Happy Father's Day.

There was a heartbeat, an irregular and viscous heartbeat in my leg...too long in the car seat, the air conditioning was on too cold, I had a feeling they'd get it if I went on about my philosophy on That, but not today.  The Thruway, the Tappan Zee Bridge (my father used to over pronounce the letters to it, almost Italian like, making it sound much more interesting than the word actually was in English, "Taa-pan SEE"...I grew after all those years, all those houses, all those counties, to like the west side better, than the east, where I had mostly grown up.  Wilder, less subsidized, less standard, overall) and the same again to Exit 20 or 21 of the Catskill Ski Region, as it was called.  My father preferred getting out at Exit 20, and taking about 20-25 minutes on a gentler, curvier drive past the farmers' market, the Friar Tuck Inn, which always gave me a chuckle (especially on a Saturday when some small collective of Jews on Sabbath were walking black and white along route 23B), the strip club where I had gone in the midst of it all years ago, the big, beautiful green and white farm house at the end of the street which led to our last street, Paradise Lake Road.  And it was.  Down the hill, trees, tall and bushelled framing the mountains and the sky, the quiet of the day, the tree frogs bellowing at night and echoing off the lake in the moon water.  It looked exactly the same.

Simple thing to want, staring out the window of the car, while the cousin talked to the mother.  God, he could talk.  Thick nasally queens accent, and a good heart beneath.  He wanted to come and see where his Uncle John was laid to rest.  Funny how broken and hazardous our Croatian-American dichotomy went.  We still called our aunts Teta, but uncles still uncles.  Amidst that, the stories going back and forth between us all, I stared out at those wide fields, hovering under the treelines, and wanted so badly to just sleep in the grass, as a blanket, under the sun.  The dirt was better at his grave too, not choking to death on rocks and weeds like the Uncle andTteta's grave on the Brooklyn-Queens border they had visited and planted earlier that morning, but rich and chocolate brown, soft and pliable, soaked from inside by the rain, and my mother had remarked to us that this small town cemetery was like the one in his village back in Croatia.  Having just stood atop his parents and family's graves there, I could stand with one foot on all of them at once.  There is a detachment here now.  Enough (4) years having gone by, I was completely out of the experience of losing my father, and friend, but now there was a different sort of connection.  I planted his flowers, stabbing into that loose and liquid soil with my tiny shovel, and spaced the four apart, purples, reds and yellow wildflowers too.  I did a good job, she said.

We talked in our usual loud familial voices about the cousin's sister since they didn't talk anymore, which was sad.  We drove by the beautiful last house there, on paradise lake road.  The cousin was impressed.  The people, rich Manhattan types who now had our home as their summer home lived there part time now, but they had done so little to the exterior, that it looked like we could just waltz on in and be right back there.  The treeline my father had left to offer the privacy that we always desired, to be ourselves in our own place together, and the well structured colonial on stilts, roman columns (but of course) on the front porch, the unseen, wild and endless greens growing behind the back one, my pointing out that the large window in the front was around a big jacuzzi where you looked out onto the trees.  A chipmunk scurried across the road, and I remembered my drunken late night swims, and all I had done in that house, and said "I had a lot of fun there".  The cousin, at first sight, just sat back in his seat and said "Wow.  Uncle John didn't fuck around, did he".  My mother noted "nope.  But that house killed him".  But I was quick to add, "but he made it beautiful".  And we all agreed of its worth, and its right to take away from the man who made it stand.

We talked as I dreamed still of grassy naps, of his father, of mine, of him being hungry at Christmastime and not knowing what day it was, because he was the black sheep and had to make his way on his own terms.  On his father walking from the coast of Italy to Rome to ask a Croatian priest for food or money or help.  How, I thought, these men lived as men through their ups and downs, and how the story was slowly being removed out of our lives by the empty bearings of this technology, of detachment, of lack of life.  But that was just the start to another of my mental tennis matches, which would be resumed at a later date, as usual.  My brother had bequeathed the rock I brought him from the village where our father was born, and the old rusted fork we found in the family stone house, no longer usable and wanted us to leave it at the grave for the old man.  He loved him funny, but he loved him all the same.

As I pressed the fork into the soil, and made sure the rock had its own place there too, I thought of the boy.  The one who returned from his trip to the Outer Banks, as we all yelled his name and high fived him as he led his misfit parents back into the garden, ours.  He sat on my lap and pulled my hands to him, and got me to carry him, not knowing whether he was here nor there quite yet.  He leaned his head on me, blond hair turning brown, and said "take me to my Outer Banks home", which he was already missing.  I said I couldn't walk that far, and he said to me that he brought me a rock, which I had luckily asked for before his departure.  I thought of him, and his newness, and how they were all like my family too, but just differently....tattoo ink thicker than skin, and how he looked older to me, and how we talked of the home, the first one my father built lower down the Hudson, and how we were all children there, just a few short seconds ago, it seemed.  He (the cousin) and my brother had once snuck switchblade combs (like Danny Zucko, yes) into church back then, and the priest took them away from both of them and his dad got angry at my dad for letting them in that way, for being too soft.  But my dad was not the stoic, Eastern European type.  Strong as nails, and would erect the pyramids in one day if he had to, but he liked stories, and traditions, wine and laughter, songs to sing to himself when he was drunk, and sometimes you could hear him when he stayed up just a little bit later, and thought about his home, where he had to flee from all the paradises there to make his own way.  He'd sing a few lyrical songs, which told stories, and enjoy every of those last drops.  More often than not, we were together when he drank, which made all the difference to me, at least.

We got back into the big black truck, and I suggested we beep the horn, like his father and like mine did, usually a few more than some bedsheets to the wind after many a holiday, when one of us would drive home from the other's houses, more often them from our house.  He smiled, laughed that loud fiery laughter that he had inherited from his mad, sometimes angry, inappropriate but also good hearted father, and we beeped a few times as we drove back down the country road.  I saluted my dad army style and know he was enjoying this.  All of us together is all that really mattered at the end of the day.  My legs ached, the grass beckoned, the stories continued, and I thought of home, and all the places and faces and people and losses and sun ups and downs that encompassed.  You flow through me like the river moving west, my ever living Da. In the greenest of grasses you cradle me and let me sleep it off, while you sing my nap into existence with sweet, solid songs of the land of home, allowing me to wake with a fresh start and my own terms laid out before me, waiting to put the story back into the movement of sun.

M. Lucia