Rocks

When I was a kid my dad gave me rocks. He was never home much but every time he came home he had a new rock for me. The rocks were not that big. The biggest one was about half the size of a baseball. Some were only the size of a pebble. Some were beautiful and colorful and looked like gold, or glass, or diamonds. Others were dull and ordinary-looking. It wasn’t the rocks that made me happy; it was the story he would tell me about the rock. Where it came from or who once held it. And now as I look back on all of these rocks, I remember every story he ever told. I didn’t lose a single one over the years. I treasured them like some kids treasure old baseball cards, their grandfather’s gold watch, or some priceless family heirloom. I have them all in a rock garden at the base of a balsam hill blue spruce in my backyard because my dad always came home for Christmas with a new rock and so Christmas trees make me think of him.

It is far from Christmas being the Fourth of July. Fireworks crack in the dusky distance and sparklers sizzle in the neighbor’s yard in the happy and sticky hands of excited kids. They drop them when the fire burns down too close or they burn their fingers. I sit outside and play with the rocks like I am a kid, though I am forty-two years old. No one is around or looking, but I wouldn’t really care if they were. I got a bucket of warm soapy water and washed off the dirt and dust from another year without my dad. It’s been twenty-six years since I got a rock and I will never get one again. It’s time for me to let go of them because there comes a time in life when you must give rather than take. I want you to have them, though I don’t suppose you can since you’re not even here. I don’t know how, or if I ever will be able to actually give them to you, or if you would even want them. I don’t know that I can write something and have it notarized, or pay someone to write me out a will. A will just for a box of rocks seems kind of silly. But I want you to have them if you care to have them someday. And I want you to know the story of each of them so you don’t think they are just a bunch of rocks for lack of anything better. I want you to be a person that sees rocks rather than just looking over them. I want you to hear birds sing and feel the wind. I want you to truly live.

I can still smell my dad’s breath and feel the boniness of his knee as I sit on his lap. I can feel his calloused hand on my back and the scratch of his whiskers on my cheeks as he hugs me. Each story he told seemed to always outdo the last. Elvis held this rock when he died on a gold toilet in 1977, the year I was born. Gandhi held this one when he made peace. Babe Ruth carried this one in his pocket for good luck when he called his shot in Chicago. Abe Lincoln also carried this one for good luck, but left it at home the night he went to Ford’s Theatre. This one is from the moon, brought back by Russian astronauts. This one is from aliens who are in Area 51. This black one that looks like volcanic glass, he said, is from Pompeii. This one belonged to Rasputin. This one Caesar carried and dropped when he was assassinated by opposing senators led by Brutus. Rolled right of his dead hand and into the sands of time and now it rolls to you. This one, dad said, my personal favorite, belonged to the pirate Black Beard and is all the land he kept in his hand as he sailed and pirated the seas. Why that rock, dad? I don’t know son, he replied. But it was the rock he carried. I like to think it reminded him of someone, he added. Some beautiful woman.

I am leaving out a lot of stories. Years of them. The rock George Washington chucked across the Potomac. Winston Churchill’s paperweight. The rock in the boxing glove that once knocked out the great Joe Louis. The rock that won World War II. The one that saved a destroyer in The Battle of Midway when a soldier incredibly tossed it at a Kamikaze pilot and struck the cockpit glass, diverting the plane from it’s fateful path down towards the ship. The amber-colored glass rock that holds Cleopatra’s soul. I remember asking him who Cleopatra was and he went on for hours about Egypt and the Roman Empire, and though I learned later that most of what he said was not exactly true, according to historians, my dad spun a great yarn. He had a way with the spoken word, though he could hardly write to save his life.

He must have had something for Cleopatra because there was another rock she gave to Marc Antony, which he gave to someone, who gave it to someone, until finally my dad gave it to me. There was King Henry the VIII’s fertility rock. There was the blood rock he got from Roanoke, which contained all the condensed blood from the pilgrim settlers who vanished. A rock from the Great Wall of China, chiseled away by some obscure American hero. A brilliant white stone from the Athenian Acropolis. And my favorite of all, the heavy blue-gray earth-like stone that David hurled at Goliath, killing him in the epic battle. Dad pointed to a discolored spot on the stone and said, there is the blood of Goliath. How my dad got these rocks, I will never know. But after giving them to me he always finished by saying that if anyone tells me these rocks were less than what he said they were, or that they are anything other, they are unscrupulous filthy liars.

