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July 13, 2005
a gift of stones
i keep thinking it was "six million dollar man."
no, wait - it was "the hardy boy mysteries."
the front windows in the living room looked out to the highway, a good 150 yards away. the wall behind where i was sitting on the floor, watching t.v. and playing with legos, was mostly sliding glass patio door, looking out to the backyard, past the structure of what used to be a small water tower, the small red pump house next to it, beyond that the woods that grew so dark at night.
at some point, i looked up, and saw the small man hunkered before the water hydrant that stuck up out of the back yard next to the pump house.
i watched quietly for a while, watched him drink, methodically wash and rinse his bandana and wipe his face. from fifty feet away, you could sense weariness, the lack of any threat.
i looked down the hallway. my dad was in the bedroom. it'd be a matter of time before he saw him. i finally called softly down the hall, told him somebody was out back.
living on 52 acres, with the closest house being old judge phillips' about a mile away, anyone that came off the busy highway, through the locked gate, and up to the house was immediately a bit suspect.
dad looked out of the window, frowned, returned to the bedroom. i heard the drawer open, with the same ominous rumble and clunk as the drawer where he kept the wide leather belts i had become so well acquainted with.
he reemerged, a leather shoulder holster strapped across his white t-shirt with a large, glistening .44 magnum making its presence as obvious as it could without it being pointed at your head. the reddish-brown holster complemented his curly, poofy reddish-brown hair and charlie daniels-like beard.
he may or may not have also been wearing a large hat.
you may watch king of the hill, but if you haven't lived it, you just don't know.
he went outside, and mom came out of the kitchen to watch with me through the window. the man's body language was deferential; he stood slowly and nodded deeply as my dad approached, visibly as much out of the acknowledgement that he was trespassing as out of respect for the imposing redneck with dirty harry's gun.
they talked a while, and quickly, i saw my dad's posture relax just a bit, his hands at ease and not so ready to reach for the his pistol, now only the slightest mutual wariness shading the sight of two grown men talking to each other.
eventually, i saw nothing interesting was going to happen. i'd never seen my dad in a fight, but he was still a beefy guy, and i wondered just how much damage he could do. i turned back to my legos and the television.
my dad came back in eventually, and i heard him in the kitchen talking to my mother, then i heard keys jingling, and the door closing again.
when mom walked through the living room, almost undoubtedly to go clean something, i asked what had happened, and where they had gone.
"he's a wetback. he doesn't speak much english, and he just got here. your dad took him to rosie's tamale house to see if he could find him a job."
i know what hit you first. wetback. ironically, said in the broken english of a korean immigrant. it bugs more me now, but at the time, it was just one element of the racial morass i found myself in as a kid. as the chubby asian kid, i occasionally got called a "chink." then, of course, there was the single, recurring, wonderful lyrical taunt:
chinese, japanese,
dirty knees,
look at these (here, one pulls their shirt out to simulate breasts)
i have no idea what this means. just now, writing this, three decades later, it occurs to me that the only sensible explanation would be as a reference to asian prostitution.
you know how the whities like their asian hookers.
it didn't get worse until sixth grade, when i not only matriculated into the peculiar intensity of pubescent cruelty, but into a school district in which i constituted approximately half of the asian student body. but, even in elementary school, there were the days i came home and asked, "why?" i reported the words i heard, and how the others seemed to not be so keen on the shape of my eyes and the slight yellowish tint of my skin, tempered though it was by cross-breeding.
the response was always that "they" were wrong to treat me that way, to treat me any differently. well, that, and dad suggested that i kick their asses.
but the rhetoric would fall off sharply for other races, for the n*ggers, the sp*cs, and the camel jockeys. my apologies to the middle eastern contingent, but i just couldn't figure out which vowel to "*". it was a crisis of juvenile logic to be told that it was wrong to call me a chink when the slow driver in front of our pickup truck was a black son of a bitch. i was told "they" were wrong, but sometimes, my dad was clearly "they."
but for a long time, i was little better. i thought i was compassionate, progressive, but my ignorance was stronger. as a teenager, i told jokes that today would make me want to beat someone. i had weirdly lamarckian theories about evolution that could only make sense to cleverly ignorant 10 year-old logic. my parents applauded that cleverness, but it was a cleverness that, out of their love for me, helped validate their racism.
over time, and increasingly in just the past five or six years, my father has softened with experience and exposure and wisdom, and maybe with less testosterone clouding his compassion. mom says he even teared up watching some bio on greg louganis.
but at the time, on that sunday night in the seventies, the compassion was another unexpected curve ball. given a trespasser, a man who was not only a sp*c but a wetback, at that, and, my father had:
1. not shot him and dragged his body into the woods;
2. not called the sheriff;
3. not even chased him back to the front gate in the truck.
he took him to get a job?
i was overwhelmed. some part of me, i don't now know how much, knew the contradictions i was surrounded with, but i definitely saw that this was the greatest contradiction of all, borne not of the need to comfort me, but simply, and genuinely, out of compassion, humanity.
i thought. i abandoned the television and the legos, and went out to the backyard, collected small rocks that appealed to me: pea-sized bits of flint and quartz. notebook paper and colored pens, a pair of scissors.
when he came home, i gave him the cheapest gift ever, the one i'm proudest of, a gift he's never deserved more, a paper ribbon bordered in stones, and blocky letters proclaiming him "The Best Dad Ever."
Posted by Rob at July 13, 2005 06:35 PM
Comments
awww...that's a nice story...
Posted by: maz at July 16, 2005 06:47 PM