The Surf Lesson

This whole thing began because I saw a dad teaching his daughter how to surf one day at Blackies soon after we started surfing, and it made me incredibly sad. I remember seeing how tender he was with his little girl, how careful he was with her, how they laughed, how she gave him her rapt attention and tried so hard to do what he was telling her. I paddled closer to them, so I could hear his directions -- maybe get a few tips. I couldn't hear very well over the crashing waves, but I also couldn't take my eyes off them. He was kind and encouraging. Gave her specific feedback on every wave, small adjustments to her pop up or stance, where her feet were on the board. Bend your knees. Always, bend your knees. The little girl sailed in on every wave he pushed her into. And when they were done, they walked back up the beach together, smiling and laughing, the little girl skipping a little. She had done a good job. Dad held the board under one arm, so he could hold her hand with the other. I watched them until they disappeared.

This one's for my dad.

1993. The banquet room of the bar was cold and dimly lit. It sat next to the main bar through a wide doorway, so people could see and move freely between the two spaces. The floor was sticky and the whole place smelled of stale beer and cigarette smoke. There was the low murmur of voices punctuated by clinking glassware coming from the bar room as I placed the largest sheet cake the grocery store bakery could make under the one recessed light that was working in the banquet room. Two uneven tables pushed together made the podium for the cake with white frosting and blue lettering that said, “Happy 50^th Birthday, Gary!”

I decided to hold the surprise party in the bar, because he was always there anyway, and I had just started my first job out of grad school so that’s what I could afford. I thought he was there at the bar all those years, instead of with us, because he had friends there. Because the bar was a more welcoming place for him than our house was with my mom always up in his face complaining resentfully about something. I got the biggest cake possible, because I was worried that there wouldn’t be enough for all the friends he had who would be there to celebrate him on his 50^th. A Saturday night would no doubt be crowded. A two-foot by three-foot cake, I hoped, would be enough.

But I was wrong. Not about the cake. About the friends. No one came. There were people in the bar who could see us, and yet, no one crossed that threshold to say hello, happy birthday, or get a piece of cake. Dad was surprised by our effort in a pained kind of way. We sang. He smiled, but it came across more like a wince. Like the three pieces of eaten cake were a measure of his loneliness at 50. The exact volume of his disconnection, measured in flour and sugar. Only three pieces gone: mine, my mom’s, and my sister’s. No one else showed up.

It became incredibly awkward. After about 15 minutes, he told us, “Thank you” and “You all should probably go home now.” I climbed back in the car with my mom and sister, confused, leaving the cake and Dad behind in the bar. “I’m sure more people will come by later,” I said.

1971. One day when I was a child, I decided to run away. When this memory comes to me, I see through my three-year-old eyes. I am looking up at everyone else except my dad, who is eye-level with me as he reclines fully flat in his Lazy Boy in the living room. My mom is there fussing with my sister in her bassinet. I am angry. I am the kind of focused that arises from burning anger. Absolutely determined. Seething with rage.

I do not remember why I am so mad, but I have definitely had it with these people.

In my bedroom, my chest is at the height of the bed as I pack my tiny purple suitcase with the blue and hot pink flowers on it. I stand on tiptoe to reach the drawers that hold my socks and underwear in them, which are the only things I pack in the suitcase, because I’m going to be gone a long time. No room for more clothes. Only the essentials.

I reach up to grab my winter coat from its hanger in the closet. It’s summer, but already, I am the child that plans ahead for the long journey.

Suitcase packed, I zip it up defiantly. Put on my winter coat and storm into the living room to announce…

“I’m leaving.”

Dad, reclining in his chair to my left, looks me straight in the eyes and raises his eyebrows. Mom, by then standing by the front door across the room, her hand on the knob about to go out, speaks with a grin and heavy sarcasm.

“Wanna ride? I’m headed to the grocery store. I could give you a head start.”

I crumble into an injured heap on the carpet. The hood of my coat flops over and surrounds me in darkness. I sob with my whole body.

Mom leaves. Dad sits there.

He sat there the whole time. Not saying a word.

The tears ran out and I sat up, face red and wet, sweaty under my coat. I went back to my room to unpack, dragging my suitcase behind me.

---

My sister and I did not see my father too much when we were growing up. He did not attend a single volleyball or basketball game during the six years I played both sports in middle school and high school. He spent a lot of time in that bar. In summer, he was gone to the golf course every spare minute he could. He even played golf while we were on vacation visiting my grandparents in Arizona, often missing dinner. There would be an awkward waiting, and then one of my grandparents would say to my mom, “Where’s Gary? Do you think he’s coming home tonight?” Mom would shrug, sigh, and we would sit down to eat without him.

I had him briefly during the winters, as we lived in the Midwest and golf courses close when it freezes. We would watch old Hollywood movies: Cary Grant and Leslie Caron in Father Goose, Robert Mitchum and John Wayne in El Dorado, William Holden and Alec Guinness in Bridge on the River Kwai. My best memory of him is laughing until he cried to the “Who’s on First” routine from The Naughty Nineties, an Abbott and Costello film. I can see his round face smiling, red and wet from laughing so hard he cried. I still laugh at that routine.

