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The Man Downstairs

by Peter Anderson

     My father is the only man I know who dissects mathematical formulas while composing songs about the Chicago Cubs.  He's the only one I've heard of who wears steel-toed boots every basketball   game.  He's certainly the sole person on the planet who can sleep with a heating pad on his face, hear my radio when it's not even on, and range the proximity of lightning strikes without error - all while singing about the Cubs.  He is easily the most unique and intriguing man I know, yet the one whom I truly do not know.
     Since I'm the youngest of four boys, the father I grew up with was, in many ways, much different than the one my brothers knew.  The man he was differs greatly from the man he became, and is still very foreign from the man he is today.  My earliest memory of my father involves a golf club - one with its head sawed off.  It was called "The Stick" and my brothers knew it well.  Most spankings we   received were with a belt, but for serious crimes, "The Stick" carried the message.  I don't remember what stories I fibbed or whose arms I bit, but I do recall one thing:  my father never missed.
     The one constant that lingered throughout my childhood was my father's penuriousness.  He was cheap.  If it was 112 degrees outside, our air conditioner would still be set for impotence, and it was always shut off at night.  On Mother's Day, we dined out at our own kitchen and were served by the one who deserved our service.  If we turned the television off, we weren't allowed to turn it back on for an hour for fear the knob might fall off.  I bought my first bicycle and my first baseball glove, while being informed by my father that I was misspending my money.

My father's love of baseball and my budding ability to play it built a temporary bridge for us during my high school years.  With baseball, there was only clarity, as sharp as the sting of my father's fast ball.  There were other sports we both enjoyed, but baseball came easiest.  It wasn't forced.  There was only a toss in the back yard or a ground ball I didn't stay down on.  Only sore arms and grass stains.  Nothing resembling demand or disapproval.
     In the ninth grade I tried out for my high school's junior varsity baseball team and made it.  I played for two years on the j.v. squad and two years on the varsity team.  In those four years, my father came to two games.  The second game, he only came for four innings.  But it was never my father's way to bear the family flag. 
     My baseball career ended when I graduated from high school.  I haven't picked up a baseball bat since, and the bridge that had once extended to my father no longer exists.  The common ground we briefly shared now lies buried underneath as many excuses and distractions as we could pile.
     My father never said a word to me about college.  He didn't advise me on which one I should attend and never scolded me for switching schools.  All totaled, I attended four different colleges before settling on the fourth.  While my mother worried herself inside out over my nomadic education, my father puttered in his workshop.  He was always down there, building and rebuilding and hiding.  When I came home on school breaks, I invariably found him down amongst his tools in the basement where he felt most comfortable. 

My father's seclusion in his workshop was his only real means of coping with the sensitive and unsettling aspects of family life.  I liked to think that his puttering was his way of hunting for the right words to speak to the antsy ones upstairs.  But as I began to recognize my father's method, I also noticed the gap separating us had widened.  Though he had softened somewhat through time, our differences and directions had pushed us farther apart than ever. 
     My father's mind is still light-years deeper than mine could ever be, but his hearing has weakened.  His fingers are now arthritic from his years of puttering and he can't use his   workshop nearly as much.  He still wears the same grease-stained, patched khakis he always has, but his boots have been shelved for slippers.  His Christian faith is as strong as ever, but it has always been a harnessed passion of tradition, and I've never felt its emotion.  Only now do I see its sincerity.
     He walks slowly and heavily but directly.  He tells the same rehashed tales that plagued years of family gatherings, but even he can't remember the original versions.  His hair is thinning and posture sagging.  He reads more than he used to and gardens less than he ever has.  He naps frequently.  His body aches more every day, but he still sings about the   Cubs.
     He likes watching television, especially mystery programs with my mother, and sickens at the thought of drinking a soda.  "Vile, filthy fluid," he grumbles.  He drapes his handkerchiefs atop his lamp, and refuses to watch movies.  He has started to exercise lightly, but doesn't fish anymore.  He wears gloves around the house and when driving to warm his fingers to ease his arthritic pain, and he always wears white socks to church for extra comfort.  He takes a handful of medicine every night after dinner, and a book into the bathroom to read during his bath before bed.  He wakes before the sun to get the paper.  He often roams the house during the day and stops for no reason, other than to look for words that aren't there.     

Most live without any real grasp of other people, and the ones closest to them prove most confounding.  It is those we spend our lives with who lose us.  But we still come back to them, unavoidably, for one excuse or another.  And where I choose to meet my father is on an old, empty baseball field with outfield grass that needs mowing and missing bases in the infield.  And the hammering we hear is that of a bridge being rebuilt, as the ball sails back and forth between us like it had never once hit the ground.