on loaded guns and father's day

Father's Day, for me, is a shameful day. Understand, please, that the shame is mine, not his.

Honor thy father and thy mother is the fifth commandment in the Christian Top Ten, and the first commandment to add a Carrot to the Stick.

Honor your father and your mother,

that your days may be long

in the land which the Lord your God gives you

--Exodus 20:12 (RSV)

One of my favorite off-the-cuff and exceedingly clever remarks to make? "Ewww, that is sooooo Old Testament!"

It's so wonderfully scathing a thing to say in response to some wannabe's harsh judgment or other. Sniff.

After dropping promptly out of college during my second semester, I toyed with this course and that course, using up precious elective credits while working as a nurse's aide in what was euphemistically called a "neurological post-intensive care unit." (Think carrots, peas, corn, eggplant.)

I lived with Baber, a drop-dead gorgeous woman who suffered various addictions -- to cocaine, marijuana, tequila, moonshine, cigarettes, and sex. She was lots of fun, for a while, until her Probation Officer began dropping by too often, and for the wrong reasons. If you get my blaring drift.

Somewhere toward the end of our year together, The Baber lost her job as a Respiratory Therapist, became a short-skirted waitress, began to deal coke out of our apartment (she had, believe it or not, a hollow-ended pool cue that sometimes came into play), and received her second Driving Under the Influence citation. Actually, I think these things are listed in the wrong order. Whatever. It all seemed to happen at the same time, belying cause-and-effect neatness.

Part of Baber's DUI sentence included the temporary suspension of her driver's license. She insisted I go to court with her that long ago early morning, getting us there right on time in her jaunty Toyota stick shift, expertly maneuvering into a choice parking spot three-quarters up a tree-lined, steep, and narrow street.

I learned to drive in a vintage pristine 1965 baby blue Cadillac, which resembled nothing so much as a boat, after which I was gifted with a white 1963 Ford Falcon, my first automotive love. That was the extent of my experience as a driver. (Please note that as I got older, so did my cars.)

So it was no surprise, to me, at least, that I almost got us killed on the way home. We lived in a mountain town, a *hilly* mountain town, to boot, which helped not at all as I struggled to hold my place in line at stop signs and to respond to Baber's barked, angst-driven instructions.

After that, my roomie called on her many other friends to get her from points A to B to wherever.

I remember a strong feeling of disconnect during those final weeks of living with Baber. I was working Night Shift at the hospital so as to free up my days and evenings for two classes: The Bible as Literature and The History of Western Civilization, Part One.

People like to play the game of "where were you when...?" -- I guess because it creates a reassuring collective -- something we had more of when we were less evolved. Where were you when John Kennedy was shot, and Robert? Where were you when you heard that Reverend King had been assassinated, that four were dead in Ohio? Where were you when they tore down the Berlin Wall, when Nixon resigned? When Lennon fell, and George died, and Pinochet got off scot-free? Where were you when the Challenger blew up, when the Twin Towers came down? When Michael Jackson overdosed, when Obama won the election, when the market crashed?

Where was I when I first encountered Plato's man in a cave, chained both fore and aft to his fellows, facing a blank wall, that blank tablet on which was cast the shadows of things?

Sigh. Everyone fancies themselves a semiotician.

Reference the shadow.
Reference the thing, itself.
Reference the thing that cast the shadow.

Where was I in that famously pivotal moment when I was washed in the Allegory of the Cave? Turns out, it was one experience that took place at two different times. Once at its first reading, in that mountain city, in the campus library, where I sat peering out a huge plateglass window at the golden light, setting. The bookend of the experience came 6 or 7 years later. I was walking down Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, and came upon a beautiful blue shoe, a woman's pump, silk. One left shoe and I was awash in the arbitrary nature of the sign, and in what Plato makes Socrates call "truth"!

What a rush.

Okay, let's get it out of our collective system. This was years ago, before hegemony and eurocentric became part of my stilted academic vocabulary, definitely prior to the time when I began to question the validity of The Canon, and a few universities away from reading Gramsci (as a requirement).

I was as if lost at Baber's place, never feeling it even half mine, despite paying half the rent. Work was rarely fulfilling, and if the Allegory of the Cave could rock my world, imagine my stupefaction when faced with the poet Isaiah, with Socrates drinking hemlock because his principal and the Superintendent of the School District deemed his teaching impious and too snarky for impressionable students. [In case you are wondering, I've topped out today at 101.3.]

Time with her was not a waste. I made some good and lasting friends, earned some easy college credits, and saved my money. I met a man and fell in love. I met lots of men, in fact, mostly musicians from Baber's work. I generally found them in the kitchen, searching desperately for coffee, happy to let me brew a strong pot while they played guitar in the living room. Baber was never an early riser.

But as someone famously said, about something else entirely: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold..."

Baber had a gun that somehow made its way under my pillow, and the man I loved was called home. I felt a failure at 19, and spent 50-60 hours a week talking to people who literally oozed, telling their parents, their pregnant wives and lost-without-her husbands that "you never know..." I was sleeping with the husband of a bisexual friend -- actually both Baber and I were -- in exchange for unlimited organic carrot juices at his downtown health food store -- also for pot and blueberry shine.

One day, the precariousness of everything became too much. It had been well over a year since I had called... home. As if it were a habit, I picked up the phone and dialed numbers like an automaton.

The rift between me and my father is bottomless and so wide I cannot see the other side.

"Please come get me," I whispered.

"I'll be there tomorrow afternoon," Dad said. "Be ready to go..."

I may have 3 semester hours that were awarded for the apt completion of The Bible as Literature, but I had forgotten, let's say, that though Deuteronomy and Exodus are credited with the Ten Commandments, they cannot hold a candle to the grave legislation of Leviticus, written around the time of the Babylonian exile, and not, as some hold, by Moses -- but by that amorphous group designated P, for Priestly Sources.

"You shall rise before the gray headed and honor the presence of an old man, and fear your God: I am the LORD" (Leviticus 19:32).

Reverence, fear, curse, honor, obey, mock, scorn, contempt -- Biblical parent language is loaded language.

As I write this, it has been 20 years since I have spoken with or seen my father. I think of him everyday, which does neither him nor me any good, but it is, in all honesty, the very best I can do. I know you think otherwise. Sometimes, usually early in the morning, in the kitchens not making coffee for musicians, the man I loved long dead, and Baber's rabid enthusiasm finally understood as the manic portion of bipolar disease... I also think that I could do better.

There are no guns in The Manor, nor under my pillow -- and there never will be. That's the last full measure of my devotion.




My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -

And now We roam in Sovereign Woods -
And now We hunt the Doe -
And every time I speak for Him -
The Mountains straight reply -

And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow -
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through -

And when at Night - Our good Day done -
I guard My Master's Head -
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow - to have shared -

To foe of His - I'm deadly foe -
None stir the second time -
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -
Or an emphatic Thumb -

Though I than He - may longer live
He longer must - than I -
For I have but the power to kill,
Without--the power to die--

--Emily Dickinson