These next five are from last weeks online group. I thought it was a very good week for writing.

When I started this first one, what I had in mind is definately not where it ended up. But, hey, Sometimes that just happens. Thank God!



A MAN ONCE TOLD ME...

A few years after my father died I was going through all the stuff in his workshop hoping I might be able to throw most of it away. I couldn’t do it. I kept expecting him to come swinging through the door trailing the oxygen hose from the cannula clamped to his nose behind him and yelling at me to leave his shit alone.

I reminded myself that he was dead and turned the radio on to a really loud rock and roll station just to spite him.

My father and I had a love hate relationship that I am still chewing at six years after his death. Part of the love was that we had many of the same attributes, things I’d learned from him. We were both entertainers; great singers and storytellers, and larger than life characters.

Unfortunately he didn’t want to share the stage with anybody, much less me. He never actually said those words, but he made it excruciatingly clear to me in other ways. He interrupted my stories, sang louder, drank harder, and made snide comments that humiliated me. Or he might simply leave the room taking the audience with him.

He could do this because it was his house, his friends, and he had a lot of cool things to show them in other rooms. For instance he had a bright red, two man submarine in the outside garage. His ace in the hole to get the audience moving was to say, “Wanta see my sub?”

Of course everybody wanted to see that sub. And so they would all troop outside, following him and hanging on to his every word of the story about how he got the sub, put it together, and used it to find treasure in our lake. He’d stand next to it while each person climbed the ladder and eased themselves into it, a benevolent observer.

I would hang back watching him being the star of his own show and knowing there was only one star allowed in the room, and it wasn’t me.

Someone once gave him a T shirt that said, “He who dies with the most toys wins,” and Dad made that his credo.

The sub was just one of the things he accumulated to keep on the top of that most toys list. Boats, cars, prestige, money, even the accouterments of his dying illness were the biggest and the best. His motorized chair was a maroon Mercedes Benz of chairs, with gold trim. The electric hoist that got it into the trunk of his Cadillac was the best money could buy.

But the fact is that no matter how many toys you have, when you die, you’re just as dead as if you had none. I think he finally realized that in his last year when all the toys he had couldn’t take the fear of death out of his eyes.

The night he died my mother said to me, “You’re the man of the house now.” And even though I’m a woman I never thought to question that. What I thought was, “Yeah! It’s my turn to be the star.”

But since then I’ve decided that it’s a legacy I don’t want to carry. When I’m in a roomful of people now, I try to remember what a friend of mine told me long ago at a jam session when I was hogging the show. He took me aside and quietly said, “Other people want a turn, Chris.”

Oh. Duh.

So that’s what I want when I die, to be the woman who remembers that everybody wants to be a star, and to know enough to shut up and let somebody else have a turn.