I Kept Waiting

I kept waiting for my dad to come home,

to walk down the street, 144^th Street to be

exact. Actually, my dad had never done that be-

 

fore to the best of my memory. He drove

just about every where, but for some reason,

I, a seventeen year old, senior in high school,

 

stood in the living room looking out the big

bay window expecting, hoping, desiring, crying

out in a stone, cold, silent way to see my dad,

 

my dad walking

 

home. My dad didn’t do that, nor did he do it when I

slept dreaming that hie would walk down 144th

street on his way home.

 

My dad didn’t walk down the street and he didn’t come

home, his home, my home, our home.  He wouldn’t

ever again sit in the chair by that big bay window

 

smoking his Chesterfield non-filter cigarettes sucking

deeply on a draw and exhaling with utter satisfaction

while he told me never ever to start the filthy habit

 

of smoking. He wouldn’t ever again lie down on the

 

couch under the big, bay window with pains shooting

down his arms and saying to me when I walked in

the room after school one day

 

that I needed to drive him ASAP to the hospital

because he really wasn’t feeling very well at all

and I knew that it was pretty serious.

 

He came home from the hospital two weeks later in

a really weakened state after I had visited him only

twice during that time because it was my senior year

 

and I was really busy with which whatever it is that

 

seniors in high school are busy, not to mention

never ending a sentence with a dangling participle

no matter how awkward it makes the sentence.

 

He lived another year but didn’t work much and

every penny that he made from his work came in to

keep things going and if he didn’t work, it didn’t come

 

in and I knew it and it weighed heavily on his mind,

ever so heavily.  So one evening when he was feeling

up to it, he left the house to make house calls to sell

 

head stones to those who had recently lost loved ones

 

or to put it more bluntly, who had loved ones die.

I was napping on the couch and his words to me

as he walked out the door were that I shouldn’t

 

sleep the evening away and that I should get

up and do my homework.  Next thing I knew the

phone was ringing and it was a call from the police

 

station that my dad had stepped in front of a train

and had been killed.  I think the officer actually said

killed himself.  I said it was a joke. He said no. I called

 

my married sister and we picked up my mom from her

 

work as a sales person in a women’s dress shop.

We went to view the body, that is my brother-in-law

actually looked. And so, for a long time I stood looking out

 

of that bay window for my dad to walk down 144^th Street,

and then after the house was sold and my mom and I

moved and then moved and moved again, of course,

 

I couldn’t look out the big bay window looking

for my dad to come home, but I couldn’t stop dreaming

that I was standing in front of that window watching and

 

waiting for my dad to come home.  Through college, semin-

 

ary, marriage, birth of my son and then daughter and mov-

ing to another state, and then one day I realized that I didn’t

dream that dream any more and that I just remembered being

 

a seventeen-year-old waiting for his dad to come home.