My father was a carpenter who worked out of our garage, and on-site for various contractors around Seattle. My mother, Anne-Marie March, whose name you may know, was a nurse at Harborview. Depending on the year, my father was more or less often in his workshop, but she was always at the hospital, where she’d worked since graduating nursing school. Despite so many other options, she stayed in the ER where she began, and where she felt most at home.
What else of those very early years? After school there was the distant sound of my father working the band saw. The workshop smell of fresh-cut wood and orange oil. There he is standing in the kitchen dressing a cut index finger, bleeding calmly into the white sink, asking us about our homework, our friends, our teachers, our troubles. Our father surprising us with wooden knights and faeries, dragons and princesses beneath our pillows.
And my mother coming backwards through the front door with a low stack of pizza boxes. The exhilaration and relief of our reunited family in the evenings after school.
Maybe I overstate all this happiness of youth. Claire would probably say so. But I’m not so sure.
Whatever the case, ours was never a sentimental family. However happy we were, our parents always took a brutal attitude toward time.
“What’s gone is gone. What’s done is done. What’s dead is dead,” my father said when we came home crying after some injury, slight or failure.
“And who,” my mother would add.
The two of them faced us in those moments like soldiers returned from a war neither of us could fathom.
“For better or for worse,” he said dealing pizza slices onto our plates.
“Mostly for the better,” my mother said.
I am nine years old. I have a black eye. My mother is walking me home through the neighborhood.
“Don’t be blue, Joey Boy. It is difficult, but you are strong. It is difficult, but you are strong and next time you’ll fight harder.”
There is golden sawdust caught in the hair of my father’s forearms. Clear safety goggles perched on his head.
“There is nothing you can’t do, Joe. Nothing in the world,” he says, pouring oil onto a rag.
“Fly? Be invisible? Become a lion?”
“Even those, kiddo. Even those.”
Then I’m wearing the goggles, too big for my face, his eyes through the scratched plastic lenses, he’s lifting me up and I’m flying, arms outspread, and we’re no longer in the workshop, but on the back lawn gliding to the roar of jets, the smell of his coffee breath.
I’m trying here to find some kind of order.
I want to do now what my father did in his later life. I want to see the world, our history, with peaceful clarity, find in it some pristine logic. Or no, maybe what he really did was give up on all that entirely. Maybe what he did best of all was surrender.