Papa (as seen from 27 year old eyes)

It's his birthday today, and I'm left remembering.

Papa. Six feet two inches, red bearded, loud, listening, giant. Hermit, poet, reader, writer, and depth psychologist. He spent his life trying to understand himself. How could I ever know him better?

I didn’t know Papa very well as a child. I only remember little moments. Wading out into the ditch and him following me, turning to find him there, just watching, listening.

I remember marching down the trail behind the shed with my friend Freeze, shouting, “God damn! God damn,” because our daffy duck cups had gotten sandy - and Papa coming out on the porch. We immediately grew silent, Freeze perhaps knowing that we weren’t supposed to say that word.

“Do you know what you’re saying?” He asked us. “You’re asking God to bring destruction down because your cups are dirty.” I remember imagining my precious daffy duck cup shattered by God’s damnation, destroyed because I had called it.

Papa worked weekends in Seattle as a night shift computer operator - living homeless in the hospital where he worked until Monday, when we would drive to Poulsbo and pick him up halfway. Weekends were a special time. Mama and I would wake up late and get up later. We’d make up songs and sing them together, laugh and laugh until we couldn’t stop, gasping up into our day, breakfast, sun, play on my magnificent five acres. They were bright times.

While in Poulsbo to pick him up, we would get groceries for the week from Central Market. I remember George, a bagging man I really liked, though I can’t recall why, but we would always try to be in his queue when we checked out. We would always get barbecued chicken pizza, and I would always pick out the onions. Then, coming home, Papa would tell us the plots of the two movies he would have seen. A spirit of storytelling that would entertain me all the way home.

When Papa returned - so did a measure of order that didn’t exist when he was gone. Monday night he would always make us Turkey Tacos. Breakfast would be early, dinner would arrive at the same time every night. I would go to my Waldorf preschool again, and I think I mistook the difference between weekdays and weekends to be his influence.

Papa was taken for granted in those early years. Everybody had a Papa, and this was mine. He was good as far as Papas go. He would protect me on his lap, hold me in his arms. He made good food with lots of cheese. I remember one day as he was dropping me off on Tomkin farm when I didn’t want to relinquish myself into my Waldorf teacher’s hands. Papa stayed all day and we made water candles together. “That wasn’t so bad,” he said at the end, and I realized I had forgotten that I’d been upset at all in the morning. Forgotten why he’d stayed.

I was ten when Papa didn’t come home one Monday. Perhaps we drove to Central market and he wasn’t there waiting for us. He and Mama had a fight the Friday before she explained to me. She was sure Papa would come home.

Days passed. I was also sure Papa would come home, but Mama grew more and more frightened. She had called his work and nobody had seen him. Called him over and over again with no answer. She explained to me then that Papa was something called “Suicidal,” and she was scared he might “take his own life.” She had me call on the telephone and leave a message. “We’re worried about you,” she had me say. “We want you to come home.”

He did come home. One week away from us, he came back. We learned that he had gone to the mountains and re-centered after the fight. He had been in the room listening to the message I’d left on the machine, but hadn’t answered. Angry at Mama for using me to manipulate him like that. Twisted by my voice.

I began to notice that they fought more after that. Papa always said that Mama was the boss - but he’d rebel against ‘the boss’ from time to time. Neither of them would yell at each other, but the slightly raised voices and tension in the air were never comfortable.

Mama left, tearful, one evening after a big fight. Papa explained that she would probably come back, but had claimed she was leaving for good. I took this in. “Can I ask an unrelated question?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Can I use that dead bird on the porch’s beak as an arrowhead?”

“No,” he told me. Later, he would tell me that was when he knew I was Okay. Unphased.

Mama came back later that night. I remember a time when Mama was away, and I had to go spend the weekend with Papa at work. We had done this a couple times during my childhood, but this time Papa decided to introduce me to the internet. I wanted to summon an air elemental - a Sylph - and Papa promised to help me. There in his office, full of those old white PCs with monitors the size of your chest, he made me my first email account. Then we worked on narrowing search terms.

How to summon a sylph

“How to summon a Sylph” - with quotes

How to summon an air elemental . . .

We waded through the clutter of video game tutorials and fiction together. He showed me how to print things I wanted to read later, spell check things I was about to post, and get back to things I had accidentally left behind. This was my first exposure to the internet and in it I found many of the things I wanted an air elemental for. I learned to convey messages great distances in the blink of an eye and gather arcane knowledge from far and wide.

