Two Years Short

On the spiral notebook in my father's desk

My father’s desk had a spiral notebook in it. Four pages of measurements, a materials list, a note to himself about checking lumber prices that fall. The notebook was from 1987. He died in 1993. The workshop was never built.

He’d talked about it for as long as I can remember. Not vaguely, with the specificity of a man who had thought it through. The dimensions. The concrete pad. Where the electrical would come in. He talked about it the way other men talk about things they are going to do, and I believed him, and then one day I was cleaning out his desk and found the notebook, and the notebook was six years old, and my father was gone, and the backyard was still just a backyard.

I have a novel I’ve been writing since 2011.

A file on the laptop I keep on the kitchen table-novel_FINAL_v2_thisone.docx -

opened maybe forty times in thirteen years. On the good days I added three paragraphs. Then I closed it and poured two fingers of Jameson and went out to the porch and smoked a Padrón and listened to Scottsbluff go quiet, which is its own kind of writing, I told myself.

I am sixty-six years old. Two years short of the age he was when he died.

I know this the way I know my social security number. I didn’t decide to track it. It tracks itself. He died on my birthday…which means every year the number updates and the anniversary arrives on the same day, together, grief and countdown braided into the same date, the same candles, which is the kind of thing you can’t unfeel once you’ve felt it. I’ll be sixty-seven this September, which means I’ll be one year short, and I am aware that I do this arithmetic without being asked, in the middle of other things…filling the car, reading the news, lying awake at 3 a.m. with nothing in particular on my mind. The number is always there. Running in the background. Getting smaller.

This year I sat on the porch with the Jameson and did the math again. Didn’t mean to. Couldn’t help it. Sixty-six. Two years. The Padrón burned down to nothing and I lit another one and thought about the notebook in the desk and the concrete pad that was never poured and the file on the kitchen table with forty-three paragraphs in it, which is not nothing, which is also not a novel. My sister called to say happy birthday. We talked for twenty minutes. I didn’t mention any of this. She probably knew anyway.

I found the notebook in 1993 and understood it as grief. I am only now beginning to understand it as a warning.

The Word

I’ve been calling it maturity.

That’s the word. When someone asks…which nobody does anymore, because eventually people stop asking, and the silence fills in around the thing you haven’t done the way silt fills in around a post. Maturity. Realism. Life is what it is. There’s enough truth in it to work. Enough resemblance to wisdom that the man saying it can’t locate the seam.

My father never called anything by its right name.

He called depression tiredness. Called fear realism. Called the distance between himself and everyone he loved a man’s nature. Died at sixty-eight of cigars and things he never said out loud, and I am sixty-six on this porch in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, smoking Padróns in the dark, and I know the entire vocabulary of men who won’t name what they’re doing.

I am trying to find a different word.

The word is surrender.

I’ve been surrendering for thirteen years and calling it something else.

The Alibi

The novel can’t fail as long as I haven’t written it.

That’s the mechanism. In the file, in the theoretical future where I had the time and the discipline and the right quality of November light, the novel is good. I finished it. I am the version of myself I said I might become. Try to actually write it and the future collapses into a Tuesday. The novel becomes a real object, imperfect, available for judgment, and some of those judgments won’t be favorable, and I would have to live with that.

I have been choosing, very quietly, not to live with that.

This is not laziness. I want to be honest about that. It is something more like protection. Keeping the thing you care most about at a safe distance from the possibility of its failure. One day is a form of love. A way of guarding the dream from the damage of being real.

The damage of being real is the whole point. I know this too.

Knowing it has not been sufficient.

There is a day when the someday becomes permanent. It doesn’t announce itself. That’s the whole problem.

The Refrigerator

My sister kept a list on her refrigerator for eleven years.

Not a bucket list. She didn’t use that word. Six items, blue marker, folded notebook paper, taped at eye level on the Kenmore. Pottery class. A 5K. A week alone somewhere she didn’t have to explain herself. A conversation with our cousin Diane she’d been composing in her head since our father’s funeral in 1993. Two others she never told me.

She read it every morning at first. Then most mornings. Then it was furniture. Part of the refrigerator. Like the calendar from Ritch’s Hardware she never took down either, stopped seeing years ago.

What did it feel like, I asked her once, on the phone. All those mornings, walking past it.

Like owing money to myself, she said. And extending myself credit.

Last spring she unfolded it. Called Diane. Two hours on the phone, both of them crying, the conversation she’d written and rewritten in her head since 1993. Then she booked the flight. Registered for pottery. Signed up for the 5K. Did the things the list had been waiting to have done to it.

