1: 1974
I came home from school one day to see the front sidewalk had cracked again, the damage probably done by a utility truck parking above the curb. Or something along those lines. That was what had broken the walk in the first place, before my father and I spent a weekend afternoon breaking the slab up further with a ten-pound sledge, then pouring new concrete atop the rubble. I saw it rebroken perhaps a month afterward. It was a little frustrating. My father came home from work, saw the broken slab, and his shoulders slumped. Still, I looked forward to redoing the job better.
The next day I had just enough time to get the slab dismantled before he came back from work. I would be useful, a state he regularly scolded me toward. Somehow that scolding rarely pried a book out of my hands, even if I’d read it a half dozen times already. But I was motivated. I knew how to fix this, having done so already, but this time I’d do a better job. I got the sledgehammer out of the garage and set to work.
2: 2024
Green has a scent to it. It infiltrates your senses without your knowing. Or at least it did mine. This past weekend La Mujer que amo and I rented a cabin with loft in South Wales, New York, southeast of Buffalo, to celebrate the 40th birthday of my eldest niece, and the looming 90th birthday of her grandfather. Friday noon I sat on the cabin porch as Hurricane Debby sideswiped Erie County. Rain fell in hourly amounts surpassing our average annual back home. What could I do but breathe deeply? I savored the familiar aroma of the local wild strawberries. Queen Anne’s lace released clouds of bitter and lovely perfume. White pines and hemlock offered up their own resinous fragrance. Timothy and staghorn sumac and some kind of fir I couldn’t identify right off. And the silver maples! Leaf litter of silver maples, decomposing bark and broken limbs of silver maples, wet fungus and slime mold on the carcasses of broken silver maples. I had not been back for 25 years, and still the scents leapt out at me immediately recognizable.
But there was something else. Something underneath it all. I closed my eyes hard and drew in deep draughts of wet air, interrogating my nostrils for data. Chlorophyll, yes, and humus, fungal mycelia and the tang of old wood smoke, and the pong of salt seas 400 million years old preserved in the local shale, but — to borrow a concept from a different sensory organ — there was a base note, unnoticed before but deeply familiar, with which all the other odors harmonized. This subtle scent, which I had to focus on to perceive at all, brought them all together. The forest was playing in the key of green.
3: 1982
I watched from my seat on the Greyhound bus as the landscape of Northern Nevada rolled past. I had been west of the 100th Meridian for some days, but the lack of green in the West had not yet lost its capacity to unnerve me. I watched the landscape pass as a rat might watch a snake.
Eventually of course, the landscape would swallow me whole.
4: 1974
My bedroom door flew open. My father stepped halfway in. He was not happy. He said a couple of curt sentences, then left. I sighed as someone deeply and unfairly oppressed, put the book down, went outside and propped a short ladder up against the garage. I climbed to the roof with a bucket. The eavestroughs were blocked; rainfall no longer drained in the proper, socially acceptable way but instead cascaded over the gutter edges in sheets. I was to pull the muck out by hand and restore order.
Inevitably, that project proved fruitless. Order would not be restored. The silver maple next door would continue to rain leaves and debris down onto the garage roof for many years. Besides, I got distracted a few minutes into the job. In each gutter, sinking roots deep into the decomposed leaf litter, there were several dozen tiny silver maple seedlings. I pulled a handful out carefully, trying not to damage their roots any more than necessary, and put them in the bucket.
Down the ladder and into the garage went I, reemerging with my father’s shovel. I hauled the shovel and bucket to the front yard and started digging holes without benefit of parental approval. I measured out the distance between holes in shovel lengths, trying for some semblance of regular spacing, and then eased each little gutter tree out of the bucket muck and into its respective hole.
My parents were oddly pleased by these new additions to our landscaping, and my father seemed in a better mood the next weekend when he told me to clean the remaining 90 percent of the garage gutters.
5: 2024
La Mujer and the oldest of my sisters and I walked through the old neighborhood on Saturday, saw the inevitable changes in the nearby commercial strip on Elmwood, walked Delaware Park by the lake, admired the wild hydrangea and the weeping willows, grabbed a snack at a sidewalk cafe. We parked in front of the old house, more or less. Just one of the silver maples I had planted still remained, a rate of attrition that surprised me not at all. I have learned in the 50 years intervening that silver maples, while they are very good at being silver maples, are not the most problem-free of urban landscape trees. They grow quickly, resulting in brittle wood branches joined at weak acute angles. They shed limbs almost as frequently as they their shed leaves and their cubic meters of seeds. Their roots buckle sidewalks and foundations, invade septic systems and drain pipes. Walking ten feet onto the front lawn to admire the remaining tree I half expected the current homeowner to appear and hand me an invoice for the last 50 years of repairs.
