There are varying stories as to how you came into our lives, but with one common theme: you came to do what you were paid to do, harm, but ended up finding a friend in Dad, and a family - who took you in like so many strays - the scarred, the scared, the loners, the cast aways, the lovable losers, whom we often snuck into our home and hearts: Oscar, Tut, Spike, Missy, Tigger, Barney, all of whom easily settled into life among a variety of other domesticated, wild and human wards which Mom quietly embraced and Dad not-so-quietly tolerated.
You were certainly one of the most colorful and memorable.
As humans go.
You didn’t stand very tall - about the same height as Dad, but stood twice as wide, heavy with muscle and hair, apart from your head, which was always shaved bald.
You moved and spoke slowly, deliberately, dutifully - except when it was just us kids around. Then you’d shadow box and dance back and forth in an imaginary ring, reciting your poems of triumph and strength, with a smile ear to ear and a hint in your eyes, if we’d chosen to see, that your words were just tales.
To camouflage the things you’d seen, the things you’d done.
Or hadn’t.
Alone in the world, raised on the streets. Third grade was as far as you went. You fought to survive, then fought on demand. Why you chose to do that with your hands…
Was it the only praise you ever got?
While the real you, the softhearted, curious, clever you, sat in your room with your best friend, Sgt. Alex, a white-haired German Shepard, making art on found canvases, drawing faces and things that I can only hope gave great comfort and meaning.
Just as each word I write.
A reason for being.
Misaligned and alone you arrived in our world and made me remember you standing there in your sleeveless white t-shirt and rolled-up blue jeans above ankle-high army boots. I can still see you leaning against a rake, on a break from yard work Dad asked you to do. Picking at the teeth that still remained with a homemade toothpick from the nearby woodpile, sipping from a giant water jug from the back of your beat-up truck (where it looked as if you kept your life), you’d spin glorious tales of overseas battles and prize-winning bouts, heroic deeds and days of glory to a curious, young huddle who believed every word from your kind, but busted face.
I’m not sure anymore if any of them are true.
But it hardly matters.
Because you were you, a sweet, gentle soul who used your imagination and your art to color the truth of your life and the bad things you did for the sake of the dollar, for food for your dog and bread for the table - not stories for kids who marveled when you chewed glass, flexed your biceps and showed us your gold and shiny, giant red, white and blue championship belt (which I once saw you wear while you dug a post hole), while living in the greenhouse office at the edge of the bluff, at our house in Shoreacres.
Dad gave you other choices, away from the violence, a place at our table where, for a time, we gave thanks together and looked out for each other. To me, you were Ferdinand, that sweet, big bull who given the choice preferred to sniff flowers than fight in the ring.
Gone from home and home then gone and times ahead when Dad couldn’t even help himself, you quietly disappeared.
But not from my mind.
Which still sees flashes of your bright, happy drawings of people and places, from moments that mattered. The film in my head of your boxer’s stance and boxer’s dance. You with your stories of whatever glory that might hold our attention or conjure a gasp, or a laugh, and a moment to be anything that you wanted to be: the prize fighter, the daring Marine who leapt from planes, the artist, the poet, the good citizen who saved a woman and confronted a gang.
But no matter who, the you that I knew was loyal as a dog when a friend was true, creative, imaginative, humble and compassionate, who only ever wanted to sniff flowers beneath the old cork tree.
No comments:
Post a Comment