Father

Dad, at 89.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

In the summer of 1980, my parents had the summer off. Dad was a college teacher, and my mother, an RN, was encouraged to take unpaid time as the hospital census was low. My parents owned a Jeep, and my dad loaded sleeping bags and two tents in an oilskin on the luggage rack, and secured the bulk with bungee cords. From New Hampshire, my parents headed west with their three kids.

Now, older than my parents were at that time, I wonder what the heck my parents were searching for. As a kid, of course, you simply go with the family flow, show up at the picnic table and eat chili from a plastic bowl. As a writer, I know that all life is propelled by desire, for that bowl of chili, for the wilderness my parents loved, for the far murkier desires that lurk in a human heart. We were never a Bobbsey Twin family (although good lord how I longed for that, a long-quelled desire), but three of us grew up and created our own complicated lives, never far from the wilderness.

Today, my old man is 89, a remarkable age. I woke thinking of him on one of those summer trips, back in the world before cell phones and internet, when no one knew where the five of us were, just us—dad, mom, the three kids—rattling around in that Jeep. Dad always packed tools, and he fixed our vehicle along the way. High up in the Wyoming mountains one summer, it was cold as heck. He got up before any of us, brewed coffee on the Coleman stove and made buttered toast. He unzipped the tent and handed in toast and hot coffee. Stay in your sleeping bags until it warms, he said. We’d been on the road for weeks by then. He was unshaven, bundled in a jacket, and he kept that makeshift hearth of the Coleman stove burning, feeding us toast. Happy birthday, dad. ❤️

And the Hayden Carruth poem that reminds me of my parents…

Birthday Cake

For breakfast I have eaten the last of your birthday cake that you
had left uneaten for five days
and would have left five more before throwing it away.
It is early March now. The winter of illness
is ending. Across the valley
patches of remaining snow make patterns among the hill farms,
among fields and knolls and woodlots,
like forms in a painting, as sure and significant as forms
in a painting. The cake was stale.
But I like stale cake, I even prefer it, which you don’t
understand, as I don’t understand how you can open
a new box of cereal when the old one is still unfinished.
So many differences. You a woman, I a man,
you still young at forty-two and I growing old at seventy.
Yet how much we love one another.
It seems a miracle. Not mystical, nothing occult,
just the ordinary improbability that occurs
over and over, the stupendousness
of life. Out on the highway on the pavement wet
with snow-melt, cars go whistling past. 
And our poetry, yours short-lined and sounding
beautifully vulgar and bluesy
in your woman’s bitterness, and mine almost 
anything, unpredictable, though people say
too ready a harkening back
to the useless expressiveness and ardor of another
era. But how lovely it was, that time
in my restless memory.
This is the season of mud and thrash, broken limbs and crushed briers
from the winter storms, wetness and rust,
the season of differences, articulable differences that signify
deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic
perplexities in our lives, and still
we love one another. We love this house
and this hillside by the highway in upstate New York.
I am too old to write love songs now. I no longer
assert that I love you, but that you love me,
confident in my amazement. The spring
will come soon. We will have more birthdays
with cakes and wine. This valley
will be full of flowers and birds.

Dad and Father’s Day.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

When I was a kid, in moments of stress or elevated high jinks, my dad’s sense of humor rose. He was prone to things like putting grapes up his nose while my mother wasn’t looking to make us kids laugh. This was the camping trip to the Grand Canyon, when the clutch went on our old Jeep, and my dad was fixing it whatever he might have had at hand — a pliers and a fishing hook , maybe two rocks rubbed together in prayer, for all I know.

That same trip, someone was on the lam who had once also been a Navy Seal. We hiked into the canyon, passing sharp shooters at the rim. Don’t look, my mother said. Sometimes I wonder, Whatever happened to him? Did he have kids?

My parents never hesitated to get out our atlas, the essential road tripping gear. Looking at the map with my youngest recently, I chanced on Medicine Bow, Wyoming. We camped beside a man who lived in his canvas tent. While we were hiking, a lightening storm blew up, and my father hustled us down. As a kid, our sometimes peripatetic life was status quo, all kinds of living mixed in. I could list a 100 things without stopping that my dad taught us, all darn useful — like read Plato and follow water when you’re lost in the wilderness — but the one I keep returning to these days, now that I’m along in my life, is his utter persistence. A parent now myself, I think of him in the Grand Canyon with three young kids and a skeptical wife, with hardly any money and a broken-down Jeep. He patched it together. We kept on with that journey, thousands of miles, all those nights in the desert under the stars. At the wheel, he drove that Jeep for many more years.

Worms for the Body, Philosophy for the Soul.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A little light rain falls as I pull a few weeds from the Sweet William in my garden. I planted these flowers when I moved here, putting my shovel into this terrain, vying for flowers and vegetables versus lawn. At the moment, the flowers flourish. I’m thinking a little about a writers roundtable I participated in the morning before, how I urged writers to remember that cause and effect drive the world we live in. All the pretty and noble thoughts we have about ourselves are only illusions. Character lies in our actions, for good or ill, whether we chose to see this or not.

On this Father’s Day, I remember those conversations my siblings and I had with my father at our kitchen table, so many decades ago. This sense of the world comes from the Aristotle he had us read. It’s a lesson that I’ve been hammering out, over and over and over in my life, through garden (what truer way to learn cause and effect), through writing and childrearing, through work, divorce, friendship.

On my deck, the robins’ nest has open-beaked fledglings, tufted and mewling. All day, the parents fly in and out, worms draping from their beaks, feeding their young, this great Herculean parenting endeavor. My cat Acer lies on a kitchen chair, staring through the glass door, mesmerized. The robins, in their robin way, have taken a chance nesting just above my door. Will this pan out? Will the young survive?

Wendell Berry wrote that “Parenthood is not exact science.” Nor, by any means, is bird or human life. My father gave his three children worms and philosophy. He taught us to love bread for the body, wine for the soul.