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Tag: father/daughter (Page 2 of 2)

Parting Gift

Special Selection for the 2022/2023 Winter Holiday Issue

Nonfiction by Marianne Lonsdale

I cooked dinner for Dad in early December, warming up canned baked beans, cut up hot dogs and a little ketchup in a pot. The television news blared from the family room accompanied by Dad’s hacking cough. Dad took up smoking again after Mom, his wife of 62 years, died four years earlier. I pushed open a window to diffuse the constant stream of second-hand smoke but worried the cold air would chill him.

I’d given up on cooking anything other than dishes with hot dogs or ground beef—Dad considered pretty much everything else an extravagance. Individual bowls of iceberg lettuce served as my attempt at something healthy and green. I whipped up his favorite salad dressing, equal parts mayonnaise and ketchup.

I put our plates on the table and we took the same spots that we’d been sitting in since we’d moved to this house when I was five years old. Dad at the head, and me to his right. We missed having my mom at the other end and being surrounded by my sister and six brothers.

He spooned the goopy dressing over the beans mix and the salad, ate quickly and handed me his plate.

“Is there more?” he asked.

He’d weighed in at just 130 pounds at his last doctor’s visit. I wasn’t sure what he ate on the nights that I or one of my siblings were not at the house, and it made me happy to see him with an appetite and eating with gusto.

“Thank you for cooking,” he said. “I really like seeing you. I appreciate your coming.”

Dad said the same few sentences to me on each visit and not much else. His world had shrunk to the walls of his house and his memories of his wife, my mother.

Mom’s death disoriented him; he still cried every time I visited. He was so lonely but had little tolerance for visitors. He was even ready for me to leave after about 90 minutes, usually heading up the few stairs to his bedroom without saying goodnight.

He objected to any help. We’d forced a housecleaner on him and he refused to pay her. He sometimes smelled. He’d just begun using a walker after several falls, including one getting out of the sports car he’d bought at age 86, and he lay on the street as cars sped by until some man eventually stopped and helped him up. But every now and then he’d perk up.

“What’s that bird?” Dad asked after he’d taken his last bite of beans. I took a few steps to the freezer, hoping he’d enjoy the vanilla ice cream I’d brought.

What the heck was he talking about? I stared at him; even his eyes, deep brown with hazel highlights, seemed to have faded, filmy and dull.

“The one that people think brings babies?”

“A stork?” I asked and brought two bowls of ice cream to the table. “Do you mean a stork?”

“That’s it! I knew you’d know.” Dad beamed.

“When you were born, the nurse brought me to the nursery in the hospital. All these babies were in clear plastic boxes, lined up. On the wall behind them was a painting of this huge stork—that bird had the most incredible brown eyes. So big and warm and beautiful. The nurse pointed you out to me and I just stared. My girl had the same eyes. So beautiful. Do you remember me calling you Birdseye? Do you remember that nickname?”

I’d hated that nickname. My sister was Princess and I was Birdseye. The name was ugly. I was jealous of Princess. I wondered why my Dad called me Birdseye but never asked why. Questions weren’t much tolerated in our household.

This story had never been told. I was near 60 years old and Dad was 89. He shared this memory with so much love. He said so little these days, like every thought was difficult to pull out.

His story surprised me. I’d never considered that the name might be one of affection. Dad had an unpredictable temper and I’d often assumed that he found humor in being mean and teasing. And I’d shut down, cutting him out of many events of my life, and not sharing how I felt with him. Now I wonder how many times he and I misunderstood each other, blocking so much love that we might have shared.

I didn’t know that would be our last dinner together, or that hospice care would start for Dad in a couple of weeks, and that he’d die on December 27th. I am so grateful that this parting gift, the truth of the nickname, flew from him to me and I better know how much he loved me, right from the start.


Marianne Lonsdale writes personal essays, fiction, and literary interviews. Her work has been published in Literary Mama, Grown and Flown, Pulse and has aired on public radio. She lives in Oakland, California.

Feed

Nonfiction by Natalli Amato

It’s the good summer. Connor and I are out on the dock, beholding the St. Lawrence. There are more lily pads right here, right now, than there are lily pads I have stumbled upon in my lifetime before this point. Some of them flower. Some of them are just green. There are geese milling about on the lawn near the shoreline. We talk out loud about how much we love them.

