Shadow Memories

Some things I hold as precious are like wisps of smoke... like some of my shadow memories... things that may have never happened in exactly the way I recall them, but they are mine because I need them. The need that I have for my father, Eugene, causes me to hold fast to scant things, wisps of a reality long ago.

In Philly, we lived for a time on Hunting Park Avenue. Here I attended Cleveland Elementary School for two years and learned to ride a bike without training wheels.

It was Hunting Park where I planted seeds from an apple in the gray, hard-packed dirt between our stoop and the sidewalk not long before we moved to an apartment on Cambridge Street. I would dream about these seeds for many years, wanting to return and see if they ever took root. I took joy in this shadow memory, thinking that just maybe something I had done there would be permanent... something that I could return to and claim.

I smile at all this now, These shadow memories...memories of warmth.

On one corner of our block there was a Linton's Cafeteria... and the stop where Eugene, my father, would step off the bus in filthy khakis smelling of roofing tar in the afternoon. For a time I took to waiting for him there....

While I waited, I would study the black carbon patterns on the wall of the huge coke plant across the street...watching people go through the revolving door of the cafeteria or checking out the trolley cars in the barn across the avenue.

I would wait at the bus stop, and as he stepped down, I would throw myself at his legs and hug him tightly.

This became such a routine that after a while I would not even look up. The soiled khakis were enough to identify him and the warmth and the strength I so badly needed.

So it happened that one afternoon I threw myself at this man stepping off the bus.... "Daddy!".... and then sensed something was wrong.... Looking up I saw a confused, smiling stranger instead of Eugene. Why is this man such an important part of the shadow to me? And how could two men could have soiled khakis so similar?

On Friday nights there would be a kitchen full of men playing pinochle , eating pizza, drinking beer, and swearing when they caught bad cards...I would hear them from my bed and feel safe and happy.

When Eugene was working, things were good....

There were nights when he would send me down to the corner bar by the fire station for roast beef sandwiches...there were walks in the summer with my parents to get lovely lemon water ices from an Italian vendor...there were trips to Fairmont Park to swim and ride the merry-go-round....

I remember walking down the street in Philly with my father when we came upon men working down under the sidewalk. The manhole cover was off to the side, and I bent down to see what the workmen were doing...leaning over more and more and more.... Suddenly,I was falling head first into the hole....

In that split second, Eugene caught me by my right ankle.

This memory casts a huge shadow that spans a half century. My father saved me...deliberately extended my life.

I need that memory...need that hero, that savior quick and strong. Eugene....

Some of the rest seems so trivial and small, but I need these too... these shadow memories....

I remember him showing me how to make pancakes....waiting for all the little bubbles to appear before turning them.

I remember him taking me in the back yard to pose in my boxer shorts while holding a broken table leg like a club.

I remember him caring for me when I was sick.

Throughout my early childhood, my parents fought occasionally. These were bad fights where there was pushing and shoving, punches were thrown, and things got broken.... But I thought all mothers and fathers did that, although I never saw it happen on TV...

Within a short period of time it would all blow over... Peace, for a time, was restored. The badly broken pieces of ceramics wound up in the garbage, but some were salvaged... These I remember handling years after, remembering the things done in anger to hurt....and hurt bad.

The bust-ups between my mother and father...when we separated as a family...all this began going down in New Orleans. I'm not really aware what all the fighting was about, but one issue was Eugene not working.... and then there were time times my father got rip-roaring drunk...nasty, mean drunk.

As a child, my New Orleans was full of broken promises... promises of houses we would never live in, ponies I would never ride... a family life that would never exist outside of the dreams and promises of Eugene.

My mother's family despised Eugene, said he was a bum, and a "bullshitter", not be be trusted. But it was growing up in New Orleans' Irish Channel that I learned the uneasy peace I would be driven to make with virtually every member of my family as they lied, cheated, stole, and abused one another in a scrimmage of selfish survival.

Eugene had a really good line and lived his life chasing down the smooth deal, the fast buck....a hustler hunting down something for nothing. Somewhere in me, possibly on a genetic level, I inherited some of this in the way that breeds of dogs share traits.

Broken people break one another....

It was in New Orleans that I began chasing down my own dreams that ...dreams of wholeness and healing.

And Eugene? Well, he lives in my shadow memories.