Distant Land of My Father by Caldwell Bo

Author:Caldwell, Bo [Caldwell, Bo]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Published: 2001-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Within days, there was evidence of him everywhere. My mother had kept our house very spare—”No use cluttering things up,” she said—and only books and a few photographs took up space on the built-in shelves in the living room. She kept little more than was needed to cook for two, and she was a perfect match for wartime, the expert at salvage. Scrap metal, tin cans, cooking fat, rubber, paper, her old silk stockings—everything had another use when we were finished with it. My mother passed everything along with an efficiency that made me nervous. She read magazines the day they arrived in the mail, then packed them up for the Boy Scouts. The morning paper wasn’t in our kitchen long enough to get rumpled, and she regularly went through my closet as well as her own, pulling out pleated skirts and cotton blouses and dresses and shoes that she no longer wore or that I’d outgrown, tossing them all into the center of the room for me to fold and pack into boxes for St. Vincent de Paul’s poor. She did it so often that I commented once that I figured my job was simply to break the clothes in and make sure they were comfortable for the poor, a remark she did not appreciate.

With my father’s arrival, it was the sparseness that disappeared. He was a reader, but it was never just one book. Whatever he was reading was left wherever he’d been sitting when he got up to do something else. In the living room was Guadalcanal Diary, in the kitchen Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, in the bedroom See Here, Private Hargrove. Copies of Life lay on the kitchen table, and sections of the Los Angeles Times drifted into every room. My mother’s reminders that the Boy Scouts were due went unheeded by my father. “I’m not finished,” he’d say calmly. “It takes a while to catch up on the world.”

True enough. Most afternoons, he rode the Red Car up the Oak Knoll Line to the Pasadena Main Library, a place he said he loved for its huge wooden tables and chairs and the strong scent of books, where he read newspapers and magazines for hours. When he finished, or when the library closed, he checked out still more books and lugged them home to our now-crowded bungalow.

Only he never seemed to finish any of them, and his lack of attention worried me. I considered myself an expert on it, and on him, for I watched him every chance I got, staring so hard that I could feel the discomfort my scrutiny caused. But I couldn’t make myself stop. I wanted to know him, and because I somehow felt that my surveil-lance might help keep him here, the second half of my seventh grade was dominated by keeping watch on him. More than boys or clothes or girlfriends or parties or school, he was what occupied my thoughts. In the morning, I watched him shave, then pat Old Spice onto his wet skin, as though he were slapping himself awake.

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