But then one day, the snow would melt enough, the temperature would warm enough, and he would be gone again. No word. Just gone. Whatever connection I thought we made dissolved and disappeared with the spring rains.

---

1981. One of the first weeks I was in 8^th grade, my dad took me and my best friend, Heather, to a baseball game. One day out of the clear blue, my mom said to me, “Your father wants to take you to a baseball game on Monday night. You can invite Heather.” I almost couldn’t take in the news.

“Dad wants to take me to a baseball game? Why?” Mom shrugged.

“Wait. Monday? Monday is a school night.” Mom said it was ok. This was highly unusual. Out late on a school night? Bizarre that my mom would have agreed to this.

“Wait. Monday night? Cubs don’t play at night.” We were Cubs fans and the Cubbies didn’t get lights at Wrigley until 1988.

Mom said, “It’s a Sox game. The Tigers are in town.”  My dad grew up in Michigan. The Tigers were his team.

I was so confused. “Dad wants to take me to a Sox game on a school night.” I shook my head, mystified, highly suspicious, and called Heather.

On the night of the game, Dad picked Heather and me up early from school and we drove to the city. Going to the South Side of Chicago on a weeknight from where we lived was probably a 90-minute drive if traffic was moving, so this little trip, again, was baffling to me. Dad announced that we would go to dinner first.

Café Angelo’s was a masterpiece of an Italian restaurant, straight out of The Godfather. Heavy brocade curtains, velvet wallpaper, high ceilings, dark wood, the deep reds and golds saturated the very air around us. White tablecloths. Italian-looking bus boys, dark-haired and beautiful to Heather and I. We flirted as awkwardly as only 13-year old girls can as they kept our water glasses filled, flirting back.

The food was amazing. Dad talked a little, but not much. After we ordered dessert, he excused himself from the table, saying he had something he had to do. He told us we should eat dessert when it came and he would be back.

Dessert came. We ate. No dad.

I went looking for him. I stepped out into the foyer by the maître d’s stand. No one was there, so I peeked into the bar that was on the other side of the restaurant. I saw my father speaking intensely, faces red and up close, with another man who was the spitting image of Vito Corleone himself, straight out of central casting. I thought, “Is my dad mobbed up? Is he connected?”

The maître d’ tapped me on the shoulder at that moment. I about hit the ceiling, he surprised me so badly. “May I help you, young lady?”

“Um. My dad…” and I pointed into the bar as I shrunk into the folds of the brocade curtains behind me.

“I will let him know you are looking for him.”

“Thank you.”

As I went back to the table, I finally understood why I was there. The whole story came immediately into my mind. My dad owed money to the mob and he was here to discuss the debt, because they were going to break his legs. I was brought along as protection. They weren’t going to kill a guy with his daughter along.

It was easier for me to believe that my dad was involved with the mob than it was to believe that he wanted to take me to a baseball game.

The Tigers won that night. I kept score like he taught me to.

2024. My dad moved into a nursing home. My mom told him he had to, and he acquiesced. Things were getting violent between them. Police had been called several times. Dementia was worsening. My mom took my dad’s phone away from him when he moved out. I think she did it so he wouldn’t call her. Unfortunately, that meant he couldn’t call me either. But before he moved out, he did call me. He said goodbye to me at that point. He said, “You were a nice person to grow up with in that house.” I wanted to know more about what he meant, but he dropped the phone. By the time we got back on, he didn’t remember saying that.

My dad lived in the nursing home for about a year and half. I spoke to him rarely. Only when my mom allowed it.

2026. My dad died last year. I flew from California to Michigan to attend the funeral, like an actor in a Hollywood movie returning to their grim Midwestern homeland for some kind of reckoning. It was early January, dead of winter. Temperature five degrees, wind blowing hard across the frozen ground. Decent snow falling and blowing all over the roads. The small kind of spikey flakes that come with this kind of cold. Ice. Lots of ice. A two-hour drive to the cemetery from my sister’s house and no one talked about him, about where we were going or what would happen when we got there.

He was buried at the Great Lakes military cemetery in Holly, Michigan, because he had been a Navy man. An escort met us at the gate and led us to the outdoor pavilion for the service, where the casket was wrapped with an American flag precisely tucked in around the edges. We got out of the car into the wind and subzero temperatures, walked up to the metal benches through the slush. There was a startling nine-gun salute. Three guns shot three times. Two men ceremonially removed the flag and, folding it neatly into a triangle, handed it to my mom. Two other men kneeled before her and told her that the country thanked her husband for his service.

No one said anything about her service.

Then, we were given a few minutes with the casket. No chaplain was present. No words were said. My mom walked up to the wooden box, tapped it three times with her right hand, turned, and immediately walked back to the car. I saw my sister’s face, red, wet, and teary like mine must have been. We held each other’s eyes for just a moment, then turned to follow her.

A two-hour drive to the cemetery from my sister’s house and no one said a word about him. There were no stories, no fond memories. Two hours back in silence. Only myself, my mom, my sister, and her husband and son were there. No one else showed up.

33 years later and still, no one else showed up.