My Father’s Trip
The seaside can be a dreary place. So much fog hovering over these thrashing waves. Rocks standing like folks, waving, staring quietly at the foamy tides. They were sights that stretched into the farthest distance.
My father grew up in there in that cold, desolate place. Just him and his parents, making the most of a life so simple and so forgotten. If he didn’t have his picture books growing up, the ones about space creatures and daring adventurers, he might have thought the whole world looked like that little wet, hostile piece of land. Yes, father was a proud man— as proud as his father was a mess.
Grandfather liked his drinks. With his morning breakfast, during a lunchtime sandwich, at dinner, with friends, to pair with a pickle jar and before going to bed. He never said no to a foamy pint. He had them brought from far away, special delivery brought to his door by the hardest working mailman in the land. It was an expense the old man was willing to make, as long as it made that plain existence there over the cliffs just a bit more tolerable, a bit more relaxing. Tending lettuce had its maddening qualities.
My father told me that they only ever left this land but once a year. It always fell on the day of my grandparents’ anniversary. They would pack a few things, wear their best-ironed clothes, then make the drive, hours away, in that old buggy, until they reached the nearest town. When they arrive, they’d meditate on the sights, the bronze sculpture commemorating some fallen soldiers, they’d walk around a breezy garden, before sitting down somewhere to watch the street performers across the town square, seldom leaving any coins for the entertainment they provided. It was tradition for them to conclude their holiday with a visit to the dance hall, where my father would recall with some glint of a smile, how grandpa and grandma used to dance with the energy of two smitten school children. The way my father spoke about these moments, it seemed as though the only time he felt his parents were in love was when he saw them act like fools in these boisterous jigs they did, within the chatter and murmur of those hallowed halls. Yet these memories were tainted for my father. Grandpa would always get embarrassingly drunk and it was all but inevitable that Grandma and father would have to carry him in his drunken, unconscious state, back to their car, before my father would get in the driver’s seat, barely able to see over the steering wheel, back to the black and gray beach they called home.
Once this day had passed, it seemed they would spend the rest of the year in solitude and monotony of frosty walls and basic meals. A life like that, so rural, made my father a soft, patient man. He had a slow and meditative quality, having never indulged in a drink in his life after seeing what it did to his old man. He was quite a quiet person after all that past.
Some days I think about going out there myself, just me and the car and a nice puffy jacket. I think the hiking store nearby has a sale going on. I’d like to take myself back to that place, that calm, perhaps suffocating environment. I want to take in those desolate views of the large, breathtaking sea. I want to see what made my father the way he was, what made the man that made me. The trip would not be complete of course, unless I also made a quick trip to that nearby town, with its podunk dance hall, that wafting stench of boozy barrels, and its out-of-tune fiddle resonating through the air. It would be the kind of air that recalls two ancient and belated lovebirds, who in a brief annual ritual, would incite the initial seed of romance that planted their tree. I think that would be a nice trip for me, indeed.