(My Father Climbs the Stairs)
By Richard Odell
My father never climbed the stairs to the children’s rooms (my mother, well, she was up there quite a bit, usually when no one else was around). So the sole instance of my father suddenly appearing in the bedroom, with my brother and myself present, his arms laden with that fruit box filled with compost, and the sprinkler bottle rolling around on top of the works, should’ve been dated, framed, and hung. I was five, I think.
The box was for me. That was made plain. Apparently I had displayed, at some point in my young life, an aptitude for things of the soil. My father set the box of compost on top of the odd, little wood stove we never used, and put the sprinkler bottle upright beside it. The bottle was designed for use while ironing, with stippled glass, for easy grip, but I guess the steam iron had been invented by then, and my mother could now be disabused of this future curiosity.
I was told: corn seeds were in the soil. I was instructed: sprinkle the soil with water whenever it looks dry. I could scarcely wait for that. No later had my father disappeared downstairs than I made my first application with the sprinkler bottle. This was followed several days later by a profusion of little, green seedlings.
The two events were of course unrelated – the soil was moist when my father first presented it, and these were not corn seedlings, but weeds. I would later learn of dicots and monocots, and the Parable of the Tares, but for the nonce I thought myself the cause of this revelation, and the sense of possibility with which it marked me never left, but in fact grew larger, more compelling, even as I moved through life and adulthood, through ten towns and cities, further and further from my Island origins.
What became of the box of corn I don’t recall, though the sprinkler bottle made it back to the utility room, where it rested, unemployed, through the remainder of the Twentieth Century. No matter. The real lesson, the lesson I failed to absorb, the lesson that would wait upon my arrival, was in the weeds.
~
A blue-sky Saturday morning in El Cerrito, California. The Bay Area. A pleasant clime. It’s April, and I’m inspired. The final metabolites of Friday night alcohol – following the After-Hours-of-Hate with my co-workers in the bar around the corner from my San Francisco workplace, the belly-of-the-whale ride home on the BART train, the four or five nightcaps hunkered down in my little cottage three blocks off I-80 – have been marginalized by multiple cups of French roast coffee and a yet-resilient constitution.
I am 33 years old. My only assets are a 1979 Plymouth Fury – olive drab, once employed by the San Leandro police department – and a Shepherd-mix dog, Gretchen by name, of undetermined age, which I sprung, the year before, from the Berkeley Humane Society. She was the last brilliant idea I had. This morning I have another.
I load Gretchen and myself into the Plymouth and the two of us head for the business district above Albany. There’s a nursery up there, and a lumber yard that I’ve seen but never visited. El Cerrito, Albany, Berkeley – they’re all of one thing, though the demographics shift along the way, and try finding a good bar in any of them. Gretchen’s not her real name, by the way. The name I originally gave her sounds stupid, and was stupid in the giving of it, so I’m giving her a new name, just now. May we all be given new names, someday.
We come home with 16 feet of 1 x 4 Doug Fir, custom-cut (I own no tools), four bags of topsoil, several six-packs of sky blue pansies, seeds for godetia and poppy, a trowel (I now own a tool), and a chicken with beans burrito from the El Gordo Taqueria. They were good, the El Gordos of the day.
Post-burrito, I’m out in the sunshine, hacking away at the sod along the side of the cottage (my landlord having left a shovel in the storage shed), and by late afternoon I have myself a nice, little, raised flower bed.
It occurs just now that Gretchen and the flower bed were connected in some way; that I must have my flower bed for the same reason bachelors and children must have their dogs. But that’s not what I was thinking at the time, if I was thinking anything at all. More likely, I was stirred by scents of memories, like the dusty scents stirred up by the dangling ears of a bloodhound, nose to the ground, set upon the course of something gone missing (T.S. Eliot had April in a hammer lock); of a life desired (not the life being lived), and of the day my father climbed the stairs.
~
Now it is the edge of winter. Depression to the point of hallucination, chronic nausea, and self-induced neuropathy, have rendered me unable to work, stomach food, or even to write my own name.
The Plymouth Fury, a spacious thing, is enough for what little I own and want to keep, with room yet on the front seat for Gretchen. True, it has no reverse gear, but I don’t want one. We take I-80 east til we see the sign (I can see it even now), I-5 North, Redding. Redding is of no matter.
A dark, December evening is descending on my birthday. Clouds in off the coast are tailing us, like a jealous past, roiled with cartoonish thunderbolts, bottles marked XXX, corrupted gurus, the woman in the red dress with the gold crucifix; whatever remained of the Road Less Travelled. Yeah, I took that road.
Heavy rains will catch up with us as we climb the mountain pass. Passing semis will pound us, again and again, with blinding sheets of runoff, such that we fear the hidden precipice in the dark.
Seven hundred miles – and one ferry boat ride – to the north, where I hope to be by sunrise, my mother is baking a birthday cake. She has no idea what she’s in for.
