Some Peoples’ Dads Live in Chicago
Some peoples’ dads live in Chicago, or Hawaii. My dad, he lives under the ground, way down deep.
See by the time the 90s hit, he’d lived through Vietnam, Hippies, the Cold War. Then Y2K came around, and he couldn’t hardly take it anymore. One Saturday afternoon he got up from the couch, turned off CNN, and drove to Lowes to get a shovel. I’m not sure why, we already had a couple shovels in the shed, but maybe he just needed to get in the right headspace.
Some people go crazy and build a bomb shelter in the backyard. It’s a little unnecessary, sure, but really what’s the harm in having an extra-safe second basement filled with cans of corn. My dad didn’t want to build a bomb shelter, he wanted to build a whole bomb city.
It didn’t help that the week before I was telling him about The City of Ember, a post-apocalyptic teen novel about a whole civilization that lives underground until one day the power goes out. He didn’t seem to see the book the way I did, as a warning against creating whole cities under the ground cause eventually the power will go out. Instead he consulted it like a sort of engineering manual, poring over it as if he would find blueprints between the lines. He was reading all the books he could find that talked about life underground, actually. The Time Machine, Journey to the Center of the Earth, he didn’t seem to be concerned that they were all fiction. He thought surely if he compiled all the stories he could find about going underground that he’d have enough information to build his civilization.
And he just kept digging and digging in the backyard. The hole got so big that one day the grounds person from the City of Greenville came to give him a citation or something, I’m not sure exactly cause he must have gotten lost down there. My dad said he never saw him and no one’s heard from him since.
Anyways, my dad officially moved into the hole in November of 1999. By then he and my mom had split up, it’s hard to stay committed to a man who’s become fanatical about creating a new life in the ground, and we lived in an apartment on the other side of town. My dad hasn’t come out of the hole since, but sometimes I go sit on the ground on top of his new civilization and send him letters and copies of The Mockingjay through a pipe he has poking up, one of those air-pressured tubes like they have at the bank to send in your checks. He says he’s happy down there in the dirt, and he feels safe. And I suppose that’s all that matters.