We also talk about the seaweed we see, how Maxine wants to get rid of it all; it clogs up the boat. She thinks she can get the fish to do the excavation work for us. Connor explains her methods: the fish will uproot the seaweed, even eat the seaweed, if we lure them there by tossing scoops of corn feed into the river. This is why there is a stout metal tin at the end of the dock, full of pounds and pounds of corn feed. Connor opens the tin, scoops a good scoop, and throws the kernels. Repeat the process. Offers me a turn.

I look into the corn feed tin. The fish are not the only ones being directed towards something they would otherwise not pay a visit. There is also me, a human girl, following kernels to a different place: burlap sacks in the log garage, the cabin house, Plank Road. Nowhere near this river. Forest.

I can see the line where our property met the forest. I can see where I spread the corn feed down on the pine needled ground before the forest’s feet. I can see, too, how small I am. Four-year-old hands. So who carried the burlap bag? Who opened the burlap bag and showed me how to scoop and where to pour? I know I am here for a purpose – I am here to feed the deer. But who has taught me this? Who has told me we are people for whom the deer matter? I open my eyes as wide as I can in this vision. Someone else must be here. I see only, though, myself.

My buck shooting father. He is this someone, here but not.

I know this because of a card I found cleaning out my mother’s desk – a card he sent her from such and such recovery center, the post script note reading, Ask Natalli what a deer says.

Connor is scooping corn feed into the St. Lawrence. I am walking the forest line on Plank Road. He does not see me leave.


One fish swims to the weeds and its cousin is not far behind. One deer lowers its head to eat and its cousin is not far behind. Memories are like this, too.


Connor and I are in 113 Brady. Our apartment. I am not sure the time of day. I am fairly sure of the season, fall, because Connor is studying for exams and the good summer has already happened but the murderous spring has not.

I’ve returned from the grocery store. I’m sitting on the couch reading a magazine, Cosmo. I took the long way from the grocery store back to 113 Brady so that I could speak out loud to my father. I do that when I am alone in my car. I am alone in my car less often now that I love Connor and Connor loves me.

My conversation goes something like this:

I’m sorry I told mom to tell you I didn’t want to read the letter you’d written me that one year you were probably in AA or something because why else would you write me a letter but now I want to take it back now I want to have the chance to forgive you and have you know it now I want to know if you like country music now I want to thank you for my life now I wish I could have a beer with you even though its all those beers that killed you and I wish it could have been different and when I see the blood moon hanging low over black ontario and it is so mystifying that my heart aches instead of smiles which seems to be the more logical response to beauty – I think that has something to do with you or at least I inherited it from you or maybe I didn’t and I’m just checking in because maybe you can hear me.

When I speak out loud to my father I also cry. Not too hard but enough. Enough that Connor notices my eyes look off when he emerges from the study to give me a squeeze and remind ourselves that we are here, together. Connor asks me what’s wrong and I do the degrading thing –

I say, what are you talking about?

I say what are you talking about to the person who loves me and I love best. I say what are you talking about when he notices my suffering. I exclude him – this man I will one day break my own world over, so bereft I will be when he leaves me. I turn away and assume I will always have this option.


How far have I traveled from this? Far, far, far. And also not at all. I exist as a girl and I exist as a hungry ghost with unfinished business. It is for this reason I return here.

What’s wrong?

The corn feed, say it, the corn feed, the corn feed, my own dried kernel heart.


Natalli Amato is a poet, fiction writer, and journalist. Read her work at www.natalliamato.com

Climbing a Hill in China With My Father

Nonfiction by Marie Look

I am about to climb a staircase up a hill in southern China with my father. A local has told us the summit is called Xianggong and that it’s the best view in the Guangxi region. It overlooks the Li River and the karst mountains that rise like shark teeth along the banks.

It’s a late November afternoon. There’s only a little time before the last bus back to Guilin and our hotel, but we don’t want to leave this hill unexplored. With naïve optimism, we begin. The stairs are steep, constructed of stone and wood and reinforced with metal. It’s humid, and my shirt sticks to me.