Where he was when he wasn’t home, I didn’t know then. It was all a fantastic mystery. My mom never said and I am not sure even she knew. She just smiled and sighed and said he is a rolling stone. I never knew what that meant for many years, but I figured it out later. My dad was not the type to stay in one place for too long. He didn’t like the feeling of being tied down or shackled by life. I found out that he was in prison for a while, worked a food truck in Chicago, sold hot dogs at Dodger Stadium, did tattoos up in San Francisco, was a sailor for some years on a commercial fishing boat in the Atlantic, chopped timber in Alaska for a year or three, worked a railroad in Greenland for a while, and was an English teacher in a half-dozen countries, mostly in Asia.

It isn’t that he doesn’t want to be here, I remember mom saying more than once, it’s just that he isn’t meant to be here. She never indicted my dad of being who he was, a scamp, a vagabond, an irresponsible rogue, and a terrible father. The only time she ever contradicted him was when he gave me butter for a burn after I burnt my finger on a candle. But though I am not sure if it was out of love for me or him, she always exonerated him from any responsibility and supported me in treasuring my rocks. Sometimes she would quiz me as to the origin of this one or that one and she would smile when I told her the story my dad told me, as best I could recall it. She would always tell me to remember that my father loves me very much. My father, she called him. Such a foreign word. I never heard her call him my dad. Some people just don’t like the limelight, she said in the worn-out way she often spoke doing dishes or laundry.

When I was 16 he didn’t come home for Christmas. I waited on the couch by the front window and looked out at the snow falling and the blue flashing Christmas lights across the street at the Baker’s. I tried not to make it obvious that I was looking so my mom and my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, who were all over for the holidays, wouldn’t see me looking through that cold frosty window and pity me. But I felt desperate and sad. Mom didn’t say much of anything. She had prepared me for it for years. She said over and over there would be a time when he wouldn’t come home anymore and 1993 was that time. I stayed by that window until New Year’s Eve then I went to bed and my dad died in my heart. I had a funeral in my dreams. I put those rocks in a box in the top of a closet. I didn’t want to see them anymore. I moved several times and could hear them clamoring in the box, anxious to tell their stories. But it wasn’t until I was thirty-something that I dug them out again. It was Father’s Day, appropriately.

When my kids asked me about my dad, I had always just told them he was not around. I got the rocks out to see if I could remember the stories. I did. Like flash-cards. My kids grew up and I was in and out. Their mom and I divorced and I moved on and was not much different than my dad, sadly, only I was around for more holidays and birthdays and for school programs and such, but not much different, really. Not the way I wanted to be. I may as well have been in Nova Scotia hunting whales, or Zimbabwe seeking the fountain of youth, or photographing Great Whites breaching out of white foam-capped waves off the coast of South Africa. I wasn’t much better, though I had promised myself I would be.

But then came you. This is to you. To no one else but you. It’s like one of those rocks my dad gave to me. The first one that I give to you. I married your mom and I was very happy. When you came to be it was destiny. It was like Jimi Hendrix playing his Stratocaster. Electric. You were you before you were you, if that makes sense. Maybe it will someday. You were there all along from the beginning. Meant to be. Waiting to come to life like the riff of an electric guitar. For me you were my chance to make things right. To be a good dad with a child who lived with me until he moved out to college, which is all I ever wanted, even more so when my other kids slipped away and grew up too fast. Time goes too fast, they say; it is true. I loved you before you were you, before you were conceived and after, and now as I wash these rocks alone on the Fourth of July as you are about to come into this world, I love you even more. As you’ve grown inside your mom, I have loved you in absence, looking at diagrams of babies on a website that compares you to fruits of varying sizes during all the stages of your development. I’m proud of you already.

Maybe it hurt me most because I was never far away. I was not in Indonesia, or running with the bulls in Pamplona, or in Havana selling cars. I was only three blocks from you. Maybe it would have been easier had I been in Moscow or Tibet. No, I realize now. It never would have been easy at all. There has never been a time that I haven’t loved you, nor will there ever be. You are divine because all the signs pointed to you and you were created because your mom and I followed them. All the hearts. The peacocks. The messages. The songs. The arrows. Everything. You were never an accident, make no mistake; you were created by a series of most fortunate and improbable events and your destiny is far greater than any story that I could imagine, or any story my father ever told me. Greater than Luke and Darth Vader. There is nothing greater than you. Not in this world and not in any galaxy far away.

I couldn’t be there which killed me every day and night. I got no reprieve from my suffering. Everything was like butter on burns. I missed it all when I didn’t want to miss a thing. I wanted to press my face to you in the womb and sing you Beatles’ songs. To talk to you. To read you Richard Scarry stories and to explain to you the pretty colors Mr. Paint Pig Paints and the noises Bananas Gorilla makes so you know what to expect of Busytown before you get there. To describe to you all the different trains on the Island of Sodor (the original Thomas with Ringo narrating was best, you must know).

