Can the child within my heart rise above? Can I sail through the changing ocean tides? Can I handle the seasons of my life? — Stevie Nicks, “Landslide.”
I do not write of you often, anymore, in this space. But I sure do think about you a lot, more often now and over the past several weeks and months than I ever have before.
Memories of you began creeping up on me, again, a few months ago, during The Mean Month: that seemingly endless chasm of empty time during which I felt I had nothing and no one, no present and no future; during which I nearly gave up, or, far worse, asked for help. But I refused. Because I could hear you whispering to me sternly in my memories, “Never, ever give up. And never ask for help. You’re a Bartelby Boy. We do things on our own.”
Those memories were sometimes the only things that kept me going, kept me pushing, kept me keeping on throughout all of the pain and sadness and loneliness of those harsh, rain-soaked days and nights. I remember I used to pay nightly visits to this old building on Fort Street Mall, in Downtown Honolulu, and sit outside of it, in the chill of the late evenings, because it was then that I was most reminded of you.
From street level the building in question is nothing more than a row of typical Fort Street Mall shops and small restaurants, plying their wares by day and barring up at night. But this particular building has three more stories above street level. I am still not sure what the windows of these three floors house (studio apartments? small offices?), for they are usually darkened and always closed. They look uninhabited.
Except for one. High in the middle of the fourth floor of the building is a single window, usually always (I have discovered, since first finding it) open to whatever weather happens to be blessing or damning the streets of Downtown, always lit, and always, always, with the most beautiful and soulful of tenor saxophone notes flowing out of it, into the late island evenings, down to the cobblestones of the urban street below it. The first evening I heard it, way back in the rains of January, I stopped walking, sat down on a wet bench, looked up, and listened to the melodies for a full hour, becoming drenched in water and tears and memory, half-expecting to see your tall, lean frame emerge from the window, as you inhaled a cigarette and sipped from a rocks glass while gazing up into the sky.
It reminded me a lot of those evenings, late at night, when I was a child at Edgecliffe, and I would hear the Tchaikovsky or the Prokofiev or the Berlioz being switched off on the turntable in your office, to be replaced by Charlie Parker, or John Coltrane, or Lester Young. (Much like the musical sounds of Nina Simone emanating from another suite in the house, these strains from your office meant pain, meant loneliness, meant…struggle.) And it reminded me of how much you kept inside, of how little weakness you showed, and of how much strength you exhibited to everyone around you.
It also reminded me of how much like you I am becoming, and of how much of you I now see in myself.
When I have written of you, in this space, in the past, it has not been too kind. But I am getting older. And as your memory simultaneously seemingly fades yet becomes so achingly palpable just when I need it the most, I find that it is…difficult…to be unkind, anymore. It is difficult to hear those mournful saxophone tunes of long ago, and not wish that you would open that office door, or lean out of that fourth floor window, and invite me in for conversation, cigarettes, and the Chivas that I stopped drinking…one month ago, today. It is difficult to not smile softly, while reading the many kind wishes thrown about all over the Internet throughout this day, and remember how every present I ever gave you on this day, however sophomoric, was immediately incorporated into your daily toilet: the clumsy Tiffany cuff-links; the too-brightly-colored Hermès ties; the not-smoky-enough Dior Eau Sauvage.
And it is difficult to not remember, to not thank you for giving me, or to not cherish with a vehement fierceness: your strength, and your will, and your icy emerald gaze with which you always unblinkingly stared adversity in the eyes.
For I would not be here today without them.
Nor without you.
Happy Father’s Day.
Dad.
Love,
Atherton Bartelby
Filed under: Music, Photography, Writing , defining moments, emotional landscapes, family, home, memories, needful reminders, photoblogging
I like this entry. I think it’s important that we understand how we really feel about the people in our lives.
Being able to say it or write about it is equally as important.
Annes Lane: I’m happy you liked this. My father never really gets too positive of a spin in my writing, so this was kind of an emotional exercise to see if I could be positive about him. And, oddly, the verbalization of him suddenly made me consider him differently, I found.
[...] so, as well, or simply want to keep them hanging around for myself, at the end of a week that just totally tapped me [...]