off base.”
“What do you think?”
“I think that is easier to say than to do. But I also think Dr. Buckley is very wise and that it’s worth the effort.”
“I guess so.”
We keep looking at photographs.
“Edward, what was that letter that Jay gave you Monday?”
“Father wrote it a couple of years ago to tell me that he was proud of me and loved me, and that he hoped he would say it before he died so he didn’t have to say it in that letter.”
My mother’s eyes fill with tears. “I wish he would have told you,” she says softly.
“So do I, but Dr. Buckley says he gave me a great gift. She says that she has clients who have waited all their lives to hear those things from their fathers. I only had to wait until I was thirty-nine years and two hundred and ninety-nine days old.”
My mother laughs as a tear runs down her face. “I love you, too, Edward.”
“I know, Mother. And I love you.”
– • –
Before I leave, my mother tells me that there’s one last order of business between us.
“Leave your Toyota here and take the Cadillac.”
My father’s Cadillac DTS is sitting in the driveway, gleaming in the early afternoon sunlight.
“What will happen to the Toyota?”
“I’ll have Jay dig up the title, and we’ll include it in all the things we’re sending to the Rescue Mission. Between your father’s clothes, the car, and the check we’re going to write, there ought to be enough to ensure some happy holidays for people who deserve some happiness, don’t you think?”
“Yes. That sounds very nice.”
“The keys are in the ignition. Enjoy your new car. Your father certainly did.”
I kiss my mother on the cheek and then walk over to the car, which is a deep, beautiful cherry red. I open the door and climb in.
I turn the key in the ignition to get a look at the instrument panel, which is a lot different from the one in my Camry. As I’m slipping into the seat belt, my mother raps her knuckles against the window on my side of the car.
The DTS doesn’t have manual-crank windows like the Camry. Finally, I find the automatic window button.
“Edward, it will take a while to sell this house, and I’m not planning to head to Texas until spring. Can I count on seeing you from time to time?”
“Yes, Mother. Of course.”
“Because we’re going to do better from now on, you and me, right?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Take care, son. I’ll call you in a few days, or you call me, OK?”
“Yes.”
She puts her hand on my cheek and smiles, and then she steps away from the car and waves good-bye. I push the window button to roll it up, put the car in drive, and head down the driveway.
A few minutes later, at 4:26 p.m., I’m riding along Highway 3, back toward downtown.
The Cadillac DTS is a superior car in every way except one: I liked where the cup holders were on the Camry. It is yet another thing I will have to let go.
– • –
At home, I park the Cadillac DTS in the driveway, and then I get out and admire it.
It’s a beautiful car.
The STANTON vanity plates will have to go. My father was more flamboyant than I. (I love the word “flamboyant.”)
The Dallas Cowboys license plate frames will stay.
– • –
I spend the next few hours ostensibly sorting through the pictures my mother has sent home with me. I say ostensibly—a word I love—because every ten minutes on the dot, I get up and peek through the curtains on the front window to see if I can spot Donna Middleton and/or Kyle. Each time, I see no one, though I can see by the car that they are home.
The pictures I’ve selected span much of my life, but most of them are from the days when I was a young child and my father and I got along famously. As I thumb through the albums, I remove some of the ones I like best: my father and me on the Ferris wheel at the Montana State Fair, my mother and me standing outside a cave at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, my mother and father splashing around in a lake in Minnesota. I decide that these pictures and several others should not be closed up in an album but instead should be framed on a wall. As my walls are empty, I have plenty of room for such things.
In considering where the photos I’ve picked out would look best, I find myself wishing that I had taken pictures of that snowy day in front my house when Kyle was riding his Blue Blaster and Donna and I were throwing snowballs. Photographs, it seems to me, are both moments in time and bits of memory. I have the memory of that day with Donna and Kyle, but I also know that memory is imprecise. If I’d had a camera, instead of just a memory, I could have caught the moments so that they would never escape me. If Donna has decided that she no longer wants to be
my friend, I’ll have to desperately hold on to those memories so that they never get away, because I won’t have the chance to replace them.
As the second hand hits 12:00 and another ten minutes have passed, I go back to the front window and look out. They are still nowhere to be seen.
Though I want nothing more than to leave this house and find my friends, I decide instead to quit looking. Staring out the window doesn’t violate the letter of what Dr. Buckley asked me to do in leaving Donna alone, but it does violate the spirit of it.
– • –
At 10:00, I start watching tonight’s episode of
Dragnet
. Though I broke with protocol yesterday and watched
Dragnet
earlier, at 7:04 p.m., I did it only to make the point that I wasn’t slavish (I love the word “slavish”) to the clock. I also watched a second episode, the sixteenth of the first season of color episodes, called “The Big Kids,” and that also was to prove a point. I wanted to show that I can watch my favorite show whenever I want and for however long I want.
But the truth is, I like watching
Dragnet
at 10:00 p.m. and only one episode. It works for me. Doing what you want and what feels right strikes me as being more important than doing something just to prove a point. I think Dr. Buckley would agree.
Tonight’s episode, the seventeenth and final installment of the first season of color episodes, is called “The Big Bullet,” and it’s one of my favorites.
In this episode, which originally aired on May 11, 1967, Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon investigate a reported suicide at a woman’s house. She tells the officers that her estranged
husband came by to visit, locked himself in a room, and killed himself with a gun.
But the clues don’t add up that way. It turns out that the slug pulled from the man’s body doesn’t match the gun he was holding. Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon return to the woman’s house and go through her vacuum cleaner filter, as she has already cleaned the room where her estranged husband died. In it, they find the shell casing for the bullet that killed him. They talk with the woman’s mother, who answered the door when the husband came by, and they come to find out that she shot him—because he shot her Bible.
The lesson, I think, is that we tend to be protective of the people and things we care about. It’s easy to understand why.
– • –
In lieu of writing a letter of complaint, which I’ve decided to swear off, I break down my filing cabinet and box up my green office folders full of letters. I am tempted to count the number of letters I have written, but I resist the urge. If I’m not going to write them anymore, the number doesn’t matter. I will box up the letter files and stack them up in the garage tomorrow. They can wait there for a while, until I decide what do with them. Perhaps I will eventually move them back into the house, unable to swear off writing the letters, after all. I hope that’s not the case, but I just don’t know. Anything along those lines is just conjecture, and I prefer facts. Facts are the most reliable things in the world. On that, Sergeant Joe Friday and I agree.