I wanted to give you good advice as you prepared to come into this world. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be there, you must know. Not like my dad leaving me with rocks for apologies when he returned. It was only that I couldn’t be. I wanted to sing you songs and massage your head when it was pressed against her navel. Or talk you out of her ribs. I never got to see one kick or to feel a single hiccup, or to comfort your mom when her back hurt or when she was sick or emotional. Those things hurt me worse than anything has ever hurt me in this life. To be absent.

I will not be there at your birth when you come, to hold you in my arms and welcome you into this crazy, busy world and sing a meaningful song to you. To look into your eyes. I would have given everything to be there. I wouldn’t have slept for days just to watch you sleep. I would have changed all your dirty diapers, got up with you when a bad dream made you cry until you are comforted and go back to sleep. I will not be able to bathe you in the sink, or to anoint your head with oil, or hold you as you are baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and The Holy Ghost. I will not be there to teach you how to walk, throw a ball, ride a bike, or to wrestle you on the carpet, to tickle sadness from you, make you giggle, or to swing you round by your ankles in the backyard and watch you wobble as you try to stand. To teach you how to stand up to bullies. To feel teeth come through your gums and to see you smile. To wipe drool from your chin or your nose when you have a cold. To dress you for Halloween and take you Trick-Or-Treating. To check your candy for razors and buy you a BB gun. To teach you the alphabet, or how to draw or to write, or to help you buy flowers for your mom on Valentine’s Day.

I might never see your face at all, know the color of your eyes, your hair, hear your voice or laugh, or feel your little hand in mine. I will never play wiffle ball with you or take you to the circus, the zoo, or a ball game. To buy you a balloon and a hot dog. I will not be there when your heart is broken to help heal it, to help you write a love letter to get her back or to get someone better for you, or to teach you how to paint. To help you with homework. To watch you learn how to play guitar or piano. I will not be there the first time you see the ocean, or The Wizard of Oz, or when you catch fireflies in a glass jar or burn a sparkler. I will not ever see you when you’re happy, or sad, or watch you blow out birthday candles. I will not spend holidays with you, not even Christmas.

But there is nowhere more I want to be. I would give a finger to spend a moment with you. To feed you a bottle. The rest of them to spend one night. Both arms and legs to spend a weekend. My head to spend a summer. My chest, my heart, my eyes, everything I have to spend time with you until there was nothing left but my contented smile having watched you grow up. I got to give myself to you and protect you. I understand “The Giving Tree” now because I am forced to give nothing though I want to give everything like that tree. There isn’t a more exotic adventure out there for me than spending time with you; and I am not a rolling stone. I am your dad. I would give these rocks for you. Even Cleopatra’s soul. Even the world-shaped one that killed Goliath.

I would trade or pay anything to be in all those places, to see all those things. You are all of these rocks, all of these stories, everything in one beautiful boy. Even before I see you, I know. And though I cannot see you, and may never at all, I can feel you and will always feel you. I suppose these rocks might just get left here and get sold with this old house and people will just overlook them. No one will ever know what they were or where they came from and how significant they were once to me. And my words might get overlooked too, and you may never find them, or they may never find you; but I will not stop writing to you, or thinking of you, or loving you, even in the heartbreak of our absence. I will hope you always hear the birds sing and the wind in the trees, never overlook a rock’s significance, never put butter on a burn, always return a smile with a smile, wave to children, be kind to animals and the less fortunate, open doors for ladies, believe in and follow signs, have faith, and always give up your seat to women and the elderly. Be a gentleman and love your mom and your family and no matter how much you struggle or how great you become, never forget where you came from or those who helped you along the way.

May every time you see a rock you think of me. May every time you read Richard Scarry you think of me. And though you will not know what this means, it was never the wrong tree. Nothing was wrong at all; this is the way it was meant to be and though I don’t know why, someday we all will. I don’t want you to look out a window on Christmas Eve and expect someone who will never come. You needn’t expect me because I am already here and I am always with you. I’ve never left. And if anyone tells you my love for you is less than what I said it is, or that you are anything less than truly loved by your dad, even in absence, they are unscrupulous filthy liars. My love for you can only be ferried in words and thoughts, but it is as infinite and boundless as all the rocks in the universe. You are my beautiful boy, wherever you are, and I am your proud dad, wherever I may be. Maybe we all become rocks when we pass away. Maybe we become birds and sing songs about our life. Maybe I’ll smoke a cigar on the porch when the day comes and hold Mr. Lincoln’s lucky rock for you. But never smoke, kid. It’s bad for you.