The Toyota

When my dad was my age he worked two jobs, both much harder than mine. One in a factory that since has closed and one with his brothers as a mason laying block. I was young then when he was my age now, four or five, too young to know how hard he worked for what little we had. All I knew was the difference in the clean dad who went to work, if I happened to be up that early to catch a glimpse of him, and the dirty one who came home in a robe of mortar dust, sunburned and tired. 

Sometimes he would come straight to my baseball game or practice after work and watch me, dirty and always from a distance. Ashamedly, I remember thinking that I hope no one sees him or puts it together that he is my dad. I was ashamed of his dirty clothes and his ragged blue-collar appearance and his hardened face. He was a living country music song and country music embarrassed me. He always said he works until the sun sets, but so often he worked longer.

I envied the kids with white-collar wannabe dads with them government jobs who wore shirts and ties and drove nice cars. I usually grabbed my pop and chips from the cooler and headed straight for his old beat-up Toyota pickup and grunted a "hey" or "hi" to him as we pulled away, sloping in my seat through the parking lot, that old rattling tailpipe giving me away. He had painted the truck himself. White. He had also converted it from a manual to an automatic transmission in our small garage. A garage he built himself. 

I remember finding a magazine advertisement in the glove-box of that pickup under some spare bulbs, a pair of pliers, and the registration papers. It was of a 1975 Toyota, the year of his truck. It was folded up in a square. The truck was brown with a black and white pinstripe up the side. And there was a father and son riding dirt bikes in a setting sun in the background, returning to the truck. I haven't seen that ad in thirty years but it is still burned in my head. My dad had torn it out of an old magazine and put it in his glove compartment. He must have liked it for some reason. Maybe he planned to paint the truck brown and hoped he could make new what was old and rusted. I never asked him about it. I refolded it and put it away because it seemed like some secret to me.Something that would embarrass him.

I never saw him wear a muscle shirt or loose wrinkled jeans as I wear for comfort. All his thin button-down shirts were plaid or colorful and his jeans were tight and ironed. They were cheap, from Sears or K-Mart, but he wore them as though they were expensive designer clothes. He was like a ghost coming home from his job as a mason. He smelled like sweat when he came home from the factory, though underneath it, you could always smell the cheap aftershave that we got him from K-Mart for Christmas because we couldn't afford cologne and he wouldn't have it anyway. He never wanted gifts and he would barely accept anything other than the aftershave or maybe some nuts. Maybe a cheap nutcracker. I used to think it was because he didn't care for the things we got him; but now that I'm not so young and stupid, I realize it was because whatever he got was something that we didn't.

I grew up and went to college and got me one or two of them government jobs. I slicked my hair back nice with good pomade and wore expensive cologne. I had kids and went to their ballgames in a shirt and tie and in fancy cars that I got rid of when I got tired of them. Then I lost it all. And them government jobs and that white-collar wannabe world pilloried me and cast me aside like I was a sodomite. It doesn't matter why. But it happened to me for a reason that I now understand. 

I got a job doing landscaping because I love the work and because they hire anyone. Most of us are illegals or ex-cons or current cons too proud not to work somewhere. We are the people that society has tried to throw away or reject for one reason or another. It isn't a good paying job as it was back in my dad's days. Money doesn't go as far now as it did then, but you still get just as dirty and just as tired. The same sun that burned my dad's leather-red skin now burns me in his place, and since the ozone is a little thinner, I guess it burns me a little more. I'm sunburned and covered in mulch and dirt at day's end the way he was once covered in mortar. 

At some point in life every son becomes his father. We either go proudly into those shoes or we go begrudgingly, but ultimately we go one way or another. We are our own men, but we are our father, too. We keep the good and dispense of the bad, hopefully, and pass it along. I don't plan to return to my government job if ever I am allowed back in that fake world. I will go to law school, but I will work this job as I do. Toiling in the dirt with the illegals and the ex-cons. I am proud of my dirty nails, my sunburned skin, my worn boots, my hard calloused hands, and my beat-up car. I have never earned a paycheck more and my sort of wealth isn't measured in money, or clothes, or what my house is worth, or whether I wear expensive cologne or cheap aftershave. I wear my dad's modesty and inherit his work ethic with pride. 

His birthday was two days ago. He never made a big deal about his birthday and I don't think we once baked him a cake or bought him a card growing up. When he was older we did, but never as kids. Hell, even when he was old he always would cringe and say, goddamnit you shouldn't have, or that we should have spent the money on our kids. Even when it was just another bottle of aftershave.

I doubt that a story or an essay would really matter to him, either, but I write about him after another long day. Maybe I have written it all before in a different way. Maybe not. I didn't have time to write him anything on his birthday on July 28 because I didn't make time. There was something or someone to work on that day. I suppose I learned that from him, too.

Everyday as I lace my work boots I consider it a penance I must pay for being ashamed of him. I know now that most of those other dads with them government jobs couldn't even change their own oil, let alone drop a transmission out of a pickup and replace it, build a garage, and tear down an old farmhouse and rebuild it from the frame as he did when I was in high school. How ashamed I am now that I ever wanted another dad with Ray-bans and wingtips and a Z28 with t-tops. I would give anything to be picked up in that old beat-up Toyota with the muffler that rattled on an old coat hanger. Just one more time home. 

I didn't have much left of my dad after he passed, but I have gained plenty more as I have aged without him. In absence I understand more about him and I am closer to him than ever. I look at myself in the mirror and see the same hardened sunburned face and messy hair. And occasionally, I can still hear his boots coming up the sidewalk or smell a hint of his English Leather in the wind that relieves me from the burden of the sun. Even those who have gone are still here if you choose to keep them.

My dad was an old Toyota with torn bucket seats and rust on the quarter-panels. God, what I would give to find that truck in some scrapyard and restore it and drive it around. Maybe to embarrass my kids or to give them a lesson in modesty. I wonder if the advertisement he coveted is still in the glove-box. 

Happy birthday, dad. See you when the sun sets on me.