A Series of Bungee Cords: Part Ten
by Fiona and Lily Landers
It’s snowing in Utica. We’re in coats and sneakers. We bought the coats at the mall by Lily’s house before we left. We didn’t tell the saleswoman why we were going to New York. We said, “To visit our grandparents.” Which is true. We see them. We visit. We sit across from them holding back and also holding onto tears because they are precious. These tears are important. These tears are from an emptiness and a fullness we have never felt. Grandma and Grandpa don’t know. They were told, because although they are old and losing their mental clarity, they are still humans. They are parents. Parents who are down a son. Our father.
We sit in the living room where our dad should be but isn’t, across from his parents. They are confused but happy to see us. Grandma is a little wary of us. She knows something is wrong but she can’t put it into words. This is why the tears are important. Because we are communicating without our words. We couldn’t find the words anyway, we’re just as bad as she is. Just as lost. But strong. Like her. Strong enough to sift through his belongings, not all of them, not now. But pictures. Tapes and DVDs of his work as an actor. These are things we need for his memorial. This is why we flew back so quickly. We need these things to honor him, to throw his party. He would not appreciate a lame party. He was too cool. We are strong enough to sift through these things and only break down crying at a few pictures. When Fiona found the pictures of him as a baby, being held by his mother. His msother who is sitting next to us, not knowing but knowing, crying out for mercy in our secret language. We are strong enough to sift through these items and also strong enough to carry them. Even the heavy ones. Because of him we are. Because of him, we aren’t weak women. We are of railroad stock. Of factory stock. Of grab-assed waitress stock. We lift and shovel and bury and we do it ourselves. We are in Utica. It’s snowing. We are in our coats and sneakers. The guy at the UHAUL store just forklifted our storage pod over to us. We are ready to load it up. We are ready to bungee cord the fuck out of everything. Of course we are, we’re his daughters.
Fiona climbs into the pod with the remainder of the bubble wrap. Lily moves big boxes of Dad’s stuff from the rented Suburban to this 8’ x 5’ x 8’ container that over the next two weeks will be trucked across the country. Lily looks like a warrior, or a fisherman on a loading dock, or at least like she works for a legit moving company. She looks so powerful. This UHAUL thing we are packing and shipping should arrive just in time for Dad’s Los Angeles memorial. It better because we have just loaded it with over thirty cases of Utica Club beer to be served at the memorial. The beer is hidden in large army green Rubbermaid tubs. We sign a paper swearing that there is no liquid in the UHAUL storage unit. In fourth grade, Fiona made a family crest as a project for school. For our family motto she wrote, “Rules Are Suggestions.”
Most of Dad’s possessions are guitars and some of them don’t have cases. We bubble wrap each one, case or no, and then ceremoniously wrap each guitar in Dad’s extensive collection of Mexican blankets. These blankets have been on couches and beds and under picnics for our whole lives. But now they hold his guitars, bodies wrapped in shrouds.
“Will they be safe in here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will the beer explode? Is that why there’s not supposed to be any liquid in here?”
“I don’t know.”
We only have enough stuff to fill the storage container about halfway, which leaves a lot of room for the guitars to bang around. So we try to make everything inside the pod as protected as possible. Fiona is a ninja in the UHAUL pod. She climbs on boxes without breaking them. If we lose a tool, like packing tape, she dives into the sea of Dad’s stuff and retrieves it no problemo. She is small but capable. We push the boxes close together and configure the guitars strategically on top of the boxes. We wedge old towels and nests of bubble wrap into the corners. We weave a magical web of bungee cords. Of course we do.
Some guys are just really into bungee cords. Our dad was one of these guys. He always had extra bungee cords in the trunk of each car, he had an assortment in the garage. In our minds he is forever quick-fixing something, or hooking the bikes to the back of the car, or securing the camping gear on top.
In 1992, when the Los Angeles Riots broke out, we were in school and our parents were at the Farmer’s Market on 3rd and Fairfax. They used the pay phones by the Gumbo Pot as their office (we have very fond memories of Dad yelling at his agents from those pay phones). They could smell the smoke and hear the sirens so they walked over to our school to pick us up and we all walked home. Dad said we might go camping in the morning. We were pumped. “What are riots? We love camping!” He loaded up the car with our camping supplies and we made sure we had marshmallows. In the morning he walked out of the house and looked around. Everything seemed fine so he unpacked the car and we didn’t get to go camping. Bummer. He barbecued instead. The neighbors all freaked out when they smelled the smoke.
Dad prided himself on his problem-solving abilities. He used whatever was available to get the job done. He was also very into nature. He spent many nights staring at the stars. During the day he would walk through the bean field back home and force us to go on uncomfortable, often painful, bike rides that varied from itchy trails to frightening mountains. If MacGyver and Thoreau had a baby who was kind of an asshole, that was our dad.
Using anything that was available to him included using us as labor when we were growing up. We had to mow the lawn with the old fashioned mower. We had “Plum Duty” in the summer, which meant picking up the plums that fell from the tree onto the gravel below. “You’d better get out there early,” he’d say, “before the plums get too steamy,” and then he’d make a face that was kind of a smile but also looked like he was evil and smelling something gross. We assisted him in all of his carpentry efforts. Once he made a big table that we dropped and broke while trying to move it into the solarium. Another time he made a very sturdy bench that his friend Mike Hagerty joked archaeologists would find in the future and use as evidence that all humans weighed over 500 pounds.
Dad bought us musical instruments early on and coerced us into being his family band. Like the Partridge Family, but angrier.
We were his administrative assistants, too. Each month Dad would amass a large stack of residual checks from television re-runs that we would process in an assembly line and then take the money to get pizza. When he was in hospice and we filled out the paperwork so that we would get his future residuals, he said, “You know, so you always have pizza money.”
Our dad was a man who loved bungee cords. While he was raising us, he had a unique, sometimes panicked way of holding it all together, of making ends meet by being resourceful and funny and loving. He had a back-up plan for his back-up plan. He was prepared to be a survivalist if the apocalypse came. He was prepared to live and he was prepared to die.
We finish loading and securing the storage container. Like ninjas. Like fishermen. Or, at the very least, like movers who tried hard. We have used a bunch of bungee cords but we still have leftover bungee cords. We bought too many bungee cords. The inside of the pod looks like a glorious bungee cord labyrinth. We don’t know if the valuables will make it across the country in one piece. We don’t know if the Utica Club will make it without exploding. But we should know. We should know that our best is good enough. We should know that the man who raised us gave us the tools we need to survive. To keep going. He raised us to be capable, to be adventurous, to appreciate our lives. He raised us to be women who love bungee cords. We marvel at their flexibility and their strength, their sturdiness and their changeability. We bask in their trying and their might. We drink in their rugged beauty, as they reach and stretch as far as they can possibly go, to hold it all together.
