Blinking Lemon

My 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.

“Honey, people vote with their feet.”

Of all the over my head, what good does that do me platitudes I heard as a child, the number one head scratcher was, without a doubt, my father’s all purpose brush off.  “Honey, people vote with their feet.”

I was about eight years old when he first tried this riddle out on me.  Who knows what difficulty I’d come to him with…I was a socially tone-deaf child, and both took and gave offense countless times everyday.  Someone had wronged me, of that I can be sure, and I was seeking justice from whoever would listen.

“Honey, people vote with their feet.”  Clearly, my father believed this to be the answer to my problem; as far as I was concerned, however, it was the most unintelligible thing anyone had ever said to me.  Voting with your feet was expressly and universally prohibited in my eight year old world, otherwise I would have Toe Shoes and Nancy Drew and Mashed Potatoes with Gravy ALL DAY LONG.

Quickly enough, though, I came to believe my father was saying it was my own fault if I was unhappy, or someone was mad at me.  A double whammy to be both the culprit and therefor a disappointment to the person in the world I most adored.

As with many things we wish we could avoid, his words grew to have an unanticipated influence on my philosophy of life, evolving into advice I touted to my friends as we all flailed our way through our 20s.  When a boyfriend disappointed, when a boss reacted, when any little thing tripped us up, it was, “Honey, people vote with their feet.”

Now that I have crossed my fair share of thresholds, I understand what he meant to say.  Even if we don’t like a situation, if we stay in it, we are admitting that we get something out of it.  When we don’t like it enough, we leave. I’m not saying I buy this premise; just that his point of view is clear.  For my father, life was full of anchors, weighing him down only until he was ready to move on.  But I think my world is made of roots, that penetrate and reach out and most importantly, allow me to breathe.

After a few days of suspicious regard and uncertainty, my nephew decided tonight that I had earned a spot sitting next to him, to watch night night videos.  I certainly deserved the earlier rejection;  after all, who the hell am I, coming from goodness knows where and pointing that machine in his face all the time?  However, I did nothing really spectacular to achieve this rare-as-hens-teeth honor. If I had known chasing him into the kitchen with my orange phone because it matched his shirt would get me on the A-list, I would have done it 5 days ago.

After enduring a few minutes of good behavior sitting next to me, some squirming ensued.  Nephew was bored, and frankly, so was I.  Nephew tested the waters, poking me half heartedly with his feet, the universal sign for “please tickle me and see if we can upset my parents.”  So, of course, I did what I had to do.

Pretty soon, he was pounding his admittedly adorable feet on some pretty tender areas of me, above the waist.  I needed to put a stop to it. Without warning, I found myself possessed by a power previously unknown to me - The Slow Motion Monster!  C R A W L  I N G  S L O O O W L Y toward my nephew, I knew we were both in trouble.  Going to bed is serious business; much depends on getting enough sleep.  Giggling that escalates to active playing is counterproductive when unconciousness is what you are supposed to be producing.

Still, I kept going, ever so slowly, repeating “O O O O O H H H H N N N N N O O O O O!” in a suitably altered voice.  If my sister had a naughty chair big enough for me, I’m sure I would have been in it.  But the spirit of the Slow Motion Monster could not be stopped.  For a few heavenly moments, my reality had crashed open, and filled with a power beyond my own will - the power of play.  Resistance is impossible, where surrender is all there is.

I know I betrayed the adults, and I guess I betrayed my nephew, because the Slow Motion Monster is, frankly, no match for bedtime.  I couldn’t save him from the inevitable end of sweet dreams and sticker fairy rewards.  So selfish, I am, and I would do it again for anybody who loves me enough to pester me with their tiny, delicious feet.