Skipping
January 9th, 2010My father’s nose was the first thing I know I loved about him. The Berkman schnoz. He always liked to point out that of the three times it had been broken, twice was by friends. Like all noses broken before the ready availability of plastic surgery, his leaned across his face at a quirky angle. It seemed to me to be almost an independent organ, capable of expressing thoughts and opinions of its own. I don’t know about penis envy, but at 5 years old, I was terribly envious of my father’s unmistakable nose.
His hands were a second fascination. Wide with beefy fingers, they were experts in so many mysterious things. Pliers and knives, torches and saws, and most magical of all, the curvy guitars that lived under the bed from Sunday through Wednesday. On Thursday night, the ritual of tuning and string changing commenced, and the guitars left the house with my father for the 4 nights of music jobs he played every week.
My father’s feet are the part of his body I remember most viscerally, though. There is a certain poetic justice in this. As a child, we are located much closer physically, for many years, to our parents feet than to their faces. I memorized my father’s boots, square toed and black. The sound of the zipper pulling up to close them is so vivid to me that it has made me a boot wearer, lately, just to hear the sound again, now that he is gone.
Dad had a lot of flaws. His music job was an occasion to collect girlfriends and hide money from my mom. He could not quell his perfectionism enough to allow music to grow in my sister or me. But at 46 years of age, in 1970, he was perfectly happy to skip along Wabash Avenue, in broad daylight, holding his daughters’ hands. I am telling you, men did NOT DO THAT in 1970.
After daycamp ended in the summer, my father was our daycare, while my mom worked at her full time job. This meant dragging us from one little jeweller to another while he left and picked up custom job orders. I am telling you, men did NOT DO THAT in 1970. There was no take your daughter to work day, never mind, take your six year old twins with you to work every day.
I stared at my fathers feet countless times as we stood in creaking old elevators that smelled of cigars and oily metal. I watched them tread briskly along marble and tile hallways past jewelry showrooms, the cuffs of his black trousers flapping like wings to speed us along. The tedium of sitting in hard plastic chairs in grey rooms full of parts and supplies and cracked linoleum was excruciating, though I suppose it only lasted a few minutes in adult time.
Back on the street, under the elevated train, however, my father became mine again. “Daddy, let’s skip!” we’d say, pulling on his hand. “You want to skip, huh?” broadly smiling with his teeth and his nose. And then we would fly, each holding his hand, never taking our eyes off the blur of his boots plundering the pavement in great leaps, as he pulled us along. His boots, rushing past faster than we could possibly keep up, cast a hypnotic spell. Fixated on them, black flashes striking then bouncing up in an instant, we felt the secret of flight and landing, accompanied by the squealing rumble of the train overhead.