You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning (14 page)

The expression “It is what it is” is almost always accompanied by a heavy sort of world-weary sigh and pregnant pause so that all this McWisdom can have time to sink in. It’s as if pearls have spilled from the lips of Socrates his own self. Socrates Jones, maybe.

And it’s everywhere.

Persnickety diner: “This is iceberg lettuce, but the menu clearly said romaine.”

Waiter (with light shrug and gentle smile): “It is what it is.”

Patient: “Doctor, I can’t believe you amputated the wrong leg!”

Doc (wry smile): “I know. But really, what can I say? It is what it is.”

Patient: “What it
is
is a malpractice suit.”

Doc: “Bingo.”

Judge: “You’ve confessed to stabbing, shooting, and setting fire to at least a dozen of your friends and family members. What do you have to say for yourself?”

Defendant: “Your Honor, it is what it is.”

Judge: “Right you are! And because of your impeccable logic and insight, you are free to go!”

“It is what it is” replaces former irritant “I’m not saying anything, I’m just saying.”

Whaaa?

This is usually a prelude to something that is going to be pretty harsh. Just as we bless the heart in the South before we remove it from your chest and stomp on it.

So to recap: It is in fact
not
all good. You are, too, saying something and “It is what it is” makes no @#$%^-ing sense.

Don’t agree with me? Too bad. That’s just how I roll.

Oops.

My daddy was a retired public school teacher. He spent a lifetime teaching other people’s kids.

OK, not really a lifetime. He took up teaching after jobs as a sewing machine repairman and work at the textile mill in town didn’t pan out. He’d been the only person in his family to go to college but, when he got out, for reasons I never understood, he trotted his degree from Wake Forest College right on over to the textile mill that employed practically every family in town in the business of weaving fabric for car-seat covers.

The mill was a powerful lure, perhaps because you got every Fourth of July week off and there was a huge family Christmas party, for all the “lintheads” and their kids, with bologna and pineapple kabobs that made us feel sort of chic. We were like characters in our beloved
Bewitched.
At the
party, we spent just a few magical moments standing mere inches away from the plant manager and his wife, whose flipped bob was so reminiscent of Samantha Stephens’ that we knew we were in the presence of
classy people.
The kind of people who eat little chocolate-glazed marshmallows on toothpicks and know how to mix a proper Manhattan or twelve.

The mill’s Christmas party was the second biggest thing to happen in our little town around the holidays, the first being the delivery of a twelve-pack of assorted pickles from the folks at the oil company that filled up the tank behind the house. There was another oil company in town but they only gave you a calendar with a photo of a blond-headed little girl all dressed up for church and praying in front of a stained-glass window. Nobody much used their heating oil.

The pickle box was gigantic and provided enough bread-and-butters, gherkins, dill chips, midgets, spears, and relish to last the whole year. We awaited delivery of the pickle box like the Cratchits dreaming of a real turkey instead of one made only of old socks and hope.

After the mill, there was a brief stint selling burial insurance for quarter-a-month premiums that meant Daddy was home a lot during the day, and at night would sometimes return with little prizes for my sister and me.

Thumb-sized six-packs of wax bottles filled with “fruit” juice you drank before eating the wax bottle were the best, followed closely by pink-tipped candy “cigarettes.”

Remember that cigarettes were not only in fashion; they
were the perfect pretend accessory for a second grader like me. “Yes, Darrin, I’ll have another Manhattan, and would you mind lighting my ciggie? What?! It’s already lit! That would explain the hot-pink burning ash. Tra-la-laaaaa.”

Somewhere in there, my daddy worked briefly for the Internal Revenue Service. He had a desk and a spinning chair but had to drive a twenty-year-old car a hundred miles a day round trip on roads that hadn’t improved since wagon-train days.

Once he finally decided to try teaching, he realized that you only got paid nine months out of the year, so he did what a lot of teachers did and sold
World Book Encyclopedia
s from door to door.

This was a fabulous job as far as my sister and I were concerned because every salesman got to take home a World Book cyclorama game, a sort of early Trivial Pursuit that was cool and made entirely of plastic.

