Fathers :: Personal Narrative Writing

Fathers The Capability From Grampa to Dad the tradition as joker was carried on. Dads carried things, brothers on shoulders, bags of groceries and twelve roses for mom. Hardly anybody knew, but Dad did, that garbage collected even between the prettiest gold hills in Northern California. So when he came home with lamps and couches that were neat in the elderly sort of way, we were supposed to sit around the presents and guess at their prices, bidding upward seventy-five dollars. And when Dad came down with a receipt for just five dollars our hands came down with it, clapping against the surprise shouting out our open smiles. Graveyard shifts at the canneries pulled the shades on our house, making us whisper quiet and skirt tip toes around the edges of shadows. But come those hauling jobs, Dad packed us up in the truck's cab and drove us to the dump, past the stories and stories of crushed cans, and past the stacked white walls of abandoned refrigerators that made one think of a bum's version of "what's behi nd that door?" We'd watch through the back window, always knowing that Dad weighed in solid enough to move a truck, because we felt his every hop on and off that back bed. Dad in short sleeves, Dad with long sleeves, peeled back by the show of darkened muscles and everything darkened under his sweat and concentration, until all was shoveled clear off the platform and his eyes opened again, bright and blue, so suddenly we were wondering how the sky above so clean and blue could hover over a stink so wretched. His Strength Unlike Paul Bunyan and Babe, his blue ox, Dad sleeps just down the hall, in the other bedroom. On weekends he and his friends trot down the road with their saws and axes, while the ladies stay inside, stirring lemonade. Their boots land so heavy, a solid slab of road can't last and it gives to gravel. As Dad pushes through the thicket branches break back from his wooden shoulders. Then he stops. This afternoon trees fall and fall under him and his crew. The walls of the house shake around the ladies and children. The cupboards rattle and long, dainty needles quiver in their sewing boxes. Dad can clear out a grove and take their shadows. That's how we see him standing, until the day he tumbles down the side of a mountain.