Dad's I Have Known (Not in a Biblical Sense)

-
D. Enzmann's dad was strange. He had fuzzy, crazy black and white eyebrows like caterpillars above his glasses. D was a late baby and so Mr. Enzmann always seemed more like a grandpa then a dad. He was odd--walked around in his boxer shorts and was absent-minded in a kind of goofy way.

Wallis' dad had a moustache. He was a divorced dad, only showed up once a month to take Wallis out and Wallis often didn't want to go with him and so brought me. He took us horseback riding and paid for both of us, out of guilt for remarrying the woman he had an affair with while married to Wallis' mother. He didn't talk much.

I never met Diana's dad. She didn't talk about him. She had a weird stepdad who was too friendly to all of us. Nothing happened, at least not to me. Lynn's dad was dead by the time I met; he had a heart attack. They had so much stuff in their house, these women and girls, that it seemed like he had been gone for a long time.

My friends Jess and Jodie have guy-like dads, dads who like sports and are jovial and friendly and always look me in the eye. Jodie's dad is generous and has a heavy Pittsburgh accent and a moustache.

It occurs to me that I've known and do know lots of dad's with moustaches; almost none with beards. My dad has/had one. He was a cowboy in the rodeo for awhile. I like to tell people that because I feel like it makes me more interesting, and also it's one of the few things I know about him. That and that he has a heart murmur and had bypass surgery. Oh, and one blue eye and one green eye. My eyes are hazel. The only photo we had was this one Kodak picture of him sitting in my grandparent's living room. His legs were crossed and so the most in focus part of the picture is the bottom of his shoe. And a couple of news paper clippings. He played basketball in high school. His first name is Lars, but they called him Butch. I didn't call him today. I don't have his phone number and haven't been in contact with him for lots of years and it would've been awkward anyway. He yawns when he's nervous, trying to appear more casual than he feels, and he yawns most of his way through any conversations we have.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Candyman: Race, Class, Sexuality, Gender, and Disability

-
Candyman hits on almost all of the sections we discussed over the last six weeks. Let's start from the most obvious and move from there.   Race: A large part of Candyman confronts the anger and rage of the Black community after years and years and years and years of systemic racism. Candyman is an embodiment of all of the men who have suffered at the hands of whites (white police man, the white community, white systems that have set them up to fail such as the housing projects of Cabrini-Green). The monster of Candyman is a tornado of retribution, a hive of bees swirling angrily and containing the men who have been lynched or tortured by whites, starting with the original death of a Black male painter who dared to fall in love with a white woman whose portrait he painted. This monster, like the original, can be summoned by anyone who dares to say his name out loud in front of a mirror five times. Until the very end, the only people who do this are white--and every one of them is
Read more

Short story by Lauren Groff, "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners"

-
Image
You have to maintain a much more focused attention when reading a good short story versus a novel, because if you skim, you might miss something.  For this reason, I find it a little more difficult on my brain to read short stories.  But if you're going to write in the form, you should read in the form (and others--I have yet to memorize a poem as was suggested in my workshop last week), so I've been trying. Lauren Groff has a story called "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners" in Best American Short Stories, 2014. You might have read her novel The Monsters of Templeton, or her other short story from a previous Best of collection, "Delicate Edible Birds" (also the name of her book of short stories), I have a vague recollection that that story was about World War II or possibly World War I and a dinner party where the people invited are living it up . I seem to also remember a line about the crunching of tiny bird bones. The Monsters of Templeton
Read more

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

-
Image
It’s all about the recaps. It’s a show made of recaps from previous shows. I purposefully skipped the first 40 minutes. These guys are all a bunch of idiots. They are turning on one another. Wes has not shown up, because he will probably come in at the very end for some kind of surprise. They are all trying to humiliate Jake because he is too perfect and too sweet (however, he just referred to himself in the third person; kind of irritating). I don’t remember any of these guys, to be honest. Who are these women in the audience? Oh, okay time for a short break because the show has been on now for three minutes. You know what, I’m going to go ahead and time the difference between the commercials and the actual airtime of the show. >Show returns at: 8:47 p.m. Don’t forget the 20 minutes of clapping in between the scenes. I can’t tell you how much hair mousse has been used in the making of this show. Dave is the crazy dude who has decided to grow a beard for the recap Juan is being atta
Read more