Eleven years later. She did it anyway.

We grew up in the same house. Same father. Same funeral. She made the list and eventually opened it. I have the file and mostly don’t. I wonder sometimes if there’s a person I haven’t called. A conversation I’ve been composing since 1993 that’s still just living in my head.

Tuesday, March

Last Tuesday I got home at 6:12 p.m.

The laptop was on the kitchen table where I’d left it. I looked at it. I went to the refrigerator and stood in front of it for a while the way a man does when he’s not hungry but needs something to do with his body. Poured two fingers of Jameson. Sat down. Opened the laptop.

Closed it.

Picked up the phone. Checked the news, which was bad in the same way it has been bad every day since 2016. Checked it again twenty minutes later to see if it had changed. It had changed to different bad. I watched a video of a dog that was afraid of a cucumber. I watched it twice. I read about a quarterback. I read about a different quarterback. I read about a city I will never visit making a decision that will not affect my life. I put the phone face-down on the table and looked at the ceiling.

Picked it back up.

At 9:47 p.m. I went to bed. The laptop was still on the kitchen table. I had not opened the file.

This is not a confession. It’s a description of a Tuesday. Most Tuesdays look like this.

September is six months away. I do that math too, without being asked, in the same automatic way. The number getting smaller. The Tuesday just like all the others.

The Nightstand

A man I know waited six years to learn guitar.

Instrument lived in the corner of the living room. He walked past it every day. Said it had stopped being a guitar and become a symbol of the kind of man who starts things.

One Wednesday…no particular Wednesday, no occasion, no resolution… he moved it to the nightstand.

Didn’t play it that night.

Two years later he plays twenty minutes every night after dinner. Not well. Says he doesn’t care anymore whether it’s good. Says the corner was the problem, not the guitar, not his hands, not his ear.

I just moved it closer, he told me. That was the whole thing.

I’ve been thinking about that for months. The distance between one day and an actual day measured in feet. From the corner to the nightstand. From someday to a specific Tuesday with a specific instrument in your hands. The move costs nothing. The move is the whole thing.

This morning I opened the file.

Added two paragraphs.

They’re not good. They exist. I don’t know yet if that’s enough. I don’t know yet if I’m the man who moves the guitar or the man who dies with the measurements in his desk. Most mornings I can’t tell the difference.

What Stays

My father is in this essay even when I don’t mention him.

He was a man who used the word someday the way other men use amen… as a closing, a way of sealing something off. He died with the plans intact and the plans died with him and the backyard stayed a backyard.

I am not my father.

I am telling myself I am not my father.

I am sixty-six years old and I have a file from 2011 and a porch and a habit of sitting with the Jameson until the Padrón burns down instead of opening what I should open, and I want to be careful about what I’m telling myself and why.

The version of me that wanted to finish the novel is still here. Not gone. Quiet. The way a voice gets quiet when it’s been talked over too many times…still present, still making sound, just no longer audible over everything else. I can find it when I stop. When I actually stop.

My sister waited eleven years. She called Diane. The man waited six years. He moved the guitar. I’ve been waiting thirteen. My father waited six and then the time ran out.

Never Day

Never Day does not arrive with noise.

That’s the thing about it. It doesn’t come with the feeling of loss that would tell you what was happening. What you feel instead is a settling. A quieting of the tension you’d been carrying so long you stopped noticing it was tension and started calling it your personality. And you feel, for the first time in years, something that presents itself as peace.

Some peace is wisdom. I’ve seen that kind. People who set things down with genuine grace, who let go of the particular future they’d imagined and found a real life waiting on the other side. That peace has a quality to it. A texture. You can tell.

This other kind…the peace that comes from the dream going quiet because you stopped feeding it, the lights turning off room by room until you forget the house was ever lit…this kind wears the same face. Calls itself the same name. Maturity. Realism. Life is what it is.

I’ve been calling it that for thirteen years.

Never Day has not come yet. I’m still not sure that’s true, but I’m choosing to act as if it is, which may be the same thing or may be something entirely different. The question is still open. The file is still on the laptop.

This morning I opened it.

The porch is there. The Padróns are there. The Jameson is there. Scottsbluff at 6:47 a.m., going about its business, indifferent to mine.

I wrote two paragraphs.

Tomorrow I’ll write two more.

Or I won’t. But the file will be there. And I’ll know what I chose.

Every single day, I choose this.

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