With a jar of chilled oil-company dill spears, a few packs of pink-tipped “cigarettes” and cyclorama to keep us company, our summer was set.

I don’t think Daddy ever sold many sets of
World Book.
When he did sell a few, we nervously waited to make sure the check had cleared and he could collect his commission before we could celebrate. If it didn’t clear, the encyclopedias would have to be picked back up and I imagined forlorn, overalled country kids with many missing teeth saying, “Please, Mister, I ain’t gotten past aardvark and there’s a big ol’ world out there!”

By the time fall and winter rolled around, and monthly paychecks were back in play, our thoughts turned only to pickles, and lots of ’em.

But one dark Christmas, the pickle box didn’t come. In a stunning slap in the face to original thought, the new owners of the oil company had the nerve to present each customer instead with the blond girl with the praying hands and stained-glass window calendar.

I wanted to slap her, even though obviously it wasn’t her fault. She was just some Midwestern photographer’s cute little girl (although, if I was right, she was probably in her mid-forties by now) and knew nothing of the pickle angst that was being felt across the land. OK, not the land, but at least about twenty square miles of scrub pine and substandard housing in southeastern North Carolina.

Teachers had tons of time off at Christmas, perhaps because Jesus had been one. He hadn’t worked in a textile mill, obviously, so you only got one week a year.

I could only hope that the oil company didn’t get any vacation at all. They had given and taketh away and I was irrationally disappointed as Christmas after Christmas passed pickleless.

By the time I got to high school, Daddy was teaching at the same high school.

“You in your dad’s class?” people would ask.

Since he taught special education, I had to say that I wasn’t. He was small-framed but strong like most Rivenbark men, and had the ability, also like Rivenbark men, to turn
perfectly tan in less time than it would take to walk shirtless to the edge of his garden, pluck a warm tomato, and bite into it.

Having inherited the, uh, delicate porcelain skin of my mother’s side of the family, I could only seethe as I lay on a sweaty webbed chaise longue day after day reading
Tiger Beat
and turning watermelon pink before peeling.

Daddy’s students all towered over him but he was proud of having never had to send one to the office.

“Not one time,” he would say much later, after I was married and the mother of a fifth grader myself. “Never sent one to the office. Not once.”

At eighty-five, he had slowed considerably and now I was learning all about something called dementia.

Suddenly, or so it seemed, he was staring in wonder at the speed with which I could tie his shoes after a doctor’s appointment.

“You do that good,” he’d say, looking down while I worked on these funny saddle oxfords that were his favorite shoes in the world.

“It’s not rocket science,” I muttered under my breath, tired of answering the same question twenty times in the past hour. Instantly, I felt a wave of guilt for being so snotty-sounding.

“You do that good,” he repeated. He might say it a few more times, this I knew. Sometimes, he repeated things so often I thought I would lose my own mind, joining him in this place where he had gone.

I knew that, in a few minutes, he would ask me, once
again, to check into some idiot insurance program that a has-been movie star had been advertising on TV lately. I came to nurture a genuine loathing for the has-beens and their rip-off insurance plans.

“You can’t be denied for any reason,” said my daddy. He said it again, apparently enjoying the feel of the words in his mouth.

Lately, he had taken to humming “Amazing Grace” wherever we went. The grocery store. The cafeteria. Even the doctor’s waiting room. The sound was not sweet, I thought, again feeling guilt for not celebrating the comfort that this old hymn seemed to bring him.

I remember thinking that I should be thankful that he could say anything to me at all, even if lately it was the same thing over and over.

And I reminded myself that it’s easy to be grateful for the obvious blessings in life, much harder to be grateful for the tough moments and the lessons they teach.

This man, who was down to 106 pounds now, had driven me to every sock hop and sleepover when I was a whiny preteen. He taught me how to drive a straight shift, never raising his voice as I lurched and jerked and impatiently ignored his advice.

“You do that good,” he had said when I finally, after many weeks and a few tears, mastered the art of parallel parking.

