I Kept Waiting
I kept waiting for my dad to come home,
to walk down the street, 144th 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 144th 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.