A.W. Barnes
My Father’s Body
An Excerpt
June 15th – Father’s Day
When I wake up in the morning, I think of this day and the obligation annoys me. I roll out of bed and catch myself in the mirror. I see him there in the reflection: his baldhead and lined face, his heavy chest and rounded gut, his thick legs. I turn away and the sharp anger I used to keep him at a distance has turned into a dull pain that I discount as indigestion from too much eating and drinking last night.
Sitting down at the dining room table drinking coffee and reading the paper online, I try to calculate the best time to call him. Whether it's better to catch him first thing in the morning and get it over with, or wait until the afternoon, assuming that he's at home and not out playing golf, although my brothers tell me he's not doing much golfing these days. There's a perverse pleasure in waiting, teasing myself into thinking that I'll forget like an unfit son, but I never forget. I never forgive, either, just as he doesn't.
I put it off and putter around the house in the morning, clean the dog hair off the couch and straighten up the kitchen. Throw a load of laundry in and make the bed. I tell myself that maybe I should go out into the garden and weed before the sun gets too high and the day gets too hot. I think that I should cut the grass for the same reason.
I'm not a gardening person but my spouse thinks that it will teach me patience.
The garden is made up of four and a half raised beds that are twelve feet long by four feet wide. The half bed is mine as a kind of experiment where I'm growing the easiest vegetables: peas and beans and nine stalks of corn for good measure. There's no point in growing corn because it takes up too much space and produces so few ears, one or two per stalk. But I want corn in my garden because it reminds me of my youth in the Midwest, a youth I've tried to forget and run away from, a