novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- a messed up journal entry for nonfiction writing class hello, here's something i didn't want to write. by the way, my creative writing of nonfiction teacher hated it. --- my knowledge of my father before he was my father is fragmented so much that it feels like I�ve been told footnotes to the middle of an autobiography. he rarely talks about his life. He rarely talks at all. My father has a knack for prolonging silence. He is not vocally articulate, so to hear him recollect is to hear bits of thoughts that simply happened to be voiced aloud. His intended audience is always himself, even when wife, kids and schnauzers surround him. And we are all aware of this. When I was nine he piled us into a RV camper borrowed from work and we set up camp in a parking lot outside the Stanford football stadium. I rode Mom�s bike around, nearly missing trees and other small children. It got stolen that night because I forgot to lock it up, but Dad didn�t get angry with me�-he was too preoccupied. I remember being amazed at this revelation: Nostalgia! My father is sentimental! This concept threw me for a loop. I had never seen him act out an emotion this visceral other than "angry". I watched his eyes turn glossy during a pep rally as he approached old teachers that didn�t remember him after twenty-five years. Occasionally he would poke me in the shoulder and turn me towards loud college kids carrying banners or trombones. he introduced me to a drum major with a bra on his head. "Red. Stanford colors." We went to a bar with some of his classmates; I remember being very quiet so I could listen to parts of conversation. Apparently my dad went abroad during his junior year of college to Austria. He had friends who tried to smuggle statues out of Russia but got caught. He dated a Mills girl but dumped her after her parents pressured my dad to become a teacher after college. Back in the sixties the Stanford mascot was a feathered, snarling, stereotypical Indian, which has since been changed to a non-offensive pine tree. Dad hates the tree and still trumpets the Indian. He was only able to attend Stanford because of his water polo scholarship, which he later lost. His nickname was "Trip" and his best friend, Greg, was called "Butto". Butto drunkenly let it slip (jokingly?) once that Dad was an acid dealer during their years at Stanford. Last summer my brother and I argued over the phone about whether Butto meant that Dad�s nickname was "Trip" because he sold so much acid, or because he did so much acid. My mother rebukes the entire debate, saying Dad was nicknamed "Day Tripper" after the Beatles song because he would take off for days on end to go surfing or he wouldn�t go anywhere at all, he�d just sit there and zone out. She knows about as much as my brother and I, so I�m not sure how reliable a source she can be. He graduated class of 1969, a philosophy major. my footnotes. They seem like rumors to me because I can�t understand his past in correlation with what I know of him. My father isn�t a drug dealer; he�s a car dealer. He didn�t date a girl that went to Mills; he has a daughter that goes to that school. All that I�ve known about him for years fits into the palm of my hand. It fits into a small mental box where I keep finite definitions of things I don�t understand in order to have something to hold onto. My father the stoic, moody workaholic. It seems taboo to push farther into his life than that, to assume. I know that he had fraternity brothers, a frat house, grass, and a lake. Maybe there was a tire swing. I remember walking on a gravel driveway that lead up to a giant unkempt house. I remember looking to my left and seeing water, marsh, trees. At twenty-one, did he hold two-hour long conversations with his friends, outside their house, sitting on the grass by the lake while chucking stones into the water so he�d have something to do with his hands? He wore his hair shaggy. He looked like the fifth Beatle. He wore the same clothes for days. He hated money. He rarely touched anyone and only spoke to his newly divorced parents every couple of months. His mother was having a nervous breakdown. His father quickly remarried to a twenty-two year old woman. He couldn�t handle thinking about any of them. He became obsessed with Shakespeare. He became obsessed with blonde women. Everything he wrote was lyrical and halting. He rarely wrote. He wanted to be a philosopher or a professional golf player. He wanted to live by the ocean so he could hear the waves at any given moment of the day, pulsing around his head: a more soothing, fluid version of a stagnant grandfather clock. 11:36 pm - 10.4.2000 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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