Dad's Tacos

In memory of the man who made the table worth coming to

Begin with the pork. Begin there, as all good things begin, with patience and smoke and a man who understood that the best meals are not cooked but conjured, drawn out of raw and ordinary matter by a kind of love that does not announce itself but simply tends the fire, simply keeps the heat where the heat needs to be, simply knows, as the knowing men always know, that time is not the enemy of flavor but its collaborator, its silent partner, its oldest and most faithful friend.

He knew this. He knew all of it.

He stood at his smoker in the particular light that belongs to him alone in memory, that amber-gold light of late afternoon that clings to the people we love long after we can no longer reach them, and he tended that fire with the easy authority of a man entirely in his kingdom, entirely at home in the world he had made from the small and sovereign materials available to him, a smoker, a recipe held in his hands and not on paper, an apartment made cathedral by the things he chose to fill it with, by the relics of a life spent loving the strange and the beautiful and the gloriously, defiantly strange-beautiful both at once.

The knickknacks. The pop culture totems. The cats, too many of them and never enough, moving through the rooms like small warm sentences in a language only he was fully fluent in, winding between his ankles at the smoker, occupying every surface with the sovereign indifference of creatures who understood instinctively that this was a kingdom worth inhabiting, that this particular man was worth choosing, as cats always choose, without ceremony, without negotiation, simply by being there and continuing to be there and allowing themselves to be loved by someone who had more than enough love for all of them and then some. The objects that stood on every surface like a congregation of small and faithful gods, each one a sentence in the ongoing autobiography of a man who read Barker and meant it, who read Barker and understood that the world behind the world is not a metaphor but a doorway, if you know how to look, if you possess the particular vision that lets you see the sacred in the plastic and the lurid, the infinite curled inside the finite, the gorgeous dark that breathes beneath the ordinary light.

He saw it. He always saw it.

And now the shelves are bare. Now a drunk and careless hand has swept the relics into boxes and the boxes into storage and the storage into darkness and the house stands emptied of its soul, the walls still keeping their shape, the rooms still holding their dimensions, but something gone from them, some animating principle, some warmth that was not the furnace but the man, and you walk through those rooms now and the air is wrong, the air is the air of a stage between productions, all the scenery struck, all the props in crates, the ghost light burning in the center and nothing else, nothing else at all.

The things that should be there are not there. The man who should be there is not there. Both absences conspire against you. Both absences speak with the same voice, the low and patient voice of loss, which does not shout but merely continues, merely persists, merely is there every morning when you open your eyes and remember again what you will spend the rest of your life learning how to carry.

But here. Come back to the smoke. Come back to the afternoon and the fire and the smell that reached you at the door before the door was open, that smell of slow pork and woodsmoke that was not simply dinner but a summoning, a signal, the flare sent up from the center of the world that meant come in, come in, the table is yours, you are wanted here, you are known here, you are loved here in the plainest and most nourishing sense, the sense that requires no declaration because it is already in the food, already in the way he stands at the counter and builds your taco with the care of a man who understands that what we give people to eat is what we give them of ourselves.

There was no recipe written down. There never is, for the meals that matter. The meals that matter live in the hands that made them, in the specific gravity of a particular man's particular love, and when the hands are gone the recipe goes with them into whatever country the dead inhabit, that country Barker mapped so many times with such ferocious and loving detail, that country of beautiful terrible doors and the mysteries that wait beyond them in the dark that is not empty but full, so full, full of everything that ever mattered and was taken too soon.

He went through one of those doors last December and the door did not stay open behind him and you ran to Arizona because the world was too much and the world was too little both at once, which is what loss does, which is its oldest and most reliable cruelty, the way it makes everything too loud and too silent in the same moment, the way it crowds the chest and empties every room simultaneously, the way it takes the man who was more father than the fathers were and reduces the evidence of him to bare shelves and a house that has forgotten how to be itself.

But not you. You have not forgotten.

You carry the meal. You carry the smoke and the afternoon. You carry the table and the gathered family and the particular sound of his laugh, the sound of a man completely present in the only moment there ever is. You carry the cats, his too-many beloved cats, the ones who chose him and in choosing him chose you by extension, as cats do, with that slow and serious feline consideration that is not loyalty exactly but is something older than loyalty, something that does not have a clean word but lives in the particular way they move through a room still looking for him, still expecting to find him at the smoker or the chair, still carrying in their small warm bodies the memory of his hands, which means you are not the only one who carries it, which means the grief has company, which means when one of them finds you in a room that used to be his and sits with you in it without asking anything of you at all, that is him. That is still him. You carry the taco, built by his hands, handed to your hands, the transaction so simple and so enormous that you could not have known, then, to mark it, to press it into the book of permanent things and say: here, this is the one, this is the moment I will carry when the carrying is all there is.

You know now.

You know now the weight and the worth of it. You know now what the smoke was saying all those afternoons in the language of patient men who love without condition and cook without a recipe and fill their homes with the beautiful and the strange because they understand, as Barker understood, as the dead understand, that the world is more than what it shows you and a life well-lived is an act of insistence on that fact, a daily, delicious, smoke-wreathed insistence, a pulled pork taco handed to someone you love on an ordinary afternoon that was never, not for a single moment, ordinary at all.

Begin with the pork.

Begin there, and let the smoke rise, and let the afternoon come back to you, and let him stand in it, tending his fire, entirely in his kingdom, waiting for the family to come through the door and find the table set, and find the food ready, and find him there, as he always was, as he always will be, as long as someone who loves him remembers to begin.

For the man who made the table worth coming to. You are the smoke still in the air of every room. We are still coming through the door.