“If you can guess what’s in my pocket, you can have it.”
I remember those being the last words I ever heard my father speak, a little game we used to play when I was a kid. When he was still a father.
Before he took off.
Before he did time.
Before he came back, and then took off again.
Before he did more time.
Before he left me a bundle of insecurity wrapped in abandonment issues with a lot of long abandoned questions.
But thirty years, two ex-wives, and a significant drinking problem later, and here we were, face to face.
You know what my first words to him were? Sure you do.
“If you can guess what’s in my pocket, you can have it.”
It took the old man a drawn out moment before the recognition began to wash over his features, transforming his face.
Thirty years is enough time for gravity to perform its own particular brand of cosmetic surgery on the human form, enough so that I took was taken aback when I too had failed to recognize my creator upon initial glance. But blood seems to have a way of finding blood. Something in the DNA trips a synapse and a neuron passes from point to point, causing a chain reaction so that the mind and body work together as a sort of Rube-Goldberg machine until the little cage drops down over the mouse and a memory is recalled.
“Jake,” the man said my name and stepped forward, preparing for what would surely have been an excruciatingly uncomfortable embrace.
I stepped back in tandem. My hands were still in my pockets. “George,” I said. A mirrored response.
He looked down, embarrassed. Good. I wanted him to be.
“How long has it been, son?”
had thought about killing him, my father. But they were just thoughts. Daydreams. Perhaps the shared fantasy of all the abandoned young pups shoveled out into the world to learn how to survive as a dog without a master.
For now I just needed an end to this chapter.
“I don’t know what to say,” my old man said, saying enough.
“Then guess.”
He looked at me with an angle, a slight narrowing of the eyes, a droplet of uncertain anxiety rolled down the side of his face.
It’s the bond we share.
It’s what I need from you now.
It’s what you mean to me.
I left the question unanswered. I left my father, as he had left me, to live the rest of his life the way I had lived mine: unsatisfied. And I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t planned this meeting, that I had just happened to take a second look at an old man at a bus stop, and that I looked harder that second time, and old wheels began to turn, and that I was going to get something not unlike closure out of this. That we were going to play the old game. Only, since I hadn’t planned ahead, I hadn’t anything to play the game with. Yet every clue I gave was true. What I had in my pocket was the bond we shared, was what I needed from him now, was what he meant to me.
Nothing.
“If you can guess what’s in my pocket, you can have it.”
I remember those being the last words I ever heard my father speak, a little game we used to play when I was a kid. When he was still a father.
Before he took off.
Before he did time.
Before he came back, and then took off again.
Before he did more time.
Before he left me a bundle of insecurity wrapped in abandonment issues with a lot of long abandoned questions.
But thirty years, two ex-wives, and a significant drinking problem later, and here we were, face to face.
You know what my first words to him were? Sure you do.
“If you can guess what’s in my pocket, you can have it.”
It took the old man a drawn out moment before the recognition began to wash over his features, transforming his face.
Thirty years is enough time for gravity to perform its own particular brand of cosmetic surgery on the human form, enough so that I took was taken aback when I too had failed to recognize my creator upon initial glance. But blood seems to have a way of finding blood. Something in the DNA trips a synapse and a neuron passes from point to point, causing a chain reaction so that the mind and body work together as a sort of Rube-Goldberg machine until the little cage drops down over the mouse and a memory is recalled.
“Jake,” the man said my name and stepped forward, preparing for what would surely have been an excruciatingly uncomfortable embrace.
I stepped back in tandem. My hands were still in my pockets. “George,” I said. A mirrored response.
He looked down, embarrassed. Good. I wanted him to be.
“How long has it been, son?”
had thought about killing him, my father. But they were just thoughts. Daydreams. Perhaps the shared fantasy of all the abandoned young pups shoveled out into the world to learn how to survive as a dog without a master.
For now I just needed an end to this chapter.
“I don’t know what to say,” my old man said, saying enough.
“Then guess.”
He looked at me with an angle, a slight narrowing of the eyes, a droplet of uncertain anxiety rolled down the side of his face.
It’s the bond we share.
It’s what I need from you now.
It’s what you mean to me. He had no guesses. Made no sound. I walked away.
I left the question unanswered. I left my father, as he had left me, to live the rest of his life the way I had lived mine: unsatisfied. And I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t planned this meeting, or that I just happened to take a second look at an old man at a bus stop, and that I looked harder that second time, and old wheels began to turn, and that I was going to get something not unlike closure out of this, that we were going to play the old game. Only I hadn’t anything to play the game with. Yet every clue I gave was true. What I had in my pocket was the bond we shared, was what I needed from him now, was what he meant to me.
Nothing.
