He wakes up at a masochistic 4:30 a.m.. He unloads the dishwasher then runs for an hour and a half before coming back for breakfast. He reads and eats and sits with himself. In these hours, he is unseen and unheard.
At 8:15 a.m., he packs his lunch—the same thing every time: a little over two dozen almonds, a turkey and lettuce sandwich on whole grain bread, and a single bunch of grapes. He knows every brand of cracked pepper turkey. He has a carefully curated ranking of all of them. One week, mom accidentally bought honey-baked turkey. He noted the mistake at every opportunity, soliloquizing on the tragedy that had befallen his lunch—one of the few oases in his long day. His palate is gentle. The little pepper flecks are, to him, the essence of the sandwich. He could go on. Still, he laid on the slices just the same, finished the pack, and waited patiently for the next grocery run. No matter the ingredient changes, he always completes lunch assembly at 8:30 a.m. Then, it’s time for work.
Work, the rut, the grind—it has many names. I’ve never seen him at it; but from his description, it involves some kind of back-breaking, mind-numbing labor that leaves him completely spent by early evening. He tells me he only has a few functional hours in the morning; once work begins, so does the decline. The claims of his purported patients contradict this. He has a fantastic bedside manner. He’s smart. He’s funny. He’s the best dermatologist in Greensboro. He cut that thing off my leg. When I occasionally bring these reports to him, he categorically denies them. He insists his work is grunt work, that a trained monkey could probably do it. It’s a grueling eight-hour trial, broken only by a brief 1 p.m. respite when he finally gets to eat that perfectly crafted sandwich.
He comes home at 5:40 p.m.. Although he is no longer physically in his office, the work continues. Charts have to be filed, prescriptions sent. This happens behind the closed doors of his study. Warm light diffuses from under the door, fanning across the floorboards. Sometime between 5:40 and dinner at 8:30, he transfers from his work to reading or watching a basketball game. If you enter his study in this time frame, you’ll find him at leisure. If you leave him alone and then ask him at dinner what he was doing in his study, he’ll invariably say that he was working the whole time.
At dinner, the true performance begins. We receive the full enumeration of what he does for “us people,” his term for our family. Before us he paints an image of the real world—equal parts boring and brutal. But mom knows better. She says dad is a pessimist, and he retorts that he is only a realist. My sister and I poke fun at his reality, and my brother pokes holes. We laugh and he laughs. Just as it seems we’ve reached an agreement, he flees from the table and retreats to the sink. We’ve become a nuisance again. Our clamor distracts him from the complex work of dishwashing —an art we could never hope to master. Making matters worse, he still needs to sweep the floor beneath our feet. We go upstairs to watch a movie and we suggest he join us when he is done with that labor only he can comprehend. He suggests such a feat would kill him—or at the least ruin his sleep. He is going right to bed after sweeping. Maybe he’ll do some reading first.
The flickering blue light of the screenplays across our faces. He leans in the door frame, slowly nibbling at a snack-sized chocolate-covered ice cream cone. What are you guys watching? Is it any good? Maybe I’ll stay here for just a bit.
I grew up under the overcast sky of my father’s realism, but I often felt thoroughly insulated from it. My whims were indulged, and my imagination was allowed to wander. My father would sponsor expeditions into our attic to fetch old computers and other forgotten technology for me to dissect. Circuit boards and hard drives and wires would lay scattered across my floor for days as I continued towards an arbitrary endpoint of deconstruction. He would join me as I put together legos, sifting through bins of jumbled plastic to look for a specific piece while I busied myself with constructing my broader vision.
He came to the readings for my elementary school creative writing club, and he took me home from my guitar lessons. In middle school, as my mind and body wandered from home, he loaned me his old mountain bike. I rode it to the edge of the neighborhood, and then to the edge of town. I began to yearn for quiet and solitude, desires he indulged.
Our activities gradually diverged, we had one ritual that made up for it all. Sometimes, just before dinner, I’d join him in his study to read. He’d sit in his big chair, and I would sprawl across the couch. We’d share the light of a single lamp. He’d ask me what I was reading, and I’d show him. He’d nod his head in appreciation. The next week, I’d come into the living room with a different book and find him with the one I had just finished. Scanning the lines slowly and turning the pages with care, he’d read those young adult books—those books I thought were too simple for grown-ups like him—with the same attention and intensity he brought to that big volume of Montaigne he had been crawling through for years, the one I was sure held the key to all the things he said that I didn’t yet understand.
Equally totemic in my childhood imagination were those early morning hours where he was unperceived by the world. He often alluded to this time as the one part of the day when he was simultaneously energetic and at peace. These were the hours before the decay. One morning, I was awoken by the clink of dishes landing in cabinets, the pattern of his footsteps, and his intermittent sniffling (his plights, too many to enumerate entirely, also include near-constant allergies). I knew that these sounds initiated the beginning of those mythical hours, though usually, they were too quiet to disturb anyone. I decided to uncover the truth. As my feet took the last step from the carpeted stairs to the hardwood floor of the kitchen, I didn’t find him in an especially cheery mood or bathed in an angelic glow. He merely greeted me with a soft “good morning” and continued with the task at hand, appearing just the same as any other time. I ate cereal and read. I watched his little processes, the minutiae that surrounded every chore. I watched his preparations for the run. He zipped his jacket and tied perfect knots on his shoes. He did so without a sound, without the stream of self-ironizing commentary I had grown accustomed to.
I wish I had the language to argue that the dignity he brings to his life shone in that very moment when he deigned not to speak of it. I wish I could say for certain that his exacting nature—his mindfulness in each act, his carefully imposed structure—is a form of radical engagement with the world, a defense against entropy, and an expression of himself that does not require speech. But, in the quiet kitchen pre-dawn, he never argued such. And I’ve never had the courage to ask, perhaps out of fear he’d answer in the negative.
What I did ask that morning—just as he had nestled a beanie on his head and was ready to leave—was how he mentally survived his long runs when he never brought earbuds. Did he talk to himself? Did he sing to himself? Did he narrate the thoughts of darting squirrels? No, he said, I don’t say anything at all.
