Pappy, for Now and Ever

I have a picture of my father when he was seven or so. Here he is: my Dad, my Daddy-o, my one and only ever-lovin' Pap, in a tweedy striped blazer two sizes too huge on him, gigantic, patterned satin tie knotted a little askew, looking like an old man that's been shrunken down to child-size and doesn't know it yet.

His face looks different than it did by the time I knew him. He hasn't yet been bitten by the neighbor's trusted Rottweiler after he got curious about its eyes, hopped the fence in the middle of the night, put his hands on his knees and stared, as if to kiss it, full in the face. It hasn't yet happened that he was just sitting in a diner, having coffee, minding his own business, and a cherry red Mustang shiny and well-tended as Heaven itself came barreling through the wall-sized picture window, sending a constellation of jagged glass stars sinking into the skin of his cheek. He doesn't have an inkling idea yet about the love beads, the David Bowie haircut, the hours and hours of bleeding fingers hammering out melodies from a guitar, the fact that in a handful of years he will run away from home and stay gone so long his parents will move and leave no forwarding address. He doesn't yet know about my mother, and he sure as heck doesn't know anything about me.

He's got the unrumpled face of a child, complacent and curious, not yet confused or scared but still waiting for the rather interesting story he seems to be stuck in to unfold a little more. In his face are none of the chickenpox scars, none of the lines from smiling or from smoking that he had by the time that I was born and looked up at him and knew that he was mine, mine without end. But he's the same. He looks like my brother; he made my brother, and one day I'll probably be the mother of a little kid who'll look just like him. When I look at my seven-year-old dad, I miss him like a spurned lover, because I can't pick that adorable little boy up in my arms and hold him, tell him he's the cutest thing I ever saw and that I'll love him forever. I can't because he's long gone—he's grown into a man, and then turned into my dad. All that I've got of him is a picture.

I'll be surprised when I get to heaven if we aren't all born at the same time, and get to be together for our whole lives, from beginning to end. I can't think of any other way to finally know the entirety of it all at last; I can't think of any other way not to love people so much that you grit your teeth when you look at them and miss them tragically even when they're right there, still alive.