Before 19
Dad and I He loves the camaraderie of a rolling golf green. Whether he is playing with a partner or alone, it doesn’t really matter. I refuse to pick up a club and the thought of being stranded on an island of sand edged with grass with one other person terrifies me. What do you talk about after four hours? My island of sand is being isolated on a treadmill, where I am untouchable and unable to speak to or listen to anyone. I can recall countless afternoons when I sat under an awning with a sketchbook and watched him as it started to pour. After a curious while, my father would appear, walking towards me, completely drenched and not entirely satisfied with himself, despite the fact that in the midst of torrential rain he was the only person on the course. He knows nothing about music. Of course, I know nothing about great classical music, but know a lot about music in a quirky sense. I have shamefully (and unintentionally) memorized the order of the tracks on the America: Greatest Hits CD and will tap my fingers when I hear most sounds. When he buys new reading glasses, he turns first towards me, before the mirror and before my mother. He tells me that he thinks I look best when I wear my hair in a bun on the top of my head, a hairdo that my sisters warn me never to sport because it makes me look like I’m five years old. He thinks that simply “grinding out” work, schoolwork, or any other kind of work is an unquestionably simple task. I think that doing work takes the universe’s pull and sheer determination. He wonders why the science section of the ACT takes me so long to not even fully complete. I tell him that I’d like him to try it one day. He jumps with seeping concern if he sees a small child walking alone in a parking lot. I tell him that he needs to relax and that his jumping makes me jump. We both have oddly cold hands at all times of the year. He told me about going frantically to countless physicians about his cold hands only to discover that his poor circulation was nothing to worry about. I laugh when he tells me this story, but I am secretly relieved that my cold hands are also probably nothing to worry about. Before he taught me how to drive stick shift, I was concerned that my initial incompetence would spark a reaction that I sometimes hear through the glass doors of his study on Sunday nights when he is on a business call. I was relieved to be instructed with conscious patience. Although every so often he would screech when I got too close to the curb, as we followed a strict regimen
Dad and I
By Ryan Rosenberg
He knows at breakfast what he will have for dinner; God forbid he eat poultry twice in one day. I could eat the same thing for each meal. In fact, I find comfort in knowing when I wake up that morning means yogurt, regardless of whether or not lunch might mean yogurt as well. 6
Before 19
Dad and I
of stopping and starting the car every few feet up hill, he eventually decided that we could listen to the radio as I drove. He never looks at the check before handing his credit card to the waiter. I am frantic about adding the correct percent to the tip and about whether or not it’s okay to leave it lying on the table. During candlelit dinners with my family, he reminds me each time that he has never had a meal with me when the contents of the dish did not end up on my clothing. I remind him that I shouldn’t be able to hear him chewing from across the table. He tells me about how much he misses us when he goes abroad on business trips. I get instantly jealous when I imagine him walking around London, although there is a familiar comfortable cadence of our home when it is just my mother and my sisters and brother. I also think about what he would have been like had his conservative parents allowed him to go to architecture school rather than business school. On my last day of work this summer, he was waiting for me outside and the two of us went to my favorite Scandinavian restaurant, followed by taking our two dogs on a July night walk. The streets were dark, apart from an occasional firefly flicker, so we each held flashlights. I sometimes walk the dogs with my mother after dinner, which is usually a quick, down the block, prescribed affair. When I walked with my dad that night, I never said anything about where our steps were leading us, mostly out of curiosity to see where he might take me. As we floated through the heavy air, our conversation began by discreetly analyzing our family at that moment, which amazed me, as I had no idea that he noticed subtleties that I didn’t even see. He then went on to tell me a story that he had already told me over and over again. He starts the story with him watching me through the glass window out of countless other, bundled, newborn babies shortly after I was born. He then claims that an anonymous woman arbitrarily pointed to me, as she whispered the words “ that one’s a living doll.” I think this is made up, although he insists each time that it is not.
7