My dad had a dream about the family and our Christmas tree. Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, he would crank up the holiday music and start setting the tree up in hopes that it would come true.
The Christmas tree dream went like this: He’d set up the tree and the lights and then we’d each take turns placing an ornament on the tree until the tree was perfect. This was designed to bring us all together but this did not work for one very simple reason: My father had many good qualities but patience was not one of them.
The first time we tried this we each hung one ornament before he started telling us that we were doing it wrong. Then, because he didn’t give us any instructions on how to do it right he got mad because we were going too slow. We had no idea there was a right and wrong way to decorate a Christmas tree.
Within minutes the would be happy family event devolved into shouting and my dad told us to put the ornaments down and get away from the tree. We then sat across the room sipping our hot chocolate as he finished the job.
A year later, the same thing happened.
The year after that we skipped the helping part and just watched my father put the tree up. It was more fun for everyone that way.
By the time the holidays arrived in 1995 I had already moved out of my father’s house. Since I was technically going to be a guest in the house where I used to live I called my father a few days before Christmas to ask if I could bring anything. I should have expected the response I got:
“I’ve been doing this for a while, I think I got it. Just be on time.” He told me.
I had been on my own for six months and I was enjoying my independence. I wanted to tell him I could just skip it altogether but I knew he wanted me to be there so I backed off.
“I was just checking.” I said.
“I told you I got it. Remember how it works? I cook, you eat.”
“I know.”
“You remember how to get here or did you forget the address too?”
“I think I remember where the house is.”
“Good, I’ll see you then. Be good.”
I hung up the phone and wondered what I was getting myself into.
For the first several months after moving out I rarely visited home. Things had not been great when I left. The combination of economic pressure and alcohol had strained relations between my father and his wife and this made the house a tough place to live sometimes. As the holidays approached I mentally prepared myself to go home. I was unsure of what to expect; my brother had been keeping me up to date on the state of things at home. I was ready for almost anything but almost wasn’t enough to prepare me for that Christmas.
The house looked exactly the same. From outside I could hear holiday music and see the cigarette smoke cloud above the dining room table. I tucked a six-pack of Guinness under my arm and took the small bag of gifts I had brought with me and headed inside.
The volume of the Christmas music when I opened the door was a shock. Spending six months in a studio apartment in the back of a friend’s house had taught me to keep the music down. I wasn’t used to blasting music at home but my father loved showing off his sound system so I shouldn’t have been surprised.
Somehow, despite all of the noise he heard my car pull up and he came from the kitchen to greet me at the door.
“We’ll the long lost wandering son returns.” He said as he turned down the volume on the stereo.
You’d think from that greeting that I’d run away from home without leaving a note but it wasn’t supposed to be a day for arguing so I just said Merry Christmas, hugged my father and looked over his shoulder at crowd gathered at the table.
Seated around the dining room table were my father’s wife Linda, her mother, a guy named Ray who smoked despite having a tracheotomy and my little brother. I expected to see all of them.
What I didn’t expect was the little person who was wearing an elf hat, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer on a bar stool in the corner.
My father didn’t bother with introductions; he closed the front door turned the music back up and headed back to the kitchen. I put my gift bag down and said hello to the four people I knew and waited to be introduced to the one person I didn’t know. He didn’t wait for someone to handle the formalities; he hopped down from his stool and introduced himself.
I looked past my new friend over to my brother for some sort of guidance but he shrugged his shoulders as if to say “Damned if I know.” I extended my hand and said:
“How are you….I gotta put this beer away.”
Before I continue this story let me admit something. In 1995 I didn’t call our guest a little person and in 2011 I’m embarrassed that I was so thrown off by the presence of what we called a midget in an elf hat, drinking at my table on Christmas but I was shocked because as far as I knew, we didn’t know any midgets or dwarfs or whatever term I would have used to describe them. I’d like to think that in 2011 things would have happened differently but I digress.
I made my way to the kitchen, popped the top off of a bottle of Guinness and put the other five in the fridge.
“How do you drink that stuff?” My father asked.
I replied with a question of my own:
“Who’s the midget?”
“He’s a guy I know.”
“Yeah, but who is he?”
“He’s a guy having Christmas with us. He’s been here helping me out all day.”
When it came to things you could get from my father, the list was seemingly limitless. He was well known among the people who spent their time in bars and on construction sites as a guy who could get certain things done:
Need an illegal cable box? Call Mike, he could get one for you.
Want to place a bet on a football game? Find Mike before Friday and he’ll get somebody to take your action.
Looking for phony auto insurance paperwork or a safety inspection sticker? Not a problem, Mike could take care of you.
As far as I knew however, getting a human being who’d work for beer was outside of his normal scope of work.
