Written Long Ago

In my earliest memory of my father, he is carrying me into the Galveston surf. I am afraid of the waves. One wave splashes into my nose. I start crying. My father laughs and carries me back to shore, back to my mother and my shovel and pail. He is young and broad-shouldered, and ahead of him lie more than 50 years of life … more than 50 years of memories that come back now … following him around while he did yard work … riding with him in the blue white-topped Ford … watching him carry my stolen tricycle back to me in the orange sunlight … jumping off the Greyhound bus into his arms, my grandmother and the bus driver laughed … asking him to lift me up one more time to see his father in the casket … fishing trips on the Brazos, looking up at the stars while he explained time and the speed of light … in his newspaper office, he would staple together sheets of yellow paper for me to draw my own comic books … the day after Kennedy was killed, our drive to Dallas … helping him deliver papers in the pre-dawn hours … the night of the big flood, we were up all night covering the story … the road trip to Colorado … the day the prisoner escaped from jail … the time he yelled at me because I couldn’t work the clutch … the night the newspaper office burned … our fishing trip to the Coast in ‘72 … his struggle with alcoholism … the years of my bitterness … angry words … the weeks after my wife left, taking the car with her, he stayed with me so I could use his car … the phone calls, the jokes he told … my new wife and I visiting him in Garland … his small garden … his failing health, the wheelchair … last Christmas when we sat up late talking while the rain pattered outside … so many memories, so many more … the final memories, his cold hand gripping mine and shaking it to let me know he heard and understood … the day he died, after struggling so hard to breathe, suddenly he was still, and I knew this day had been written long ago … that, on the day he carried me into the surf, it had already been written … and that these days too, the first days of a life without him, these days too were written long ago …