I was eleven when Mama went and got her tubes tied. Papa already had a vasectomy, gotten right after my accidental conception, but these two pieces of information didn’t click together until Mama came to me right after and said, “You might have been wondering  . . .” I hadn't.

She explained that Papa had ceased their sexual relationship, and she had gone to supplement elsewhere with his blessing. She had, as it turned out, met my stepfather.

It took a year for her to move out, a slow transition where they fought more, and I largely continued my golden life. That was the year I got into martial arts. The year I fell in love with the girl who would keep me tied up in an unrequited knot for the next four years. Their breakup was conscious and kind as far as these things go. Papa was, in many ways, grateful for her leaving. He had pushed her away, and she had finally gone.

Papa liked to eat from large plates with large forks. A giant to my mother’s hobbit. A man of appetites. It was in him that I first saw excess. Driving home from a party one night when he had drunk too much, and we stopped several times so he could puke out of the car. He rarely got that drunk, but would often drink to loudness. An opening of spirit inspiring laughter and joy, for which he would be dull and tired the next morning.

On those nights, he became a fool, trickster, magician. I remember my fondness as a little boy for the chaos. He had a storybook cleverness that came out at times, like Jack of the jack tales. I always thought of him as a trickster, but he was also our force of order. Mama was the unpredictable one. When Papa came back, we had Turkey tacos for dinner and went to bed at the same time. Yet despite schoolwork on weekdays and all the order he brought, it was not a controlling order. I still thought him a joker.

When Mama left, Papa took over my schooling. We had always read books out loud as a family - literature mostly, and with just the two of us, that nighttime reading turned serious, delving into deeper stuff. The Scarlet letter, Martin Eden, To Kill a Mockingbird, Cannery row. We read many I reference still, Cat’s Cradle, and We have always lived in the castle - the names could go on.

When we would finish one, he would pull out a dozen favorites, he wanted to share with me from the bookshelves that lined every room. The next iteration would have a few repeats, but usually he would have moved on, offering me new choices from among the over two thousand books in his collection. When people came and visited, they would tour Mama’s garden and then Papa would bring them inside to show them his “garden” - the thousand colored tapestry of books, separated by poetry, and other things. All by subject, of course.

In the morning, we began to read nonfiction. My education in science began there as the best writers wove interesting stories around scientific discovery. We went deep into world history following threads from the Tang Dynasty to the inventions that shaped the world. We wove our way through Guns Germs and Steel, dove beneath the surface of The Periodic table, and one Jewish chemist’s survival of the Holocaust. In every case, Papa strove to give me different perspectives. The history of the States as told by its indigenous people, the history of the sun as told from the beginning of time.

Papa loved the word “Valance.” It refers to the shells around an atom that an electron can inhabit. Electrons hop between valances, shifting their loyalty between elements - and a metaphor arises from this. To shift valances is to hop into another person’s center of gravity. See things as they see them, feel as they feel, understand where another is coming from.

My education was aimed at valance hopping. Papa taught me that everyone has a story, and every story has more sides than you can imagine. He taught me to imagine things from every perspective, be it through the eyes of literature’s masterworks, or the subtleties of science - forever finding itself wrong and arising anew like a phoenix from the ashes, hopefully closer to the truth.

And in all his time teaching me to see other people’s perspectives, he never forced his own. Papa let me pick and choose from the variety he tirelessly read aloud until I shaped myself into what I wanted to be. He gave me the capacity to understand another soul. To observe and try to capture an essence - throwing out hypotheses, playing with ideas until my eyes bleed into another’s, and I hop freely between valances. Value another perspective. See my Papa for the value he holds.

Memories. I remember coming home on Monday - two buses and a couple hours spent at the county library until Papa would come up behind my computer and put his hand on my shoulder, startling me from whatever I was engrossed in. On the way home we would catch up on my weekends - this was the beginning of my telling him everything - and then he would tell me the plots of the movies he’d watched if I had little to report.

As we came in to stop, he would sometimes say “Home again, home again, Jiggedy jig,” with a little smile. I’d get out and grab two bags of groceries and we’d come in to the cold, lifeless house together. “Hello room!” I’d shout, loud enough he could hear it wherever he was.

“Hello Pan!” He would say in his squeakiest voice, pretending it was my room answering.

