Dad Snack

My dad's in town for his 40-year high school reunion. Well, he's not in my town, at the moment, my town being New York City I suppose. He's currently in Clark, NJ, the place where he grew up after being born in Elizabeth and moving away from Garwood and saving the kid who fell through the ice pond and walking that duck on rollers all the way across town and sometimes I get his life story mixed up with that kid from A Christmas Story, but I know for a fact that when he was little, the world was in Technicolor. And kids on TV shows were named Tommy and Beaver. And my grandmother's German accent was as strong as it is now. Anyway, he will be there tonight and he'll be back in New York City tomorrow night, after "going to the party at Cal's place and sleeping at Randy's parents' house," which leads me to believe he's picking up where he left off at age 18. He met The Boss like four times, always brags about jamming with him, though the truth behind that stretch-ed lie is never boiled down completely. Apparently he and Randy burned a building down accidentally once. Some things are too perfect.

I reflect on my own time in high school, a time when I totally lacked confidence or interest in tanning, two things that, at the time, seemed to run rampant around me and signify my own blaring insignificance. While I now have confidence (what a funny thing to acquire! it's not like i can chart it over time, it's the opposite of nickels in a jar, i can only measure my successes in looking back and knowing how lonely and true it felt!), I still lack interest in tanning, and I still hate doing things to my hair to make it look nice. And I still daydream a lot, and I still listen to some of the same songs, and I still love a lot of the same dear hearts I knew and trusted and confided in back then. I still like a lot of the same movies and I still quote most of them like we used to. I think I still have my old ID? In three pieces and taped. Found my Yellow Boat and Charlie Brown tshirts in my tshirt drawer when I was on a laundry prowl. I have my favorite Beatles poster, the Hard Day's Night one, hanging in my room in New York. Lots and lots of pictures of Amy and I, making faces or pointing at things or wearing wigs. Sunil's cackle. The Bell Jar, and Dickens.

Little and big things stay the same inside the person growing, up and down as my heart beats, a lot of confusion that in time yielded to hindsight and clarity and still-so-young. Things are never linear and we look back and them and put them that way. I still feel all sorts of the same way in glimpses and glimmers. People change and they don't change and stories lie in how those dos and don'ts are.

A picture of my parents on their wedding day, 1983. They were together for nine years before they got married. Met in college in California. She in a shortish white dress. He in a tux and checkered Vans. You can take my dad out of Jersey, but you can't take the Jersey out of my dad.