Maps

<sub>I am sorry, Kid. I say Kid, because I can’t say your name anymore. It’s what I called you anyway, wasn’t it? Mostly. It’s what you came to when you were called.

I am sorry for being on my cellphone more than I was not. When you wanted to play Army men and I wanted to text someone I don’t even know anymore. Some woman who broke my heart. Or whose heart I broke. It went both ways, I guess, like games of tic-tac-toe. But they never broke my heart and I never really broke theirs. It was all adult histrionics. But all of them required attention and time that I stole from you.

Those tennis matches of broken hearts went back and forth for a while after your mother and I divorced. Wimbledon, every year or two. You were left watching the ball. Waiting for it to stop bouncing. When I’d have time. You were 3 when we divorced. When I went to Paducah, Kentucky for some broken fat girl with a pretty face who had a severe emotional disorder. We could have gone somewhere that weekend together. We could have gone to King’s Island, or the zoo. We could have played baseball, or finished the sails of your treehouse pirate ship.

And when I had you, in an apartment I don’t have anymore, whose address I don’t even remember, I’d let you watch TV as I texted someone else. Or searched for another on my phone to replace the last, or the next. I think of all the things you said or did while I was too busy to see or to listen. I think I can see you looking at me sometimes, just as you did then, looking back at the TV that always paid attention to you. You loved balloons, but I never bought you any. Red balloons, you said.

And years passed much the same way. When you were 8, we didn’t go to the park as often as we could have. We never went on that camping trip I told you we would go on. We never saw those gypsy wagons at that castle. The yellow one. Where I promised you we would stay. Someday. We didn’t throw baseball because I was with that woman who had the cats who texted me all the time and who I replied to too often. I told you to hang on, or go play. She wasn’t the mother-type, the cat woman, unless you were a cat. So, in essence, I simply wasted time with her because despite my poor parenting, I wouldn’t have introduced you to anyone who couldn’t have been a good mother to you. There were many dead ends.

I told you tomorrow we would do everything. You never met her. You never met any of them besides the two I loved and lived with. The two that don’t come see you anymore. Who were gone in an instant and never said goodbye, or wrote a letter to you saying something nice. Even in the end. The one you loved hurts most, doesn’t she? You never admitted it, but I could tell. I knew how much you liked her and seeing her. That time at Max and Erma's. At the movies. The way you looked at her. But it fades, Kid. It washes away in time, even without resolution.

I missed your only hit when you played little league baseball because I was texting someone, or checking an email from a Russian that gave me thoughts of moving to Moscow. How would we see each other then, I wondered. Summers? Or by letter? Or maybe I was on Facebook. Searching for friends, replying to messages from girls in Australia or Brazil. Maybe Costa Rica, or Buffalo. Girls that were women, but more like girls, most of whom I’d never meet and who I knew you would likely never meet, either.

I wonder what you thought of them. The ones you never met. If they had faces in your mind. Or if they were some kind of monsters. They were important enough to me then to miss your hit. To miss many things. Baths, movies, time at the pool. To never teach you to ride a bike. You swung the bat like I always told you to do and cracked the ball back up the middle. You looked at me as you stood on first base and smiled and I lied later and said I saw it when I bought you an ice cream cone. But I didn’t lie when I said I was proud of you. I wonder if you knew. If you saw me before I looked up. You quit baseball the next year. Lack of interest, you said in your own way. I bought you a new glove that we never oiled. It is somewhere in some closet, stiff and dusty.

I don’t know how 12 got here. Where it came from. But it came in the night through an open window, an unlocked door, or while we sat on the couch and watched movies every other weekend and on Wednesdays. While I texted or looked at Facebook to see who liked my posts. My stories. My status. My pictures. My blog. To see if she messaged me. She. Another she in a long and terrible breadline of them. What a monstrous word that has become to me now. She. The one you loved and who loved you, but who was dead inside and killed everything alive in herself and left us for the hopes of better financial security. Or the one who would come next. The beautiful young one with the heart of gold who wasn’t a sure bet and who, like a delicate butterfly, was ill-fated and could disappear in the blink of an eye.

I thought a mom in our time would help us. To have a family here for our weekends and summertime. I wanted that for you and a wife for me, but I should have put it down at some point and been a better dad. I should never have picked it up at all. They say technology makes life better. It saves lives and educates and all of this and that. Well, it isn’t true. It makes us all dopes. It has replaced the meaning of being human and in a matter of time the human experience will end in favor of some cyborg/robot existence, like one of those movies we once watched on that red couch. Emotions will be vacated in favor of logic, reason and convenience, and matchmaking will be done for you. Based upon income, and money, and personal interests, by a sophisticated government algorithm. Love will only exist through an emoji that will half be a joke to the old timers who remember when people really did love, but only a fake emotional and patterned response to the young folk. They will not know what it is to have your heart broken because they will never give it away.

This summer I wanted to teach you how to play tennis. We watched people in the park play and I said I’d teach you when I bought you a racket and some new tennis-balls. You weren’t really interested, or maybe you were justly skeptical that I wouldn’t follow through. Maybe you knew I wasn’t looking up rackets and tennis-balls on my phone and I was at Wimbledon again, beating the ball with another woman. But you stopped waiting for them to stop bouncing.