My father was born here sixty-seven years ago, on rural farmland in China. When he was seven, his mother sent him to the United States to live with a relative he had never met. He didn’t make it back to China again for decades, not until he was thirty-three, a little younger than I am now. Today we are both tourists in his native country, where neither of us can interpret the road signs or speak Cantonese with the locals.

The path uphill zigzags, and we can’t see the whole of it from any single vantage point. The level of exertion humbles us.

“Good thing you’re still hitting … the tennis courts … three times a week,” I gasp as we take the next turn.

“This is why you run … all those half marathons … right?” my father replies.

We discuss slipping our camera bags from our shoulders and resting. But we remember the bus, which will come soon and leave with or without us. So we ignore our screaming quads, our hearts beating in our ears, and we press on.

Some fathers and daughters have a favorite pastime they enjoy together. They take up cycling or become cinephiles or shop for vintage records. My father and I travel. We make discoveries, we collect experiences. But this trip is different from the others, in that we seek more than just a sense of place. We’re uncovering parts of ourselves in the local features, in this landscape that has remained unchanged since my father was born—possibly even since the time of his own father or grandfather. Who were they? Who are we? And if a man and his daughter manage to climb a question in the shape of a hill in southern China, what will it prove?

“What was your village called?” I often asked my father this while growing up in Oklahoma. But he couldn’t remember the name. Months would pass and I would ask him again, hoping for a different answer. I had so many questions about his origin story, which I understood to also be my origin story. Did he have siblings? How did my grandparents meet? What was China like? How many relatives still lived there? The details were always sparse. There were no stories handed down, no photos to pass around.

“I think it’s hard for him to talk about,” offered my mother, a Kansan with blue eyes and fair skin. “Or it’s possible he really doesn’t know.”

More discoveries await my father and me on this trip. The ancient city walls of Guangzhou, the hump of Victoria Peak, the stilt houses of the Tai O fishing community. But at present we’re chasing the bird’s-eye view of these limestone mountains, which for millennia have granted the tropical landscape around the Li a quality of otherworldliness.

Earlier, my father and I experienced the valley from the Li itself, aboard one of the ferries meandering southward from Guilin’s Zhejiang Pier to Yangshuo village. We stood on the upper deck, transfixed, as every bend introduced a perspective more compelling and timeless than the last. Fishermen on bamboo rafts. Serene-looking pagodas. Wading deer and buffalo. Over and over, we raised our cameras to capture it all.

Now, as we climb Xianggong, I feel every ounce of what I carry—especially my camera, a digital Canon EOS Rebel my father gave me several Christmases ago when I was still in my twenties. I call it my “big girl camera” because of its heft. It’s an expensive piece of equipment that requires responsibility, and I take good care of it. I know how to hold it, how to store it, how to clean it.

In the ’90s, my family lived in Broken Arrow, in a house on Orlando Street, where my father would empty the contents of a brown, leathery bag onto his and my mother’s bed. Lying on my belly on their floral comforter, I’d watch him clean his own camera and help him organize the lenses, the film canisters, and the various cleaning cloths as he explained apertures and F-stops, ISO and granularity. Negatives could reveal pictures if you used the right chemicals, he told me. I marveled at the system of it all. Photography was a superpower—the power of supersight, of supermemory.

At last, my father and I—chests heaving, legs shaking—lug ourselves and our cameras onto the hill’s highest point. Thoughts of the bus evaporate. The sun at our backs throws the jagged mounds of stone into light and shadow for as far as we can see. White ferry boats dot the river, appearing toylike.

Click. A moment captured.

Click. A memory created.

 Click. A question answered.            

Then there are no significant words exchanged, no particular actions I expect to recall later. Just an indefinite moment of wonder at the sky above us and the earth below us, and my father and I standing in stillness between the two, catching our breath.


Marie Look is an emerging writer of creative nonfiction and short fiction. As a journalist, she’s contributed interviews, travel articles, and more to regional and national magazines. She studied journalism at the University of Oklahoma and creative writing through UCLA Extension. She lives with her husband in Los Angeles.

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