view of the mountains from my childhood home
“You did not check yourself into a spa.”
This was my father’s response when I called him via the community phone from inside a psychiatric hospital in 1998, complaining that the staff would not let me check out. Had there been a listing for a 24 hour spa in the yellow pages I assured him that I would have opted for it as the better choice. I checked in at 1am after enduring a horrific but not totally uncommon evening of panic and hyperventilation in my college dorm room. I arrived certain that my entire mind was lost and did not bother to ask about the rules around coming and going. Turns out such places have large scale systems. So I stayed, smoked cartons of generic light cigarettes, talked, wrote, and tambourined about my feelings, diagnosed everyone else as way more lost minded than myself, sat through a few evaluations, and eventually received the ok to head back to school.
I do not remember talking to my father at length about the experience. He asked if I was alright and if I needed to come home to which I replied, I’m good and no thanks, and then he said something like, “Well, what the hell did you go in there for?” I should have said, “For the gingerbread desserts and good chats with Vietnam vets.” I did not answer. He did not expect me to. He believes the answers hail from the birthplace of his grandparents. Self preservation is all anyone is talking about in the center of debatable lands. He talks about it as biological, genetic, systemic – that in your bones sort of thing.
He once told me that the only thing, which he does not question, is being my father. I was lying in bed angry at being unable to identify what I would be known for knowing. I blamed him for not forcing me to be out of control good at just one thing. He looked at me and said, “The one thing that I know that I do well and that I am sure about is being your father.” He paused and added, “What the hell do you want to be good at one thing for? Do you think that a person is happier once they perfect?” He then turned my face to the window to stare out at the immense mountain range. He was known to disappear into that view. Wiser to a larger world, he figured if I lost sight of the white tip of Mt. Washington while off exploring some scarred city that I would suffocate in one shallow breath.
When I remind my father about the phrases that he has used over the years he responds with, “I never said that.” Then I have to re-tell a story. . .like the one about the time when I was in third grade and my pony stepped on my pinky finger. It was right before the bus came to pick me up for school so my father taped my pinky to my ring finger and said, “It doesn’t hurt.” I typically add an addendum and tell him that based on his poor assessment of my condition at the time, not only do I sport a scar and crooked pinky finger that sticks out to the side, but I struggle with a limited ability to gauge whether I am or not in pain. Sometimes I throw in that the incident took place in the middle of winter when it was at least thirty degrees below zero minus the wind chill factor. The weather always adds another dimension.
A few years after my hospital stay I found out that it shut down. I told my father the news, “I heard that they went bankrupt.” His response, “Most likely from you.” An MSW, which my parents paid for me to see, told my father that he joked too much. She said that it was a distraction. She did not have any children of her own, but he was polite and refrained from bringing it up. The truth is, as my father knows, joking or not, it does not much matter. What matters deeply is the fact that he is a father that would do anything to extinguish his daughter’s pain – least of all, answer her distressed phone calls, affirm her existence, and drive to the drugstore for a fresh roll of tape to repair her injuries.
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