The anniversary of my father’s death happened to coincide with a couple of unexpected discoveries among the few articles he left behind. Aside from clothing and furniture there was not much to gather from his apartment. There are a few folders with paperwork from Laos, including the surprising discovery that he kept a journal in which he documented his time at the embassy in the last days before the evacuation. Dad was a fine letter-writer but I never thought of him as a journaler. I am not aware he took the time to document any other period of his life. He also retained his military hats and regalia, some of which is here while the rest in Tampa. Other than that I don’t have much else of his to account for, except for a metal can. A little maroon-colored can was labeled “PENS PENCILS X-ACTO” was present on his workbench at all times, from as far back as I can remember. I never gave it much thought, and why would I? It was just a place for pens, pencils, and sharp blades.
I found that can in my kitchen cabinet, along with a pile of estate-related paperwork (which I assume I can get rid of now, 13 years later). Thinking the container held nothing of any note I was ready to discard its contents when discovered it contained more than pens and pencils and other utilitarian gear. A small number of business cards for businesses and individuals was no real surprise, save for one. It was a card for a motel in Mississippi, but that was not the interesting part. On the back of the card dad had written a man’s name, his date of birth, and his Florida state drivers license number. Underneath that was the name of a bar in the Bahamas, along with what appears to be the street address of a 2-bedroom house near the Sea of Abaco. I do not recognize this man’s name, but a number of Internet searches seem to confirm that he died a few years ago. It does not appear that this person was a resident of the Bahamas, but a Floridian from a small town in the panhandle.
Who was he? I assume I will never know, nor will I concern myself with it for any longer than it takes to write this, but I think it might be the only evidence dad left behind of an encounter with another man. My father was gay, a fact I never knew until after he was gone but which made perfect sense to me given his somewhat stilted, half-blossomed eccentricities. At the time of the discovery I was shocked, but I quickly accepted it. If there are any enduring feelings of regret it come from my feeling that he never lived the life he might have wanted, and also that I never told my mother.
Or did he, on at least this occasion, live the life he was born for? Did he keep this person’s name at the ready in his workbench container of pens and pencils for a reason? Why would he have needed this person’s drivers license number? Was the bar (where I can only assume they met) a gay bar? I don’t need to know the details, and they will never be accessible.
Another item in the container is more poignant to me. There is a small plastic envelope containing a booklet and a newspaper clipping. The booklet is dad’s “PERMANENT RECORD”, which I guess is what they used to call your record of academic performance. This little volume contains dad’s grades and class schedules from high school. This record of school performance was in this container on his workbench, always at the ready. I never knew this until now, and I can only ask at the wind if this was something he frequently looked at for some reason of nostalgia or affirmation.
But ever more poignant is the newspaper clipping from a local East Tennessee paper. It is a two-paragraph piece in which it is reported that my dad and one other student made the honor roll at his high school. I guess that’s the kind of thing that makes the papers in small towns such as where he grew up.
You see my dad was sensitive about his intelligence. He was not slow in any way but, as my mother only half-way revealed to me, his mother called him “stupid” and other such names throughout his youth and into adulthood, comparing him unfavorably to his twin brother, who evidently did better than him in academics.
But he was the farthest thing from unintelligent. He was not book smart but he had a keen appreciation for intelligence in others (this is obviously part of what he saw in my mother) and in alternate points of view. He did not always agree with me but he was happy to hear that I had informed opinions on things.
My mother, in describing how dad’s mother treated him, went as far as to say it was “cruel” but left out any more detail than that.
It reminded me of what happened the last time I ever saw him, at a restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia. I believe this was around September, 2003. We were finishing breakfast and preparing to go our separate ways, he back to Florida and I to New York, when he overheard a woman at another table bragging about how smart her son was. To this dad mumbled “I hate it when parents talk about how smart their kid is.” I replied “It’s better than saying ‘My kind’s a fucking idiot.'” At this my dad laughed so hard I thought he might cough up a lung. I riffed on it a little, comedian-style, saying “He’s just so fucking stupid, all the other kids are smarter than mine.” I quit the riffing in the interest of not sending dad into a convulsion, but his laughter continued for a good couple of minutes.
I laughed with him at the time but later I thought differently of this incident. I don’t think people laugh like that because they are happy. That kind of laughter is a signal of a raw nerve, or an insecurity. Laughter, I think, is too often associated with happiness because it hijacks the gesture of happiness, which is (of course) the smile. But it takes the smile and chokes it, filling the symbol of happiness with guttural anxiety. I think my dad laughed so hard at my joke because it reminded him of his mother’s derisive comments about him, and the fact that she may have even made just such a remark to others about him.
Now I know that he salvaged a newspaper clipping to document his honor roll achievement, and kept it handy in his pen and pencil container. I think he must have done this explicitly to assure himself that he was never as stupid as he was made to feel. If I read his grades correctly (assuming grades were all on the 0-100 scale) then his record is all over the place, with what I would guess is an all-around average in the high 70s. Weighing it down are a few grades in the 20s and even a few zeros, whatever those mean. Minus those I’d say his general average was in the low- to mid-80s.
This anniversary date has come and gone many times since 2005 without me remembering. I happen to have had it in mind this year on account of these discoveries, and in fact I missed the exact date anyway, thinking it was September 5. It was September 3. I do not dwell on the circumstances of his passing as much as I used to, but these discoveries of late stoked memories, as they would. I would have thought I had found and mentally processed everything there was among his effects, which were minimal, but I guess I was wrong. Did he have an encounter with a man in the Bahamas? I don’t even need to know, but it is something like eerie to have found the street address and online photos of the house where it may have happened.