Sure, dad, you said. It caught my attention enough that I put my phone away and we climbed the mountain and talked about what we would do someday, if we ever got the time and money. I asked you how you’d like to go to New York City in a sidecar and we looked at motorcycles. You lit up. You must have forgotten the gypsy wagon and the camping promises. Or like a good car salesman, I just managed to sell you another brand new one. One that was even grander and shinier. But a few days later, the phone rang.

Everyone is on their cellphone. It isn’t just me. That isn’t an excuse. It’s simply an observation. We are a whole generation of idiots on phones ignoring our kids, all by some degree of difference. Some more or less. I sit in McDonald’s at the hospital and watch women text or play games as their kids eat happy meals and run amuck. 9 of them. 90 percent. I watch men do the same. 8 of them. 80 percent. And their kids are left to look up at faces buried in interests other than what should interest them the most. They don’t tell them to wash their hands, or to eat their food. They don’t say much of anything at all other than don’t bother me, or go play. You got 10 minutes that turns into thirty. My heart breaks because I still have a heart and no matter how much it is already broken, it seems to find new pieces to shatter.

I want to scoop those kids up and put them in my car and take them to the ocean and rent a black pirate ship, or steal one, or build one. And I want to sail with them away from here and have them help me with the sails and the ship as my crew. I don’t know where we would go, but there wouldn’t be a phone. There would only be the adventure of doing something together with an adult who cares to do it. Who looks them in the eye and appreciates them. Maybe at night we would play checkers or chess below deck. Or tell ghost stories like we told ghost stories when we built your pirate ship behind your house. That was before your mom and I divorced and before I had a cellphone. We bought the canvas, but we never finished the sails. I wonder if that ship is still there, in that tree. And I wonder if you played in it after I was gone.

Someone who may read this will say it isn’t the phone’s fault, and they are right. It isn’t. But they are in denial of the obvious truth that they, too, spend more time on their phone than they should. That they neglect their kids. Maybe not like I did you, but they do. The business that isn’t really business. Or they stay up late playing a game or texting and are too tired the next morning to play with their kid or to make blueberry pancakes. And these kids watch and learn. And when they get that age, with their thumbs curled over a screen, they will not know the difference. They will not understand that human interaction was once face-to-face rather than screen-to-screen, nor will they understand the desensitization that resulted. The phonies we have become in our disposable phony commercial world.

You get time sometime, they say. A diagnosis of Stage 3 Lymphoma doesn’t mean it is over, or that there isn’t time. Time to go camping, or to play tennis. Time to watch another movie without a phone in my lap that you see, but you don’t say anything about. Time to say goodbye to everyone you never had the chance or opportunity to say goodbye to. But cancer is cancer and it doesn’t wait for proper farewells. It doesn’t give us anything, it only takes away when it wants to take. And sometimes it doesn’t give you time at all. It gives you a week in a coma. Your mom was in the lobby with her husband when I walked out. No one said anything at all. There was nothing left to say.

They sold the house and I bought it. She had let it go and it wasn’t what it once was. It wasn’t as I remember it. Trees were overgrown and it was neglected. Things were broken and not fixed. I sat in your room and found little things in the cracks of the wood floor that belonged to you. Papers in a dresser. Old drawings. Little socks and shirts you outgrew. I don’t know what I’ll do with the house, but I knew if someone else bought it they’d tear down the pirate ship we built and, if they did, I would lose all I had left of you besides for a few hats, some toys, and pictures. It is midsummer and we ought to be camping. We ought to be at Niagara Falls, or New York City. Places I took women I don’t know anymore, rather than you. I don’t want to know them. I want to know you. I want to bring you back home.

I wrote this out on a few pieces of paper at the pub tonight. I don’t know what I’ll do with it or where I’ll go. Maybe I’ll leave it here because I have no one to give it to and the bartender will likely just toss it in the trash. Maybe I’ll put it in my pocket. Maybe tomorrow I’ll cash out and buy that motorcycle and sidecar and I will imagine you in it. We can go to New York City and FAO Schwartz. Up the Empire State Building. The Statue of Liberty. Maybe God will forgive me and maybe you are already there waiting for me. Maybe you are holding a dozen red balloons and if I do not grab your feet, you will float away. I like to think that you are somewhere, and that in this somewhere you will give me another chance to be your dad. I just have to find you.

I threw my phone as far as I could throw it today. It cracked against a building downtown. An hour or two later, someone knocked on my door and said he found it and managed to dig my address out of Maps. You wouldn’t want to lose this, he said happily to me as though he was my new hero. There were nine messages on it, but I didn’t open them. I do not care anymore.

Maps, I thought. I thanked him and then after he left I tossed it in the trash. And then I drew a map and I set a course for you, Kid. Straight for you. It’s about midnight and it’s still hot outside. After I leave the pub, I’m going to stop and get a bottle of rum and a dozen red balloons and then go to our house and sit in the pirate ship and drink until I can remember everything, and then nothing at all. Then I will unfurl the canvas sails I finished for us, and I will set sail to you. I wonder how old you will be when I get there. I wonder if you will be happy to see me.</sub>