If it was winter, I would build a fire, and go upstairs to read my comic books. Papa would go sleep off the jet lag of his night shift, and would be up by six to make me turkey tacos.

After we’d eaten, he would either pull out a chess or scrabble. Chess was funner for me, I got to play against someone vastly my superior. In the early days he structured our chess games as lessons, with explanations as to why he was making each move, and the ability to take moves back. As I got better he gave me less of an advantage, although sometimes late game as I was struggling he’d say - “switch?” and we’d trade spots and he’d usually win anyway.

I remember the first time I won a game. He was exultant. “You’ve been playing great all night! - but that was spectacular!” He exclaimed. I beamed. It would be another year before I won again.

Scrabble was less enjoyable for me, but more, I think, for him. Our scrabble board had taped high scores all along its edges. We played, not against each other, but against ourselves, always trying to get higher points than we had before. Papa took meticulous score, and we worked together when someone had a seven letter word. I finally rebelled sometime around sixteen after a particularly frustrating game without a single vowel drawn. “This is frustration!” - after that he’d ask “Would you like to play Frustration or Chess?” I would almost always pick the latter.

It’s always odd how parents remember whole swathes of time that you don’t. Papa would talk sometimes about old rituals now lost. Mr Gumpy’s outing - a story I have no memory of, or  rhyming games we used to play with each other. I vaguely remember him working on the kitchen floor, and I proclaiming. “My carpenter name is Con!”

“Well, if you’re Con, then I must be Pro,” he quipped. I was delighted, not knowing what the two words meant, but I knew they went together. For years after that we would call each other those names “Hey Con, pass me those nails will you?”

“You got it Pro.”

It was on that now completed kitchen floor a few months later that I finally learned how to pronounce “This” and “that” - instead of the “dis” and “dat” I was prone to before. I would always bite my tongue when I tried to make a th, and Papa coached me through saying it softly. When I got it, we were both delighted and danced around the floor singing “This!” “That!” I remember it almost as a musical.

I do not remember the time when I went and asked sweetly if he wanted a drink of water, and then when he accepted brought a cup with a couple drops in it. He got so angry - he told the story to me later - he hurled the cup and broke it.

It was at that same building site - what we would later call the art house, that I went to climb onto a tall stump.

“Don’t climb up that if you can’t climb down again,” he warned me as I climbed. I played on top for a while and then tried unsuccessfully to clamber down. “Papa, help!”

“Nope - I warned you, now you just have to stay up there until you can get down.”

As an adult, I’m sure it was a great place for me to be. The stump isn’t actually tall enough to hurt a child trying to get down, and I was out of trouble - but to me then it was betrayal. What would it hurt him to come get me down? I cried and wailed and pleaded and he just kept on working. Finally, when Mama came up to check on us around dusk, she lifted me down. The difference between a mother and a father’s love.

Later I remember climbing that stump again - carefully testing my whole way up to see if I could get down again. I remember triumphantly inching down and touching the ground. It was a lesson well learned.

Papa had a secret room he built into his section of the house. It was hidden behind a curtain and locked with a combination lock. This thrilled me as a child - as I imagined everything that could be in that secret room. Superhero costume? Magic item? I set about trying to solve the combination.

The next week, Papa came to me and confronted me about trying to get into the room. I’d left the combination lock all out of order. He knew. I stayed away for a few months and then set about it again.

Papa told me once that one of the skills of a Wizard is the capacity to move through a space unseen, leaving it exactly how you found it. I think now he was probably trying to teach me cleanliness - teach me to not leave a trail of toys, clothes, and dirt behind me - but I took it and ingested it. I would learn to be a wizard.

After he caught me the first time, I was very careful. He left traps - a curtain corner folded, a chair placed just so - the lock was always at a slight angle, intentional or not I’m not sure. He left the lock in order, and so it was easy enough to put it back that way now that I knew he’d notice.

One weekend when I was around eleven - I went up to work on the lock in my un-methodical way. I peeled back the curtain and found he had forgotten to lock the door. When, after memorizing where everything was, I inched inside, I immediately noticed the combination lock on the shelf - combination in its open setting. 

The room was, of course, his porn stash. He’d plastered the walls with images, often repeating, so that it had an almost dreamlike quality. Mirrors pointed towards a specific spot, giant penises mosaic-ed the landscape, and it was as much a work of art as it was a pornographic display - I was enthralled. This was more naked femininity than I had ever encountered. I knew all about sex, I have a very liberal family and a holistic education, but this was different. This wasn’t the superhero costume, but it was an alternate identity. This wasn’t the magical item - but there was magic here.

