Treasure

I’ve tried writing this a few times, but each time I wonder if it’s the right way to say it. I’m not sure the revisions are helping. So here's the raw download, just how the thoughts came to me. Feeling like the first cut is the truth; what I really feel.

And the story itself is true. This really happened. I’d like to think it was supernatural, that it really was my dad coming back to visit.

But it doesn’t make logical sense. If I’m a humanist, like I say, then this should just have been a coincidence, since we look for patterns deliberately and see them where we want to see them. And I’ve had years to develop patterns around it, adjust memories, find threads that fit together, so it all weaves into a beautiful story that can’t be figured out, no matter how you look at it.

Like my dad being a bird watcher. He spent hours in an old rocking chair in the dining room, looking out the sliding glass door to the backyard with a pair of binoculars to his face.

Or him being a collector. When he wasn’t in the chair he was out “beeping”, dangling a cigarette from his lips like a rock star, waving a metal detector over parks, playgrounds, farms, anywhere treasure might be unearthed.

My sister and I had to decide how to split up his other collections: stamps, coins, filet knives (don’t ask, but they’re cool). We used to say he must have been a crow in a previous life. He liked crows, actually. He didn’t see them as dark birds at all. He admired their language and intelligence. His nest, too, was full of shiny objects.

My dad was also a pianist, a writer, a smoker, a fisherman. A mystery. Mom said he could play Malagueña and The Bells of Moscow, and we had the piano and the sheet music, but he always said he was out of practice.

He was a psychologist. He said he got into the profession largely to figure out his own problems. He was seeing a psychiatrist. He joked one time that the shrink’s kids were the most screwed up.

I lived with him during my junior and senior years of high school, after he and my mom separated. He watched “The Wall” with me one night, trying to understand my black moods. He had a poster in his apartment that said, “Life is like an onion. You peel back layers, and sometimes you weep.”

I'm sure he was dreaming of stories when he was out there alone on a frozen lake in the middle of winter, plunging a hole through the ice and dropping a fishing line in. Who does that, ice fishing? Someone struggling with their thoughts, I think.

He passed from lung cancer in 1996. He was 56 years old. He smoked straights for a long time and used one of those refillable metal lighters that you flip open. I'll never forget that click, and that butane smell.

He tried everything to quit, even acupuncture. He said the acupuncturist stuck a bunch of needles in him and fiddled with them for an hour but barely spoke. He said when he got out of there he wanted a cigarette more than anything in his life.

I’m older than him now. I’ve outlived him. I still have a box of his stuff that I haven’t looked at. My mom said there's some of his poetry in it. He never shared it with anyone. I haven’t been ready to read it. I feel strange about it, like I’d be barging in on his private thoughts. Maybe some things are indeed best left secret, some treasure forever undiscovered.

***

By the time Dad got sick, I had graduated and moved to the West Coast. I flew back for the funeral and stayed a week with the family, at the little brick Midwest house where I grew up.

I sat in the rocking chair, still in the dining room facing out to the yard. Mom had moved some stuff around since the divorce (the ashtray certainly wasn't there anymore!), but the chair stayed right where it was.

I found the binoculars in the basement. It was cool that he left them for me when he left with his new girlfriend. His desk was still there too, buried under stacks of who-knows-what. Decades of life tucked into corners to deal with later. Maybe this is why I avoid cleaning out closets. You have to go through all the memories of how the stuff got there in the first place.

Like what's in the writing in the box sitting in my office unread. He was out there on the road somewhere, living a Keroac dream all in his mind. Wishing he was on that empty freight car instead of sitting at our dinner table. He never really lived like he wanted to live when he was with us, I don't think. His energy simply couldn't escape.

I don't remember much about the funeral service itself. You’d think I would; he was my dad after all. Like this would be a really important moment that would stick out in my mind for the rest of my life. But memories don’t work like that. At least, mine don’t. They’re full of holes.

My stepmom decided to have a stone bench put near the grave, where people could sit and watch birds in Dad's honor. We had the option to put an inscription on it, but it had to be short, like five or six words, tops. She asked if I wanted to write something, knowing I was a writer. The words came to me almost instantly.

"Spread your wings and dream," I said.

***

So when I returned home after the funeral, that’s when it happened.

I had not been back for even 24 hours. I woke up and made my tea as usual, then poured a fresh mug, stepped outside, and stopped.

The ground was shimmering with a blanket of jet-black feathers. Dozens of crows were casually walking around, covering my lawn, mingling with each other or stopping to take in the scenery.

I looked up to see more crows rustling through the tree branches and perching along the power lines. They were EVERYWHERE, descending like ink dots, filling in every available space. Just in my yard. There had to be hundreds.

And the silence. Not the chatter you'd usually hear from these birds. The absence of it, like the silence itself was speaking. Like when Dad would take me beeping, but we wouldn't say anything; we just stood together with our own thoughts.

Or the last time I visited him at his office before I went off to college. He spent most of the time going to the window, looking at his watch, wondering when Mom was going to get there to pick me up. His mind was somewhere else. His spirit was somewhere else. I didn't know what to say at the time. I guess small talks could reveal big things.

The crows stayed all day, quiet as if attending a church service. Then they just as silently soared off, a few at a time, the yard emptying slowly until by sunset there were none left. 

I’ve never seen so many crows in one place at one time. Never before and never since. Why then? Why only then? Why crows and not some other bird?

As I finish writing this now, it occurs to me that maybe Dad finally found his people. Maybe that's what they were here for.