When asked how he obtained these things my father’s answer was usually: “I know a guy,” but he rarely let on who that guy was and most people knew better than to ask. The one thing you couldn’t get from my father was a straight answer when he didn’t want to give one.
Of course, I wasn’t most people. I was a nosy son so I pressed my father for more information.
“Yeah but WHO is he, how did he get here?”
My father didn’t stop what he was doing, he just said:
“I won him.” Like that was a thing that happened all the time.
“You won a midget?” I asked, managing to be both indignant and offensive at the same time.
“Yeah” my father replied. “I won him in a keeping your mouth shut contest.”
I understood his point and I didn’t press the issue, which probably means I missed out on some kind of amazingly untrue explanation. After all, my father once claimed he found a rare tropical bird in a cage on the Long Island Expressway. When he was told that the bird was in fact a very rare species and not the kind of thing you’d just find on the LIE, in or out of a cage, he said:
“How rare could it be? There’s one right there?”
There was no way to get my father to tell you anything unless he wanted to tell it to you.
As dad and I reached an impasse, our little friend came into the kitchen.
“Mike, you need any help?”
“Nah, I got it. You meet my son?”
“Yeah, he looks just like you. Mind if I get a cold one?”
My father grabbed him a beer from the fridge.
Once we had the kitchen to ourselves my father looked me in the eye for the first time since we had started talking and said quietly:
“You know what the difference between you and that guy is? Don’t answer, I’ll tell you…he doesn’t act like he thinks he’s too good to be here.”
Before I could protest my father continued:
“Now that you’re on your own I never see you. I gotta wait until Christmas to see you.”
I stared at my father but couldn’t say anything except that I had been busy at work and at school, which was true but only part of the story.
He was wrong but that’s the way things were between us for a long time. We couldn’t see each other clearly. He couldn’t see that from my perspective it was nothing personal, I just needed to be on my own so I could learn to be a grown up.
As for me, I couldn’t see that he could show me the same kindness he had shown a little person with a drinking problem at Christmas. I’d just have to come around often enough to let him.
We would get to that place eventually, but we weren’t there yet.
Back at the table there were hungry people. My father told me to take a seat and send his new friend in. Together the two of them brought the food out and we all enjoyed Christmas dinner together.
Later, as we ate cookies and drank coffee I handed out the gifts I had brought. Unfortunately I hadn’t brought anything for the unexpected guest but I’m sure he understood. My father made sure his new friend was taken care of. He gave him a bottle of whiskey and a carton of cigarettes. Later, our guest in the elf hat made a phone call and a short while later a car came to pick him up. As he left we shook hands again.
“Please to meet you Binky*, thanks for everything. Merry Christmas.”
He thanked me, and thanked my father again before heading out to the car that was waiting for him in the street. I never saw Binky again, but every Christmas I wonder where he is.
*Seriously, his name was Binky. I am not making this up.
“Please don’t do this. He’s his best friend.”
My mother was begging my father to not leave the house, to not take me with him and to not do what he said he was going to do when we got out there. I was waiting by the door in my blue and orange Mets jacket hoping that my mother would win this argument.
They were fighting about my best friend. He was a boy in my class who had everything better that I did. For some time they had patiently listened to stories of adventures he and I had experienced while at school and they listened as I outlined all of the ways his life was better than mine.
My friend had no bedtime; he ate ice cream every night and was allowed to watch anything he wanted on TV. I believed he could do whatever he wanted and I expected that my parents would eventually let me do the same. My friend’s name was Carpo, of course his name was Carpo; because when a six year old makes up a friend they give them a ridiculous name.
My mother indulged my imaginary friend even though I referenced Carpo almost exclusively to critique her parenting and get out of doing anything I didn’t want to do. Of course I hadn’t told them that my friend was imaginary but the fact that I said he had a motorcycle probably tipped them off.
My father on the other hand had grown tired of me resisting bedtime because my friend didn’t have to go to bed and not eating my dinner on the grounds that “Carpo didn’t have to.” He wasn’t about to let my mother convince him to let it go on any longer. He had tried unsuccessfully to get me to admit my friend was made up. Now, despite my mother’s protests he turned to me and said:
“Let’s go. We’re going to Carpo’s house so I can tell his mom and dad a little something about how to raise a kid.”
This was where my father expected me to admit that Carpo was my own creation. Surely he didn’t expect me to actually make him go out but he underestimated my stubbornness and commitment to a story.
When he asked me where my imaginary friend lived I had an answer.
The neighborhood where my parents met and where I spent my earliest years is split in two by a canal that runs about a half mile from the boatyard on the main road down to the bay. I lived on the east side of the canal, my extended family lived on the east side of the canal, my entire life up to that point had taken place in a small grid of streets on the east side of the canal.
When my father and I headed for the car I knew what I had to say:
“Carpo’s house is on the other side of the canal.”