I returned periodically after that, always careful, always as a wizard. I kept it a secret from him until I returned from college, and realizing it was the only secret I had kept from him - confessed. He cried out, loud, “Aah!” - then when he had calmed confessed that he knew deep down that by making a secret room, he was inviting me to try and get into it. It had only taken one slip - one moment of laxness. He had not been the warrior he thought he was.

There was magic in that secret place, but there was magic everywhere growing up. The mosaic on that wall was like the collages that covered everything. He had an eye for beauty, and would collect images he found beautiful. He was not a maker so much as a collector. In addition to his 204 journals, he had a set of commonplace books - collections of quotes he liked in everything he voraciously read. He had a sense of magic in everything.

Framed on his wall were the words “Magic is alive and the Goddess is afoot.” He lived by those words.

I loved bringing people home to Papa. Friends would ask later if I wasn’t embarrassed - his over exuberance, his capacity to dive right into the deepest questions. I loved that. I would always learn new things about old friends. He’d ask girlfriends what they loved about me. He’d ask magic buddies about their childhoods. He was always delving, always driving deeper, always the psychologist listening for truth.

The story we’re told of his birth, is that his mother decided she was done at eight months. She convinced a doctor to prematurely induce labor, and when it went wrong, he took her to a hospital, but made her promise not to tell the doctor’s there that it was him who’d done it. 

There on the operation table as she was in forced labor, they gave her truth drugs, and asked her over and over again “who did this to you?” She held out, and Papa was born full of truth drugs, bound to seek the truth in all things.

So many of my memories of him are of him writing or listening. He wrote for around four hours every day in his retirement, sometimes more. He would listen to the radio every morning sharing snippets of what he had learned over a breakfast that he would only eat when I was around, preferring one giant evening meal - a huge salad in a giant’s bowl, or some casserole he’d make so he could eat for the week.

I took for granted the ease with which he held both poles - his endless structuring, and his fascination with new knowledge, new truths.

So enraptured was he with new perspectives that he was impossible to argue with. Like the Taoists he adored, he would simply flow with the argument. “I can see that,” “That makes sense,” “Okay, yes!” - as a young man trying to define my identity I at first thought myself a master argumentatist, until realizing that he never changed anything, and if we had the same conversation again, he would have forgotten the first, ready to be persuaded again of the validity of my strongly held teenage opinions.

Unable to argue with him, I defined myself against him as the one who held strong opinions. I had to be different from him somehow. He defined himself as a realist, so I pitched myself an optimist. He called himself in favor of the whole and so I championed the small and individual. The definitions he had named himself in his youth were the only things I had to push against. If argued with, he would cede that value of optimism, the beauty of the small - but I comforted myself with the fact that he’d forget and revert by the next time I asked.

Papa hadn’t wanted kids by the time he had me. His realism (cynicism) told him that any child would curse him for being pulled into this world, as he had cursed in his darkest moments the unconcented fact of his existence. He would tell me that for all his worries, though, I had been perfect. Just the child that he could raise.

His father had been solid and predictable, his mother wild and edge walking - bordering sanity on a number of occasions. He got both, and became in his own way the predictable trickster, the edge walking philosopher, scrupulous in his note taking.

Papa was scrupulous. He imagined that someone would follow him one day and that everything he saved would help uncover some historical mystery. He kept copies of every letter he ever sent, and certainly every letter he received. He also kept every piece of art I made, such that I began to give him pieces I didn’t know what else to do with, content that it would be saved forever. When I started writing, he started collecting those too, printing out every essay and meticulously dating and writing notes. I have a folder of my work up to his death, complete with his comments and quips in the marginalia.

I didn’t know Papa very well as a child. He was a Papa, better in almost every way, but I could not have told you why. As I made the transition into teenage-hood, I could have named all the things that irritated me, and perhaps made him worse than other Papas.

Now, as I find myself becoming him in all the ways that I am, and understanding him, as I trace the ages he lived - following along in his meticulously kept journals to find similar thoughts to my own, I think I am back to the original supposition, and I have data now to back it up.

My Papa is the best Papa. Sure, from other valances, other Papas might shine, but mine was mine, and he was himself in all the right ways.