What I Know

///   THERE was that one time when our father magically appeared on the sidewalk.  He slowly made his way up to the front door clutching his arm.  He had lost a lot of weight.  I could see it in his face.  He was never a chubby fellow, not particularly lean either, but generally as trim as a man of his generation would be.  This man, he looked like my father, but he was gaunt, his cheekbones more pronounced, his skin darker and sallower.  It was an odd sight and strangely, not disturbing.  I pitied him.

And yet, I feared him.

I feared the outline of his small, limping body.  I feared the menacing spirit he carried inside that frame.  Its bewitching ability to drive uhmmah into another crashing halt was oppressive.  The inevitability of my mother's downward and upward and back down spiral, even more so.  Who knew what would happen once he entered our lives again.  The only thing for certain?  That yet another cycle of tempestuous events would - no - was brewing.

He had been beaten.  Or something.  Something that left his shoulder out of its socket and bruises on his face.  Weak.  Maybe he hadn't eaten in a few days.  We hadn't seen him in weeks.  He had somehow managed to drive his manual car back to Philadelphia.  It had taken him days what should have taken a few hours.  That's how it is with a broken arm.  Or whatever it was.

The silent streak of resilience that is so ingrained me - there is no doubt that this comes from my father.  The two of us, we will literally fall apart trying to manage on our own, proudly keeping the white flag down.  Hidden.  Away.  Safe from the eyes.  Oh, the eyes.

He claimed he was robbed at a gas station while pumping gas.  My mother laughed.

That's where I get it from - laughing softly when I don't know what to do.  As the girls' athletic director at my high school once scolded when I couldn't maneuver a basketball the way the drill was designed to teach, There's nothing funny about it, Julia.  Touché, Mrs. McConnell.  Touché.

Uhmmah waited until I was at school and dialed the number on the white board next to the phone, the number where she could reach me on most Saturday nights.  The father of the family was a radiologist.  The mother a nurse at the same hospital.  My father didn't have insurance.  Uhmmah wondered if the family might know of any alternative routes to have a doctor assess the damage.  He had been in an accident, she reported.  The next time I babysat, the mother gently - and dutifully - delivered a lecture on how I should never feel ashamed of my family asking for help.  I was mortified.  I hadn't known that uhmmah had contacted them.

I couldn't articulate then what I can now.  It wasn't that we needed help.  It was that an ugly pattern had formed.  What most parents could manage on their own as adults, my parents were incapable of doing without their children.  What parents often shield from their children, I was front and center.  Did uhmmah mention that her husband hadn't been in contact for weeks before this incident?  That the accident was probably not an accident, but more likely the result of loan sharks shaking her husband up for a gambling debt?  No.  Because the outside world, no one could know.

My sister has a framed print with a message that stays with me.  You might remember it {+}.  Some may find it trite, but to this little girl, it's so profound that I think I'll share it here again.

Hindsight is always twenty/twenty.