No one was home, though, and the remaining silver maple looked sturdy enough. Was it 50 feet tall? 70? I’m lousy at ballparking linear measurements. It towered over the roof of the three-story house, the trunk splitting into two about 15 feet up. With careful, ruinously expensive maintenance, the tree might make it another 80 years.
I brought my forehead to the trunk, felt the rough, lichen-covered bark scrape my brow comfortably. “Thank you for still being here,” I said to the tree. “Please outlive me.”
6: 2004
“I’ve been thinking about something I wanted to talk to you about,” he said.
Talking to my father on the phone has always been slightly awkward. He is always happy to hear from his kids and grandkids, yet it never occurs to him to make a call himself. I learned early on in my life away not to broach the topic of politics. Somehow it always crept in anyway, and I feared this was going to be another such time.
But he surprised me. “You remember the time I chewed you out for breaking up the sidewalk out front?”
I did, of course. Far from the grateful and appreciative response I had expected from him for my taking initiative, my father had stormed out of the house to berate me for not thinking things through, for failing to check with him about the proper course of action, and possibly for the length of my hair and the way I was scraping the paint off the sledgehammer’s head by hitting concrete with it.
“I’ve been thinking about that day,” he said, “and it has bothered me. I had had a lousy day at work, and I took my frustration out on you. I knew that that first repair was unlikely to last long, since we just poured a little concrete over the rubble and smoothed it out.”
“And I know you had jumped up to try to fix it again, that you were trying to be helpful, and I’m sorry that I took it out on you that way.”
I thought of the next weekend, watching shamefaced from my bedroom window as he finished breaking the slab, dug it out deep, poured a layer of fresh base gravel and then the fresh concrete. That repair held until we sold the place.
“I’d forgotten about all that,” I lied.
7: 2024
I sit on the hard picnic table bench next to my father, who is shivering. “Are you shivering from cold, Dad, or is this just the usual background level of tremors?” I don’t mean to sound glib. Since the last time I saw him in 2019, the week La Mujer que amo and I wed, he had had several attacks of debilitating illness concurrent with, and possibly caused by, the Covid pandemic. He has lost maybe 30 pounds since then. He is a shell that once held a strong man inside it. He stands relatively easily, but a stray breeze might knock him over. He is unsteady on his feet, and has lost a couple inches off his once 5’11” stature. We are now the same height.
“Cold,” he says. “I can never stay warm.”
Always taciturn except when griping at his teenaged kids, he now sits amiably and quietly among those teenaged kids grown up, and their teenaged kids grown up.
I run to our rental car and pull out a jacket. He puts it on with some help from La Mujer, who finds another jacket for him to sit on, to insulate his bones from the hard cold bench.
My sister is anxious to lead a hike. “Who wants to stay here with Dad?” she asks. No one answers. It’s clear nonetheless at least half of us intend to stay with Dad.
“Who is this man?” I wonder. He is recognizably the man who raised me, and yet unfamiliar. He sits here vulnerable, not trying to mask his vulnerability with sarcasm or resentment, but just being that, sitting with his kids and their kids, happy to be brought a plate of food and listen to our too-clever banter.
Clouds gather and the sky opens up. Rain comes down in torrents. We laugh at the storm. And then the rain ends, and we start packing up our picnic.
I am suddenly aware that this right now is very likely the last time I will see my father still breathing. His flame is brilliant but sputtering. We all hug goodbye as my sister brings the car up for dad.
Dad and I hold each other for a moment. I cannot bring myself to say anything. I cannot take my eyes off him as he wobbles to the car, sits, and is driven away.
8: 2004
I walked along the shore of San Pablo Bay near the house my ex-wife and I had bought a couple years prior. The shore was developed and armored, train tracks and flood control levees keeping random high tides from flowing too far inward. Along one stretch of shoreline, a paved trail topped a levee that shelters a large former floodplain. Something familiar was growing in the middle of the field.
It was a silver maple, only 2,000 miles from home.
I slogged out through a layer of mud to introduce myself. The tree was perhaps five feet tall with an incongruously thick trunk, about seven inches across. It looked so out of place, this tree; far more suited to the immense forests of the eastern part of the continent, somehow wrenched from its ancestors and dislocated to this semiarid place, where the water in the soil was at least one quarter saline.
How clearly the tree recognized that it didn’t belong there I could not say. It was doing its best to fit into the landscape, just like the rest of us.
9: 2024
I told the silver maple in our old front yard in Buffalo that I was glad it had survived. I asked it to outlive me. I saw something nearby that made me laugh. I pulled out my phone, took a quick photo, and sent it to my father.
.
very grateful for this in a lotta ways, certainly its beauty (as usual) but also a glimpse of my father. and a shakier vision of my own fatherhood, how it doesn't measure up. but tearfully, understanding that my measure will be in my daughters' memories and my grandkids, and i'm not meant to understand me in that way.
Thank you, Chris.