I guess I figured my father would just say we couldn’t possibly go there and that would be the end of the story. As far as I knew there was no way to get to the west side. The west side of the canal was an unknowable mystery to me. I never met anyone who lived there and no one in my family had ever mentioned going to the west side of the canal.
Instead of throwing up his hands and letting me do what I pleased my father started the car, turned down the radio and drove around the block until we we’re parallel to the canal. From the passenger seat I could see houses on the west side. None of them looked like the kind of place my imaginary friend would live. My father stopped at the light and asked me if I knew the address.
“No, but I’ll know the house when I see it.” I said.
My father made the left when the light turned green and then made another left on the other side of the boatyard. For the first time in my life, I was on the west side.
Each street had the same name as the streets I knew, only with a W instead of and E on the signs. The houses looked the same too. My father drove slowly down each familiar looking street and told me to point out my friend’s house. I pretended to look for it but eventually we ran out of streets and I ran out of ideas.
I didn’t admit that I had made Carpo up and my father, to his credit, didn’t embarrass me further by dragging a confession out of me. He just made a right turn onto the main street and took me back home.
When we went back in the house he said we couldn’t find Carpo’s house.
I went to be at my usual time that night and I never, ever spoke of Carpo again. My father was okay with this but my mother was not. Years later, my mother said that she never forgave my father for what he had done.
“He killed your imaginary friend,” she would say. “He shouldn’t have done that.”
Except for the empty closet, the place didn’t look any different than the last time I was there. The furniture was in the same places, the beds were still made from the day we left and the toys had been sitting untouched for weeks. The closet in my room was empty though. My clothes, along with my brother and sister’s clothes had all been packed into bags and taken away with us when we left.
While the place looked almost the same as it did when we left, it was darker than I remembered it. My grandmother, who lived upstairs, had let me into the apartment. She allowed me to wait downstairs alone, only after my homework was done, on the condition that I left the door at the top of the stairs open; this would allow her to hear me until my father arrived.
My arrival at the house that Thursday afternoon was part of the unofficial custody arrangement my parents had agreed to after separating just a few weeks before. All three kids would spend Friday night through Sunday afternoon with my father but since I, at almost seven years old, was the oldest I also spent Thursday night at my father’s. It was never explained if this extra night was intended to be a punishment or a reward. At seven years old I loved my father but my mother was the one I was closest to.
Perhaps the Thursday father and son night was supposed to bring us closer together but as I sat in my old bedroom waiting for my father I was scared. The last weeks of living together as a family had been tense and unhappy. Was he angry with my mother? Would he be angry with me for leaving with her? What was I going to wear to school the next day? All of my clothes were gone.
From my old bedroom it was be impossible to tell when my father’s car pulled into the driveway so I moved into our old living room. It was only 5 o’clock but I needed to turn on the lights. There would normally be enough light at that time but father had covered the window to make the room as dark as possible. This was a trick he had often used on me to convince me it was later than I thought so he could send me to bed early. In a few years I would find this fact funny but on that afternoon it was another reason to have mixed feelings about seeing my father.
I heard my grandmother’s phone ring upstairs and a minute later she called down the stairs.
“Sam, are you there?”
“Yes. Was that my father?”
“Come to the stairs so I can see you.”
I got off of the couch and walked to the landing. From the top of the stairs my grandmother continued:
“That was your father. He’s picking up pizza and he’ll be here soon.”
She asked me if I wanted to come upstairs; I didn’t. I turned on the TV and tried to act as grown up as possible. When my father arrived I was watching the news. This was not the first time I had seen him since we had left but it was the first time it was just the two of us. He put the pizza down and hugged me and then, in a scene that would repeat itself for the next thirty years we made awkward small talk about nothing while we ate.
Things opened up after dinner. He made me a glass of chocolate milk and one for himself. I asked him if he was going to have a beer and he said no. He stirred his chocolate milk with his straw and reached for a cigarette.
“I want to talk to you about that. One of the reasons your mother left is because she thinks I drink too much and maybe I do.”
He lit his cigarette with a match and asked me if I wanted one. He was joking but I declined.
My mother had talked about his drinking and even if she hadn’t I knew it was a problem. My father walked over to the counter and came back with a stack of pamphlets. As he showed them to me he said:
“So I went to this meeting and I met with some people and they are going to help me stop.”
He put the last pamphlet down and asked:
“So what do you think of that?”
“I think that’s good.”
“Yeah, me too.” He said. “Will you tell your mother I’m going?”
“Yes”
“Then ask her if she’ll come back.”
I said I would and finished my chocolate milk. We watched some TV and I went to sleep in my old room. I went to school the next day in borrowed clothing and my mother brought me some things to wear when she dropped off my brother and sister on Friday night. My father’s first weekend with the kids passed without incident or a drink and on Sunday night he reminded me of our conversation on Thursday.
