W. Kinsella - Magic Time

My father is a remarkable guy. The older I get the more remarkable I find him. He does not look the way most people would imagine a gentle, self-sacrificing father should look. Dad is a large, lumpy-looking man with coarse hair down his arms and across the backs of his hands. His black hair is receding from his wide forehead, and he suffers from perpetual five o’clock shadow. His huge hands are grease-stained and scarred, his brown eyes large and sad, but they sparkle like polished oak when he smiles, a dimple breaking at the right corner of his mouth.

‘In baseball you make the same play thousands, even hundreds of thousands of times, Mike – though, like snowflakes, each one is unique. But it’s patience and persistence that carry you through. The same patience and persistence won over your mom.

‘You must have wondered how an old warthog like me managed to marry such a beautiful girl. When I was young I wasn’t handsome, I wasn’t rich, I wasn’t an athlete, and I wasn’t a hoodlum, so if I was gonna convince the girl I’d been in love with since fifth grade to marry me I was gonna have to do it on my own. Gracie only lived a few blocks away and we’d been in the same school all our lives. She considered me a friend, someone who’d always been there – like one of the old buildings downtown.

‘Final year of high school, I was already working weekends at the box factory, and your mom worked a four-hour evening shift at the old Woolworth’s. Her dad had been injured in a car accident and out of work for months. She was dating a guy named Karl, who was handsome, a fullback on the football team, and had a recklessness about him that caused girls to turn and stare when he walked down the street.

‘The one bad thing I knew about Karl was that he was never on time, and for me that was like a pitcher knowing that a batter swings at the curve in the dirt. I showed up at Woolworth’s at closing time, and stopped to chat with Gracie as she waited. I said I was on my way home from the box factory, but actually I watched the clock like a hawk and scooted out of the house in time to arrive just as Woolworth’s was closing.

‘Sometimes Karl was really late, and Gracie would get cold or tired, or both. I never said anything against the guy. I’d run across the street and get us coffee from the all-night diner, and remember to put one sugar and one and a half creams in hers, and I’d try to have a new silly joke to tell her. (Slug jokes were big then. What slug sees out the old year? Father Slime. What’s a slug’s favorite song? “As Slime Goes By.”)

‘I can’t tell you how happy I was the night when, after more than a half-hour wait, Gracie said, “To hell with him. Walk me home, Gil.”

‘The next couple of nights he was on time, but it didn’t last. This went on for months. One night I got to the store early, and bought a timing chain, car polish, and a fancy gearshift knob for an old car I was trying to get running. When Gracie came out I showed her my purchases and said, “You know, after you marry me we’re gonna have the best maintained car in the neighborhood.” Gracie laughed her merry laugh, but the glance she gave me said it all. Not a month later she came out of the store and said, “Karl and I aren’t going together any more.” By that time I was finished school. A year later we were married.

‘You know what I used to like best? After Karl showed up, whether Gracie was walking away with him, or whether she was getting into his old man’s car, she always turned and waved to me, and gave me a big smile.’

Dad would stop, sometimes there’d be a tear in his eye.

‘I miss your mom more than anybody could ever know.’

The nail and a half-inch of Dad’s right middle finger predeceased him many years ago, slashed off by a saw at the lumberyard where he’s been employed all his adult life, working his way up from stacking lumber to feeder in the sawmill to servicing the equipment, to full-fledged maintenance mechanic.

I was in first grade the day Dad lost the tip of his finger. I came home after school to find Dad in the living room rather than Mrs. Schell, who babysat my kid brother Byron and me while Dad was at work. He was sitting in his favorite chair, a leg slung over one arm of it, watching a game show on television, drinking a Tab.

‘What are you doing home?’ I asked.

‘Had a little accident, Mike,’ Dad said, turning toward me, holding up his hand so I could see his middle finger bandaged in a halo of white gauze, like snow in a coal bin in contrast to the rest of his hairy, grease-stained fingers.

‘Had a little run-in with a saw I was repairing. Forgot to unplug it.’ And he grinned, his face emitting light. ‘As you can see, I came out on the short end of the run-in, in more ways than one.’

As I came closer I saw that there was a bright red spot, like the center of a Japanese flag, on the white gauze at the end of the damaged finger. My stomach lurched like it did when Dad and I went over the top on the carnival ferris wheel. I climbed into his lap and burrowed, trembling, into his warmth, soaking up the comfortable odors of grease, tangy sawdust, and Dad’s sweat.

‘What’s the matter, Son?’

‘You’re not gonna die, are you?’

‘Of course not. It takes more than a saw to do in an old warhorse like me. Doc says I’ll be back to work in a week. In the meantime, the Cubs are in town, so I’ll pick up tickets for you and me. Maybe we’ll even take Byron to the Sunday afternoon game, though you have to take your turn ferrying him to the bathroom.’ Byron was in play school at the time.

I hugged Dad as hard as I could, burying my face in the comfort of his plaid flannel shirt, and held on until my arms hurt.

‘You don’t have to worry, Mike. Your dad’s never gonna leave you.’ And he rocked me in his arms.

I pulled myself up and kissed his blue-whiskered cheek. Dad always knew the right thing to say. Neither of us mentioned Mom, but we both knew what caused me to get all scared and shaky.

Though I claim to remember my mom, who died when I was four, I think what I remember are Dad’s stories of her. What I remember is sitting on Dad’s lap, him holding their wedding picture, an eight-by-ten that still sits on his bedside table, Mom younger than I am now, and beautiful, and Dad telling me about how they began dating, and how thrilled he was when Mom said she’d marry him.

‘Look at that, Mike, I look like a gorilla in a tuxedo. What do you suppose your mom ever saw in me?’

Or else he’d hold the family portrait one of those door-to-door photographers took not long after Byron was born. I’m sitting on Dad’s knee, dressed in yellow shorts, with a white shirt and yellow bow tie, while Mom is holding Byron wrapped in a blue blanket, all that’s visible of him a little pink circle of face. Dad would talk about the day the portrait was taken, how I was so hyper that, though you can’t see it in the picture, he had a firm grip on the back of my shorts in order to keep me from leaping off his knee.

‘Your mom had just washed your face for the third time since the photographer got there. She wiped it again, tossed the washcloth over her shoulder in the general direction of the kitchen, and said to the photographer, who looked like he’d slept in his car with a bottle of cheap wine, “Shoot us quick before any more dirt gravitates to that boy’s face!”’

Other times we’d look at dog-eared photographs from the chocolate box of photos that always sat on the mantel of the pretend fireplace in the living room. There were pictures of Mom next to a half-washed car; in jeans, shirttails flapping, as she ran laughing from a spray of water. Dad said that photo was taken before they were married, and he was on the other end of the hose. There was a color Polaroid of Mom in a yellow waitress uniform, her name, Gracie , in brown lettering above her pocket, her red hair spilling over her shoulders, smiling like she’d just received a ten-dollar tip. Her hair was so pretty in that photograph, and the photo was so clear I could see the freckles on her cheeks and the back of the hand that’s visible.