I have a new apartment. And last Saturday, Dad came through town in a shiny red pickup truck. It was late, and so we unloaded the furniture, ate some food and went to bed. The next day we woke up, and I was prepared to spend four or five hours shopping with my father.
I thought I was ready. I thought I was prepared.
In good faith, I had scouted out various regions of town. I knew where the big box stores were. I had discovered the two main strips along Carpenter Road and local highway 17. I had even walked up and down the kitchenware section of Target, calculating various items I would need in order to bake Countess Tolstoy’s Stewed Mushrooms, or Fine Russian Bliny.
I spent the next seven hours driving from store to store, the beginnings of a headache flitting around the edges of my sanity. We bought cinderblocks and 1×10s, we bought Corningware, Pyrex and Chicago Cutlery knives. Mixing bowls and cheap plastic measuring cups — the kind with the numbers embossed on the handle, not displayed in water-soluble paint. I was exhausted. That’s practically a full work day spent with your father, enduring his embarassing behavior, watching him run back to the lumber aisle to get a price check when there are families waiting behind us in the checkout line. Were the extra 10 cents/item really that important? You just want him to go home. You want to be alone to breathe deep, send roots down into this new place. Be with the excitement and the fear and the uncertainty. Pray.
And then he’s gone. He gets in his empty pickup truck and he drives away. And you have to trust that he gets back to Milwaukee safely. You have to trust that he’ll be there for you, to support you and love you unconditionally. And you look around your tiny apartment; you touch all the things you would’ve forgotten to buy if he hadn’t been there. All the things you really did need, but weren’t awake enough to recognize as necessity. You build the book shelf, and realize that yes, his design was better and more elegant than yours. You recognize that you would’ve bought the crappy mattress-store futon for $200, instead of the perfect, beautiful futon he found for $150 tucked away in a family-owned shop. You miss him, and you pray that he gets home safely.