My mother drove us back to where we were staying and even though I promised to ask my mother if she’d bring us home I didn’t say a word. At some point not long afterward, on a weekend visit, my father sent me to the fridge to get him a beer and the world moved on as it had been before.
Over the next several months my father would ask me to talk to my mother about coming back. He would talk to her about it too and he continued to do so for some time. Eventually he moved on and for the rest of my father’s life we never mentioned those conversations again. I never told him that I thought it was unfair of him to put me in that position and I never told him that I thought he might have been on the right track for just short while.
I’ve often regretted keeping the latter part to myself, not that I think it would have made a difference. This is just speculation on my part. I’ll never know exactly what my father thought. I just know that at some point he chose his path. My father made a choice to lead a hard drinking life, perhaps because he was afraid to fail at trying to find a better way. Living with the feeling that you have no choice has got to be awful and dying with the feeling that you never had a chance is probably worse.
Again, this is all just guess because we didn’t discuss this when we had the chance. Maybe I’m wrong, hopefully I am and my father never had a second of regret, but I don’t think that’s the case. In the end I’m unable to change anyone’s past but I’ve chosen a different path for my own future.
Two weeks ago I found myself driving through my hometown at 7 AM looking for a place to get coffee. I pulled into the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts and walked inside. It was Sunday and the line was shorter than I expected. I looked around for a newspaper but couldn’t find one so I walked up to the counter and ordered coffee.
I was hungry but I couldn’t bring myself to order a breakfast sandwich or a donut. The idea of eating fast food on a Sunday morning made me feel like I was letting my father down. It was the second anniversary of his death and I was on my way to the cemetery.
When my father was alive he struggled with putting many of his feelings into words. My father could express anger verbally but every other feeling was communicated through actions, most of them involving food. Over the years my father developed a food-based shorthand for each of his three kids as a way of letting us know how much he cared. He made pasta for my sister, grilled chicken and burgers for my brother and made breakfast for me whenever I made it back to Long Island.
The breakfast tradition my father and I shared had actually begun many years earlier. After my parents separated my brother, sister and I stayed with our mother but eight years later I moved back to my father’s house.
Shortly after I arrived things became difficult for my father and I but for different reasons: I was 15 years old and going through typical teenage growing pains but my father was experiencing something tougher. He didn’t say it out loud but for the first time in his life he felt like he was failing. He assumed that he could turn my troubles around overnight but this didn’t happen. Then, after more than a decade of climbing the ladder at his job he found himself out of work.
For what seemed like a very long time, both of our futures were uncertain and we were frequently at odds with one another but every Sunday morning we put these problems aside.
Every Sunday morning I woke up to find the same things: Coffee, a stack of Sunday papers (there were four newspapers in the area and we read three of them) and a full breakfast. We’d eat, read the papers and talk sports until it was time to take on the rest of the day. We did this every single Sunday from the day I arrived until the day I moved out five years later.
While other family members sometimes joined us around the table, as far as my dad and I were concerned, Sundays were our thing. Sometimes it was our only thing and it was important to us. This is why I always made sure to make it to his house for breakfast when I was back in town.
Back in the parking lot of the Dunkin’ Donuts I sat in the car with my coffee for a few minutes but I couldn’t waste too much time. I wanted to get to the cemetery early to beat the rush. My family is big on visiting graves and if you don’t get there early on a special day: like the anniversary of a death or a birthday of a loved one you could find yourself standing in a line waiting to pay your respects.
By 7:30 AM I was driving through the gates of the cemetery. I had only been there once since my father was buried but I knew the way to what I like to call “dad’s new place.” I drove slowly along the path leading up to the spot where my father is buried and parked my car across from a pickup truck that I didn’t recognize as belonging to any member of my family. I got out of the car and started walking towards my dad’s marker when the driver of the pickup truck got out and called my name. I recognized the voice before I saw his face.
Steve was a friend of my father and an all around good guy. It was good to see him. He was part of my father’s inner circle, in fact Steve was one of the few people who knew my how sick my father was before he died.
Steve and I were quietly looking at my father’s headstone when he said:
“I come down here on Sunday’s sometimes to have my coffee and read the paper.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah, every couple of Sundays I used to go to your dad’s place. He’d make breakfast and we’d read the papers.”
“He and I used to do the same thing.”
“I know, he told me that every time.”
I asked Steve to give me a second. I went back to my car to get my coffee. I had thought that bringing coffee to the grave site would have been disrespectful but obviously it would have been okay with my dad.
About 15 minutes after I arrived a car pulled up and out stepped my grandmother, my aunt and my sister. My aunt and sister were holding cups of coffee and my grandmother had brought a newspaper.
