(The following selections are a brief introduction to my forthcoming novel, 'Rafael')
My father: I
have never known a man like him.
He is more than he appears to be, but less than he expects of
himself. I don’t know if he was
born too late, or if he just came into his own too early for everybody
else. He wants to be honest, from
the inside out, but from the outside in as well. And he is.
There
are those, however, who never wanted to allow that in him. They were just not comfortable with
it. Not because they didn’t
respect him. They did. But because they were just not willing
to comply. It was too high a
standard. It was too much work,
they said. It was just too hard. The unfortunate part about it is that
he did not require their compliance.
He required it only of himself.
But honesty is not linear, it is a revolving glass door; the kind you’ll
see on the entrance to a fancy hotel in the City. Most people find it to be clumsy, though; more unwieldy than
they are willing to live with, more difficult even than deceit. They continue through life with the
door of truth open only inadvertently at times, or closed up deliberately, but
never transparent, as it were. It
is not circular for them. Someone
else’s honesty, they feel, does not necessitate their own. And no, it does not for them, but it does in the broader interest of
life.
Many continue to hide behind opaque disguises, even though it doesn’t
need to be that way. My father was
never one of them.
* * *
Dad put up a teepee and camped on the property with very
little in the way of creature comforts.
He constructed it entirely from the bounty of the land, the natural
resources, by his own imagination and with a practical, no-frills utilitarian
sixth sense. He focused on being
alone. With the absence of his
wife, and his youngest son, he wanted to feel everything he needed to
feel. He wanted to remember every
moment they each shared throughout their many years together. He wanted to miss them both, he wanted
to grieve their absence, and he wanted to become friends with the void. During that first year on the property
he explored every acre of his new world like a young boy would explore the
insect world beneath an old decaying log.
He got to know every nook and cranny, every bend in Pilot Creek and the
Rubicon, every pool, falls, rock, wooded glen, canyon, and anomalous
outcropping. He also got to know
himself, better than most would have, even over the course of a full
lifetime. My dad became sole guardian
of both his property and his own sanity.
Eventually his sanity began to mirror the 350 acres, changing quite
noticeably with every change of season.
* * *
I must
admit, after so many months apart early on, seeing my dad in an old hotel bar
in an ageing gold rush town was a very difficult challenge, an unexpected first
impression for me to get past.
With his grey scraggly beard, and weather-worn demeanor, he looked as if
he’d wandered out of the makeup trailer of a spaghetti-western movie set in the
hills of rural Italy, or like he’d been lost in history, waiting for the world to
come back to catch him up on things.
I got a cramp in the pit of my stomach, my heart raced with anxiety and
bewilderment, and my eyes moistened like a mirror in a settling fog. But when he opened his mouth he
immediately became my dad again, the man I know, the dad I’ve always
known. He said, almost under his
breath, “Had I known you were coming, son, I would have shaved, and worn
something more appropriate to the occasion.” We both laughed, and we were back on familiar ground.
It was a long time ago, but I remember that we met up at the Georgetown
Hotel on Main Street. We spent a
couple of hours catching each other up on the previous year, then jumped into
his 4-wheel drive light beige 1972 Ford F-250 pick-up truck for the twelve mile
drive out to his property. He’d
named the truck Henry. Still has
that old dinosaur today. Says he
wouldn’t trade Henry for a Hummer.
I was anxious to see how my dad was living, where he was living, and
what it was about that particular place that had so captivated him. What was it that had the kind of hold
on him that nothing, or no one, had ever had, other than my mother? The picture of our meeting is still
vivid in my mind, like an old Polaroid photo you might have carried around in
the pocket of your coat for all these years. A little faded, crinkled, ragged, but vivid, nevertheless,
because of its importance to you.
