Monday, June 19, 2023

Dad's Story II

(This is the second of four parts.)

Reading further into my father’s old writings, which I wish I could carbon-date, but probably were created anytime from the 1960s through the 1980s, I discovered a shocking turn of events in what appears to have been his main short story, or attempt at a novel.

I should begin by saying that these pages seem to have been stashed haphazardly and probably were a project or projects he started and stopped over a period of years, perhaps decades. It is not clear to me whether the pages conflate several stories or fantasies, but I seriously doubt he ever showed them to anybody.

After he died in 1999, my mother asked me to empty his things into a box and take them away. She didn’t wish to go through them herself. This week is the first time I’ve ever looked at them carefully.

Anyway, the writing is very clearly autobiographical; he didn’t stray far from the contours of his own life. His main character “Joe” has a corporate job that he tolerates in order to support his family, a pretty wife he adores but who perhaps misunderstands him, several lovely daughters he dotes on, and finally a son.

In real life that was his reality and the only son was me. But in the story he names the kid Timmy. 

(By contrast, I was named after his father, who died when Dad was only ten. So of course I never met the original David Weir, since I didn’t show up until some two decades after he passed away.)

I was sort of thrilled to find myself in Dad’s story, albeit in fiction, but quickly noticed that Timmy somehow seemed to more like a figment of Joe’s imagination than an actual boy. The narrator describes what he thought Timmy might be like when he reached high-school age and expects him to be athletic. Of course in real life fathers often imagine the life their sons will lead when they’re small, so this didn’t seem all that strange.

Still, I had an odd sense of foreboding as I read about Tommy in the story. He never really seemed to be there.

I also was distracted by some of my father’s side notes, or annotations, describing ways this story (or stories) might possibly proceed. Sometimes the thread was about escaping his domesticated life into the wilderness; other parts just continued with the mundane realities of suburban life. 

Partly I feared finding something dreadful, like a secret love affair or a crime that would have been a thinly veiled confession that I most certainly would not want to know about.

But there was only a passing reference to “an encounter w/Indian girl in the wilderness,” which was never explained.

Most of all, I was wondering how my stand-in Timmy would turn out. A star athlete perhaps? A successful journalist? A gallant leader of the community? 

Well that turned out to be the really big shocker in the story.

Because one day little Timmy just dies! 

I did not see that one coming.

Right about the age of twelve, he falls out of a boat, hits his head on a log and drowns in a lake. The little guy seems to have been out there on his own without Joe, who was at work.

Returning to reality for a moment, and trying not to take Timmy’s demise too personally, I remembered a few incidents from my youth that might be relevant. On one occasion, my best friend Mark and I were horsing around in a motorboat and flipped it, casting us and all of our fishing gear (including my Dad’s) into the lake.

We limped home, somewhat chagrined, because it was a big deal to have lost that fishing equipment. But my Dad simply put on a snorkel and some flippers and went out to the spot in the lake, dove in and recovered his gear.

On another occasion, Mark and I were fishing in a cove at Ludington State Park when we discovered a dead man floating in the lagoon. The dead man had white hair like my Dad’s. That time there was nothing to be done about it.

Anyway, I was shocked that my father decided to kill little Timmy off in his story. I thought he was a likable little guy, plus it was such a dark turn. I always thought of my Dad as the ultimate optimist.

Still trying to process this tragic news, I kept on reading. The story goes forward without much looking back on Timmy at all, actually. As near as I could tell Joe doesn’t seem all that broken up by Timmy’s demise. 

(Maybe my father took a break from writing the story for a stretch and when he picked it up again, simply forgot Timmy had died?)

Who knows. Anyway, when Joe vacations in San Francisco, tours Fisherman’s Wharf, and generally does the stuff that my Dad actually did with me in the 1970s, he seems carefree and content.

Soon after that, the story starts wandering off toward the sunset, so I have stopped reading it, for now. 

***

P.S. When I told my oldest daughter about the tragic saga of little Timmy, she shrugged and reminded me of the fact that I almost died at about age 12 from an undiagnosed heart infection, and never really had a fully normal childhood after that. I couldn't play sports, for example, which my Dad had hoped for, and escaped into reading, fantasy worlds and writing instead. Perhaps this affected him in ways I never fully considered until now.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

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