A Small Moment

My Dad, 1927-2010

I met my Dad by accident on the main street in Sea Cliff.   To see him outside the never ending psychodrama of my mother’s house came with the realization that we both walked on streets outside in the world.  We met by the library, a gothic building with long, looming spires, leaded windows and dark brick, rococo swirls.  It was a building from a time when libraries were important.  

“Well, hello!”  he said.  

He was by then a fagile looking old man, whom I barely knew, who had kept himself from being known.   His steps were becoming tentative but daily, he took himself down the alley where once ran a trolley car, to the Italian deli where they knew his name and would tease him about all the women he could still attract.  

“He’s a cute old guy,” the deli man with the blood-stained apron would say to no one in particular.  My father would blush, this kind of banter unknown.

“Hello!”  I said in a slightly exaggerated way, schooled as I was in the great and necessary chasm between parent and child of an era begone just like the town.

It wasn't where I grew up in but it was a good choice of my parents to move there some years ago.  The main street passed the striped barbershop pole and its green awning, an antique nook that was rarely open, the deli, the post office with an impossibly friendly post mistress, one bank, the library, before continuing further on to the sloping lawns and wide verandas of big houses looking out onto the Long Island Sound with its sailboats lazily moving on nice days.  I was headed to the circular, grassy park that is the terminus of walks and bike rides and the end of the main street, where I  drink a cup of coffee in the morning or listen to the cicadas and watch the first firefly at dusk.  I met my father and we said hello - surprise, some formality in our voices.   “I am going to the park,” I said.

“I am going the other way,” he said and we smile and turn and begin to walk off and then, reason unknown, a small moment, we simultaneously turn and look at ech other.  We look for a minute, don’t smile now, and turn back to our own paths. It is the last visit I will have with my father walking, still well, still himself, still breathing on his own.