Four Remains

Speaking of poetry ...

{insert palate cleanser}

The day after my father retired from his job as an itinerant business machine salesman, he and my mother divorced.  It was a friendly divorce that my father had agreed to though it was not what he would have preferred. The next day, having already sold the house where they raised their four now adult children they moved into new homes, in new towns north of where they'd been and twenty miles apart from each other; my mother in a quaint cosy village close to her neighbors and close to town, my dad in a rustic cabin surrounded by a thick wood that kept the house obscured from the road and situated at a comfortable remove from neighbors.  My parents continued to see each other regularly but developed lives apart.

Always a bit of the odd man out in my house growing up with his love of both country music and opera, a flirtation with a wacky, conservative brand of politics and a fondness for talk radio, my father seemed to thrive in his new life.  He got a part time job working a counter at a dry cleaner's, and learned he had a knack for dealing with the public.  Never outgoing, but always a bit of a character and an eccentric, he found himself welcome in the rather artsy town closest to him.

He had been an only child, the only son of immigrants, a child also of his times: the great depression, World War II, the post-war boom that never quite boomed for him the way it had for others.  He grew up in the suburbs of New York but after struggling with a floor sanding business, he took the family on a vacation to Maine, fell in love with it, bought an old farmhouse to fix up and there we stayed.  He was a homebody, who spoke fluent Swedish and devoured facts about the world but never traveled.  But after 7 years of retirement, my mother talked him into taking a trip to Sweden that summer by himself to meet his relatives.  Reluctantly, overcoming deep insecurities and a heavy kind of Lutheran guilt at the indulgence, he finally agreed to go.  He had an amazing time.

When my mother picked him up at the airport in Boston on his return, he was pale and appeared to have lost weight.  He didn't recover after several days, and she made him see a doctor, where he learned he had advanced myeloma and not long to live.  When he asked how long, the doctor told him he didn't need to make any big purchases of firewood.  Winter was four months away.

He started transfusions, and began to finish things up and to say goodbye. I saw him over the summer and had planned to come up and see him again for what I assumed would be the last time over Labor Day.  I would take off from work the Friday before the holiday, drive up from the mid-Atlantic, pick up my brother in New York City and we'd be in Maine by evening.  Two days before, we got the news that he didn't make it.  My mother was with him, in his cabin in the woods, when he died.  The call came late Wednesday night. Knowing I had a scheduled vacation day on Friday, I foolishly went to work as usual on Thursday, telling no one about my news to avoid having to chat about it.  I wasn't particularly close to my father.  We all had difficult relationships with him though he mellowed in his final years. While he was sentimental about some things and had a good heart toward strangers and those in need, toward us he had a temper, and was critical and impossible to please.  He had no self-esteem, and had a way of making us feel we were in the way of other people when we were in public.  We grew up feeling that we were a source of great shame for him, a failing.  But Thursday was a sea of pain.

On Friday, I left early in the morning as scheduled,  stopped in New York for my brother and we got to Maine early enough to watch the waves roll onto the beach at York as twilight descended.  We continued up the coast to my mother's.  The next day we were at my father's.  Seeing his car in the driveway, his groceries in the fridge and the cupboards,  his dishes in the dish-rack, his mail in a stack, the little temporary messes he'd left here and there from whatever activities were in progress when the disease finally stilled him that if he were still around, he'd have cleaned up immediately, the only thing missing to animate the scene was him.  The interrupted quality of it brought home for me that death is really just the absence of life.

As we went through his stuff, there were his bird books and nature journals, his radios and pipe collections, his tools and sanding equipment from his life before business machine sales.  Every book had his name in thick black marker on an endpaper along with the date he'd come into it and who had given it to him, and was crammed with little newspaper clippings and hand-written notes.  He didn't talk to himself; he wrote to himself.  An inveterate law-giver, here everywhere were his little signs: LOW OVERHANG - WATCH YOUR HEAD!  TURN OUT LIGHT WHEN DONE - Thx!  DOUSE THAT BUTT!!  NO TRESPASSING - THIS MEANS YOU!!! 

Sometimes the signs were so ridiculous you could only roll your eyes:

PLEASE DO NOT WALK ON ALL FOURS - Thanx alot!  

The first time we saw it, in the side porch, it was just one of those absurd Dad enigmas that were familiar because they had played such a part in the background of our youth.  But in the basement workshop, a second appeared.  PLEASE DO NOT WALK ON ALL FOURS - Thanx alot!  What the hell?  Was he writing signs for his dog now?  It must have had a meaning for him.  In the garage, there it was again:  PLEASE DO NOT WALK ON ALL FOURS - Thanx alot!  One more was found over a workbench in the shed. As we made our way through his things, it became a refrain, a mysterious message from beyond, a presence.

When I returned home from Maine, the odd words echoed around in my brain for days, and then I wrote this: 

Four Remains

PLEASE DO NOT WALK ON ALL FOURS
- Thanx Alot!

--The wording of four signs handwritten on cardboard and posted by my father at various times, in four different locations on his estate 

Please do not walk on all fours.
Your ass is getting fat.
To those you contort to let pass you
Do not give too much to look at.
Better to lean tall and thin--
Less seen--
As a shadow on a wall. Obscure,
But not dark.  Less contrast please!
Thanx alot!

Please do not walk on all fours.
Are you a baby or a man?
Please don't drool and stop that blubbering;
Don't need need need;
Don't shit in your pants.
The world does not exist to please you.
No one else is going to feed you.
You alone made your circumstance.
Thanx alot!

Please do not walk on all fours.
Do not squat, gnawing on a bone.
If you do not belong it's because your race is new.
Therefore, look up, rise up, climb, arise,
Move up from where you came.
Your hands are needed.  They effect change.
They help, they rake, they write, they make.
Stand up.  Evolve.
Thanx alot!

Please do not walk on all fours.
Do not walk facing the grave--

Thanx alot!