I once stood on a cliff edge, looking down. I am not one to suffer vertigo, but at the time, I felt a bit of unease seeing so much *space* between my own two feet and the trees, rocks, and bushes far below. I thought to myself then, if this ledge were to shift, I would have a long way to fall before I hit anything. Then I thought, perhaps that isn’t so bad. Perhaps the freedom of falling would be worth the sudden stop at the end.
I once sat on a boulder, not too far from that cliff edge. I was on my own share of time; my watch had yet to remind me that I had somewhere else to be. The sun was bright. So very bright, and the edges of the sky seemed to be wrapped down around me on that mountain. I enjoyed the heat of the sun warmed rock underneath me, closed my eyes and listened to the slow melodic tongue of the elder pines speak through the wind. I felt something else, a hand closing on mine, and I didn’t feel so bad. The wind took things from me. Secrets, pains, fears… and in its place, I heard the songs of the aspen, the spruce, the pine. They sang their timeless songs and I absorbed what I could, an overused sponge in a shallow pan.
I once stood in a shower, years before I got to that cliff. I was at camp, and I was crying profusely under the fall of the hot water. We had water discipline at the camp, the cabins had a lot of kids that needed to bathe, but no counselor banged on my door, so I just let the water run. I am pretty sure they knew I was crying. I tried to be quiet, but even quiet sobs can escape the harsh sound of water hitting stone and wood. I turned off the water, dried quickly, and dressed. As I left the facility, the counselor asked me if everything was alright. I lied.
I once fell ill at a camp, a year or two or three separated from the shower. I went to the nurse’s station and she took my temperature, felt my tonsils and prodded me off to a cot in her office. I feel asleep quickly. I woke up at five the next morning, and bleary eyed, she shooed my out the door and told me to head back to my bunkhouse. The sun was coming up then, but the sun had yet to show its face over the distant rise of the mountains. The morning was cold, the gravel crunched lightly under my small feet, and I felt the world wake up around me. The blue air hung from the ceiling of the world, and in the murky grey dawn, I felt the world snap a step to the left. I felt a complete sense of peace.
I once took the trash out late one summer night, a span of years since that night of illness. I was living at home still, a teenager thinking the world was shit, and I felt the need to look up. The sky was black, but as I looked, the pinpricks of a billion stars opened up before me. In a moment as brief as a sneeze, I felt the world spinning underneath me, and the slow cosmic turn of the universe above me. I felt that hand again. It pushed me down to my knees and held me in place as I experienced a mere fraction of the bitter cold of the vast distances between our tiny little planet and the infinite dark that separates everything.
Not too long after that… I found an old picture of my dad. He was standing on a beach, with a rock under one foot, his face timeless in the beard I think of him always having, his smile so much like my own. He was smiling for someone holding that camera on the edge of the cold ocean behind him. Massachusetts, I think. There is a lighthouse I have never seen. And that smile, that I only see in the photograph. The same smile that was in my baby book, of a new dad, playing with his infant son. The son kept trying to grab his glasses, or his nose, or just to stop the raspberries from being blown on his little stomach… who knows? But those photos, taken thousands of miles and years apart are the only pictures I know of with my dad smiling. I like to think he was smiling on that beach thinking of the boy he was rolling around with on the floor. In contrast, the tears are without count, and they rolled without notice. Except for the one that was shedding them.
Let’s flash back here. Take the time machine to a boy about to hit puberty, living in a very small hole of an apartment. I was a latch key kid, my mother worked a number of jobs. I can’t remember how many. What child ever really knows what their parents do? It was late, I was by myself, and I stood on a sidewalk that looped around the building, praying. I was praying that if God could, please make me fast. Or strong. Or smart. God please let me find something to get out of here. I now know he gave me time.
Time spools around me, the threads of a hundred complimentary and sometimes conflicting memories settling around me like chaff. I can reach out and follow them for short distances before they loop back on themselves, or get too knotted for me to trace. These threads touch each other in strange ways, associating with one another like drunk strangers bumping into each other on a dance floor. They have strange paths that lead other directions, and even I, the holder of these memories, have a hard time seeing where they lead.
But I have a father. He gave me genetic code, and an imprint to pass on to future generations. But I have another father too. Someone else that pushes the world a nanometer to one side for me, or pushes me down to make a realization about the nature of the universe.
There is comfort knowing that while one left me, the other was there. And I know who my father is. And some quantify it with a book, or a song, or a religion, or a big stick to hit others with. I quantify it with threads, and tears, and the warm sun, the breath of trees, the spinning of the very earth beneath my feet.
And time.