Dad II

"One day my daughter came back from C.'s apartment and told me about a plastic cupcake she'd accidentally flushed down the toilet. She'd been very sad, she explained, but then Daddy had gotten a letter from the cupcake. It was having an adventure at the bottom of the ocean! It was happy down there. Turns out the cupcake was making friends with a seahorse, a starfish, and a shark. It was probably going to send another letter soon."

~~ from Splinters by Leslie Jamison

Dad

"On the days when I dropped our daughter at his apartment, C was usually waiting for us on his stoop. As soon as we reached his block, she would run to him grinning, her tiny feet pattering along the sidewalk. He leaned down to swoop her up, then held her aloft and spun her around. He was delighted to see her. She was delighted to see him."

~~ from Splinters by Leslie Jamison

a most glamorous calling

"Raised by a single working mother who hardly had the time or emotional capacity for the youngest of four, my father grew up without much supervision. His older siblings Gayle and David were ten and eleven years old, respectively, and already out of the house by the time he reached elementary school. Ron, who was six years his senior, perpetuated the abuses he'd endured onto my father, boxing him into unconsciousness and slipping him tabs of acid when my father was only nine, just to see what would happen.

"A predictably troubled adolescence followed, culminating in his arrest, rehab, and a handful of relapses thereafter while he worked as an exterminator in his early twenties. It was his fortuitous move abroad that ultimately saved him. If this were my father's memoir, it'd probably be titled The Greatest Used Car Salesman in the World. More than thirty years later, nothing excites him more than talking about his years on the military base, working his way through the ranks of the company in Misawa, Heidelberg, and Seoul. For a man who came from nothing, life as a used car salesman abroad was a most glamorous calling."

~~ from Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

82

 He would have been 82 today.

old, yellowing picture postcards

"Rummaging through these old, yellowing picture postcards, I find that everything has suddenly become confused, everything is in chaos. Ever since my father vanished from the story, from the novel, everything has come loose, fallen apart. His mighty figure, his authority, even his very name, were sufficient to hold the plot within fixed limits, the story that ferments like grapes in barrels, the story in which fruit slowly rots, trampled underfoot, crushed by the press of memories, weighted down by its own juices and by the sun. And now that the barrel has burst, the wine of the story has spilled out, the soul of the grape, and no divine skill can put it back inside the wineskin, compress it into a short tale, mold it into a glass of crystal. Oh, golden-pink liquid, oh, fairy tale, oh, alcoholic vapor, oh, fate! I don't want to curse God, I don't want to complain about life. So I'll gather together all those picture postcards in a heap, this era full of old-fashioned splendor and romanticism, I'll shuffle my cards, deal them as in a game of solitaire for readers who are fond of solitaire and intoxicating fragrances, of bright colors and vertigo."

~~ from Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kis

vigorously, I was sure of that

"But my father had already removed his hand from his pocket, and everyone could see the scrap of newspaper into which he proceeded to blow his nose. Any kind of excitement provoked powerful disturbances in his metabolism and ample secretions of fluids. If he got out of that scramble alive, the first thing he would do would be to go behind a bush and urinate, breaking wind vigorously, I was sure of that."

~~ from Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kis