My Father's Sadness
I ride in my dad's black car to my grandparents house. I am seven or eight years old, too young to know who they really are beyond their namesake. It is a Sunday afternoon. I watch the summer sun rays disappear and reappear between passing trees and houses. A lot of the houses in the neighborhood are unkempt and smaller than the house I live in. Glitter like stars beckon on her stucco ceiling. I call it her house still but it belongs to her husband, the old man hunching over the kitchen table awash in cigarette smoke. He is huge but not strong or able-bodied. As I grow older he remains the same. Obese and stony and unclean. Perpetually confined within that chasm of a home, echoing at times with so much love and grief in equal parts. We are not surprised when he dies. The consensus is that he had it coming with his stubborn negligence and myriad of health troubles, unknown and untreated. At the funeral the preacher speaks on the mercy of God. My father weeps. I don't fully ...