betaphilings

Write about Dad, you keep saying.

OK, I’ll tell you a story about your dad.

It’s a half-remembered story like they all are. All stories are less than whole. There is no such thing as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth when it comes to memory. Truth exists only in the moment.

This story is like a broken glass with three or four main chunks lying around and smaller fragments scattered about. The big chunks include a hotel, a company Christmas party, a band from Hawaii, and a feast of food and drinks.

You can almost fill in the fragments around those chunks yourself. You could pick any big company to throw the party and any big hotel to host it. The sign out front says SO AND SO’S CHRISTMAS PARTY and the date.

That’s how Tom knew about the party. He saw the sign and came home and told me that we were invited to a company Christmas party.

Yippee!!

He lied, of course, but I came to understand that most of his lies were harmless. He simply loved to have fun, and he had no problem breaking protocols in pursuit of festivity. He had already done the hard job of rearing three children and now with just me he was rolling along carefree. Crashing that Christmas party was so emblematic of the way he approached life. The man was fearless.

Are you sure we should be doing this?

Yeah, everything will be alright.

We were dressed to the nines, looking and smelling good, Tom in a suit and me in heels. The place was packed with lei-wearing celebrants, maybe a couple of hundred in a hotel banquet room. The food was amazing, the band was hokey and loud, the dance floor was set up between the band and the food. We ate and drank and danced the night away.

Tom loved to dance. I used to make fun of the way we danced. We were so awkward together. We had different inner beats and it showed whenever we tried to dance. Still, we danced lovingly and often.

Speaking of beats, do you know anything about the Beat Generation? Your dad was a borderline beatnik because he grew up in that generation. San Francisco became their mecca so if you see any old geysers in their seventies out there, they’re probably former beats. Incredibly interesting people is what they are.

Here’s another story I love. You may have heard this one already. One day Tom came home and said he’d gotten me a part in a Willie Nelson movie.

What!?

Sure enough, the next morning we showed up at a hotel in Austin and I was whisked away to a wardrobe trailer and put into a cowgirl waitress outfit. My job was to traipse around behind Willie, Kris Kristofferson, and Rip Torn carrying a tray and serving drinks. You can see about ten seconds of me in Song Writer. Tom was seated at another table wearing a cowboy hat and tan jacket, acting like a customer. We each got a check for $88 for playing extras that day. I have pictures of us with Willie and Kris.

Your father’s fearlessness rubbed off on me. Once we were on Eagle Mountain Lake in the Texas Steel yacht, anchored in a little cove partying with a group of thirty-somethings. A sea plane began circling overhead and we all started waving. The plane landed on the lake and cruised over to the boat. I asked the pilot if he’d take me up for a ride and he agreed. So I climbed into the plane and got a birds-eye view of the lake where I met your dad. My spirit soared high that day.

Speaking of spirits, the common element in each of these stories is alcohol, which reminds me of a Visine story. We were atop a mesa in New Mexico or Arizona, one of those, laid out on a blanket in the buff when a bug crawled into my ear.

Aachtt!!

A buzzing bug in your ear is a frightening thing. I was screaming and crazy scared. Tom got the Visine from my night case and squeezed it into my ear. The bug drained out with the fluid. Remember that if you ever get a bug in your ear.

If your dad had a motto, it was “Everything will be alright.” He said that to me practically daily for twenty years to cut through my fussing and fretting. It’s funny how when you hear something over and over for that long, you come to believe it. Now it’s my motto too. I know that everything will be alright because it always is.

Tom had another line that worked well on me. No matter where we were, if there was a room full of people, he would turn to me and say, “You’re the prettiest woman in the room.” I loved hearing that. Sometimes I agreed with him and sometimes I didn’t. Most women in their prime are pretty, especially when they’re dressed for a night out.

I never thought you looked like either of us until I put those two pictures up. Now I can see the resemblance—the nose, the mouth, the chin, even the eyebrows. Mostly, you have his fearlessness. I remember you crashing that Astricon conference in Dallas when you were a freshman because you couldn’t afford a ticket. You met Mark Spenser that day and showed him Adhearsion and that became the defining moment in your career. You’ve been on top of the world ever since.

Tom would be so proud of you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 28th, 2010 at 11:31 am and is filed under My kids, My stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.