And now, four decades later and able to parallel park and tie shoes successfully, I realized that he was still teaching, even though it wasn’t intentional.

He was teaching me how to be a better person, someone less self-absorbed and less in a hurry. I had to slow down when I was with him. I had to breathe deeply. I learned to join him in a simple celebration of a sunny spot on my parents’ concrete patio.

“This is nice,” he said one day, surveying through eyes dimmed by macular degeneration and a memory that was getting increasingly jumbly. “This is nice.”

And it was. His last lesson taught was an appreciation for life stripped down to its barest bones.

And, under my breath, on that sunny spot on the patio, I thought,
You do that good.

A few days after his memorial service, I did a final errand for my daddy. The funeral home was just a couple of blocks from my house. In the deep, carefully reassuring tones that funeral directors use, they called to say that I could pick up my father’s “cremains.” It’s a word that is at once perfectly descriptive and gruesome.

I walked down the street to the funeral home on possibly the prettiest, most perfect February day I had ever seen. Warm, slight breeze, budding crocuses everywhere. It was as if I was in a splashy musical and all the flowers would bloom and nod and turn colors as soon as I passed by.

Walking back, cradling a box swaddled in purple velvet, I hoped that I wouldn’t run into anyone because I didn’t really want to have to explain what I was carrying.

But it was too gorgeous a day. The neighbors were out. Considering that it was the middle of the afternoon on a
workday, an almost comical number of them stopped me to say hello and a couple of them, yes, asked cheerily, “What’s in the box?”

I told them.

“Oh, sorry!”

“No, no, he would’ve loved taking a stroll on a day like today.”

A long time ago, I had a friend whose father died and was cremated. He loved two things in this world, she said: hot dogs and flying. So she put him in her carry-on, flew him to the Charlotte airport, bought a jumbo dog with mustard and relish, put his urn on the little round table, ate half the hot dog and, one hour later, boarded the plane for the hourlong flight home, her daddy stowed safely back in her carry-on.

It was a great story, and walking along with the purple velvet box o’ Daddy I thought I knew exactly how she felt sitting in that airport restaurant, toasting her dad with exactly one-half of a cold Bud Lite.

About halfway home, I caught myself humming “Amazing Grace.” The sound was sweet.

I remember just like it was yesterday the sticky July morning I stole the wrestling poster off the telephone pole and made little Hermie Drucker cry.

Sure, I was twelve and I should’ve taken the high road. Hermie, the asthmatic redheaded kid brother of a friend of mine, was only seven, and the wail he let out when he pedaled his Western Auto banana bike up to that pole to claim “his” poster could’ve been heard six counties away.

I could easily hear Hermie’s screams of outrage from my post across the road at MacMillan’s, a rickety country store with a wood floor so worn out that, to a bare foot, it felt as soft as a satin bedspread. Watching Hermie from underneath the rusty overhang at the Sinclair pumps made me feel a little guilty.

There he was, so full of hope and determination, ready to
rip “our” poster off that telephone pole and skedaddle back home, where he would have, no doubt, taped it to his wall right alongside the Rip Hawk and Swede Hansen poster he’d stolen from me not six months earlier.

Just thinking about it made me mad as a hen on a hot griddle.
Little shit
, I thought, picturing the way the green- and orange- and yellow-striped poster
with photos
would have looked on my own bedroom wall.

Hermie and I both wanted this latest poster, and we finally agreed (me, with my fingers crossed neatly behind my back) that the only Christian thing to do would be to wait until the tag-team match between George Becker and Johnny Weaver at the Wallace National Guard Armory was officially over. Which had been the previous night.

“You snooze, you lose,” I shouted to Hermie, who just stared at me as if I had sprouted horns and a forked tail. All that was left on the creosote pole was little bitty pieces of the orange corners of the poster stuck to a few staples that I hadn’t been able to dislodge. They mocked him.

Although he was only seven years old, Hermie’s apple hadn’t fallen far from the evangelistic family tree. His grandmother, a snow-haired woman, four-feet eight inches in height and the same approximate width, had taught the catechism to all the country kids in our dinky little North Carolina town.