My mom likes to tell me the story of the day she met my dad. It was in a beach town in Italy in the summer after her last year of college. She says she tells me the story so I’ll remember him somehow, even if it’s my mom who needs to remember.
Sometimes I feel bad that I don’t hurt the way she does. But how am I supposed to mourn the loss of someone I never knew?
“He had earrings and this mass of Kurt Cobain hair. He looked like he should be in a band. He was cool. Cooler than me.”
My mom’s thinking long hair and earrings were cool always makes me smile.
When she talks, I can hear the drift in her voice as the memories seep in. She is twenty-two. She is seeing the world with a backpack and a best friend. She is suddenly in that beach town, with that sea breeze and her sunburn, and she’s seeing my dad for the first time, as the salty wind whips his hair around.
Okay, maybe they were kind of cool.
“He thought I was someone he knew,” she says, and smiles. “And when I wasn’t, he said, ‘Well, then, you’re someone I would like to know.’ ”
So cheesy. But I could never make fun of her love story.
She tells me often about the way he surfed. And the way he told jokes. And the way he laughed. And the way he lived.
“He really, really lived,” she always says then sighs. And maybe that makes it better somehow. That he crammed more into thirty years than most people cram into a lifetime.
There were Santa Anas on the day my dad died. Hot, dry winds that made the coast feel like the desert. There’s a history behind them. A lore. People think they’re ominous, ushering in change and madness, unsettling the balance of things, uprooting trees and rustling your hair like ghostly fingers scratching at the nape of your neck. My mom always spoke of them with such reverence that, when I was younger, I thought they had been a critical piece of my dad’s story. As if they’d officially played a role. As if they’d had the literal power to scoop up my dad and turn him into wildfire ash at the charred foothills of Southern California.
My mom pushes her wavy hair behind her shoulders when she tells me memories, twists a curly strand around one finger. Drops it. Twists another. Lost in thought. She has the same wavy hair as me, minus the damage from years of pool water and sunshine.
My mom smells like summer. Like gardenia flowers and lemonade.
She talks back to Siri like they’re having an actual conversation. She even tells her thank you when she’s done taking directions.
She sneaks zucchini layers into her lasagna and I pretend not to notice.
She loves fireplaces and poems and beach days in no particular order.
She thinks she takes good photos but half the time someone’s head is cut off or the frame is crooked or the light is bad.
I got my hair and my love of sunsets and beaches and bad reality TV from her.
My mom says I got my height and my love of the water from my dad.
My parents spent three weeks together in Italy after they met. When my dad went to Greece, they thought it would end. But it didn’t.
“That’s what love is,” my mom says when she talks about it. “Never-ending.”
My mom’s original intent that summer she met my dad was to come home in August and start her dream job of working to save the oceans. Instead she said goodbye to her friends at a train station in London, then spent the next year passing through quaint villages and seashore towns with my dad. And when that year of travel ended, they came back to California and got married a few months later on an autumn evening at city hall right before closing time.
Five years later, she got pregnant with me.
But on a Monday morning four months after I was born, my dad was walking in the middle of a crosswalk with a cup of coffee in his hand and was hit by a distracted driver. He spent four days in the hospital on life support, waiting for his mom and dad and brother and sister to have a chance to say goodbye. And then my mom signed the papers to let him go.
I hate hospitals. Hospitals are where people go to die.
My dad’s family went home after the funeral and then it was just my mom and me.
And my mom became weighed down by the memories of what was and the dreams that would never be.
But last night at dinner, my mom said Coach Sanchez was special. The look on her face told me it was real. It’s taken her so long to get here. It’s not about me. But last night I made it that way.