Sting-Ray Afternoons

The look on Dad’s face—of cartoon surprise and delight—confirms that he never expected to receive anything. Rubbing his palms together in anticipation, wondering out loud what this wrapped cylinder could possibly be, he says what he always does when his can of Penn tennis balls is revealed: “Pretty fancy!” He makes a big display of showing it to Mom, then protests when we try to ply him with a second gift: “What? But you already gave me…” And then the whole rigmarole repeats itself when he unwraps his bottle of Old Spice.

Mom is last. Tom and I pooled our allowance money and bought Mom, from the Ben Franklin five-and-dime, a ceramic gnome pushing a wheelbarrow. She unwraps it carefully, like an archaeologist excavating an Etruscan vase, and turns it around in her hands. I see we’ve forgotten to remove its $3.99 price tag and worry that Mom will think we’ve spent too much. But she is moved to near speechlessness and places the gnome among her Lladró figurines from Spain, her Waterford crystal from Ireland, the lacquered geishas from Japan, and all the other treasures in the living room curio cabinet, where it shall remain for the next two decades, spotlit behind glass.

The house is filled with the plunder of Dad’s trips abroad, including an enormous oil painting of a man and his donkey, which Dad bought in the Philippines for five bucks—frame included—and immediately hung above the fireplace in the family room. If a Manila mule isn’t Mom’s first choice as the centerpiece of her family room, she doesn’t say so, even if it dwarfs the hand-carved statue of Christ the Redeemer below it on the mantelpiece, hand-carried home from Rio.

After Mom unwraps the ceramic gnome, I give her the clay ashtray, spray-painted gold, that I made in art class. “For when company comes over,” I say as she removes its wrapping of tissue paper.

Mom holds it high for all to see and says, “Just what I didn’t want!”

But I can see from her smile, and her eyes, that she means the opposite. When she kisses me on the cheek, she whispers in my ear, “It’s perfect.” And on Christmas morning she could be talking about everything.





6.





As We Fell into the Sun




Dad turns forty the first week of June in 1974 and celebrates with a backyard barbecue. He shouts for me to lug the bag of Kingsford charcoal briquettes from the garage to the patio, where I find him next to his beloved twenty-two-inch Weber One-Touch Kettle grill, as black and shiny as a Cadillac hood.

In its porcelain-enameled sheen I see the fish-eye reflection of our backyard: the clothesline that opens like an umbrella from the concrete patio, the aluminum swing set beyond the sandbox, and Dad in the foreground, looking like I’ve never seen him. He has his burger flipper in one hand, a lowball glass in the other, a portrait of suburban American Gothic that he always is on the weekends. But he also wears a pair of inverted tighty-whities on his head like a chef’s hat. Emblazoned on the Y-front of those cotton underpants—a birthday gift he has evidently just opened—is the phrase HOME OF THE WHOPPER.

The lowball glass is filled with scotch. Dad drank gin in the ’60s, switched to scotch for the ’70s, and has vowed he will try vodka for the entirety of the 1980s. It’s not the only way in which his drinking is rigidly organized. At home, Dad never drinks during the week but enjoys his “libations” on Friday and Saturday evenings, usually while he’s grilling: family steak, pork chops, handcrafted hamburgers the size of his considerable fists. Standing beside his Weber, Dad is a successful Midwestern salesman enjoying the fruits of another successful Midwestern salesman.

The Weber One-Touch Kettle was invented by a salesman at the Weber Brothers Metal Works in Chicago, that cradle of 1970s civilization and incubator of immortal salespeople. The company made marine buoys, but George Stephen—a father of twelve and a man who went through family steak faster than we did—saw in those buoys a better grill. He sawed one in half, topped it with a domed lid, and added vents and legs, legs that practically galloped around the world. George Stephen had invented the Weber grill. This same object of perfection is now being poked and pronged by my father, who prides himself on lighting any grill or fireplace with a single struck match, earning the self-bestowed nickname “One-Match Rushin.”

He has a similar skill with constipated bottles of Heinz ketchup, striking one violent blow with the meat of his palm to the bottom of the bottle. The ketchup flows instantly.

“Like Fonzie with the jukebox,” I say, but he doesn’t know Fonzie. He doesn’t even watch Archie Bunker from his Archie Bunker chair. He watches four things: news, sports, Johnny Carson, and the world’s most boring show, Wall Street Week on PBS, hosted by a man in what looks like a George Washington wig.

I drag the bag of Kingsford to Dad. It’s all deadweight. He strikes a match and the Weber goes up like the Hindenburg.

“I think I’ll have a libation,” Dad says whenever he grills, in case Mom wants to join him. She almost never does.

The liquor cabinet in the kitchen is filled with sapphire-blue and emerald-green spirits that are intoxicating even from a distance. The beefeater on the Beefeater bottle, the clipper ship on the Cutty Sark, the Dewar’s bagpiper, the crown on the bottle of Crown Royal—these are adult analogs of the icons on my cereal boxes: King Vitamin, Cap’n Crunch, the Lucky Charms leprechaun, the Trix rabbit.

Unlike the cereal, the booze has a whole kitchen drawer devoted to its accessories. The corkscrews, stoppers, shakers, strainers, jiggers, muddlers, zesters, and reamers are of mysterious utility yet vital to Dad’s weekend rituals. In that same way, they remind me of the censers, snuffers, cruets, chalices, and ciboriums that Father Zheel-bair avails himself of when I’m serving Mass at Nativity.

The full alcoholic arsenal is on display tonight during Dad’s fortieth—the olives, the maraschino cherries, the little bottle of lime juice, the Schweppes tonic water, the bitters, the tiny plastic swords, the miniature umbrellas, the faux-leather ice bucket and stainless-steel tongs—all these trappings of religious sacrament.

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