Sleep

My father is staying with me these last few days. Sick with a cold of some kind he insists on sleeping in the back room, doesn’t want to disturb me with coughing fits deep into the night. Of all my father’s health concerns, his chest has never really alarmed me. Even though he was in the hospital for Christmas a decade ago, even though a common cold quickly turns into atypical pneumonia doctors take weeks to diagnose, it was only recently I became worried.

It is because he’s talking to me, confiding in me. He went to the doctor because he was waking at night, evey night with chills, fevers, sweating. The doctor looked him over and he tells me that he told the doctor that his tremor wouldn’t get him, neither would the disease his father had, it wouldn’t be his heart or cancer, he told the doctor that it would be his lungs that would catch up with him. I am so fucking horrified by this. I cannot conceive of my father dying and going on. I would like to make an official request to the universe that I get him, in acceptable health, for at least another 25 years. That is what I want.

Earlier he had dozed off a couple of times watching TV with me, this is common. He pushes himself for me, I know. Finally he says goodnight and goes into my cold back room where I’ve laid a sheet across the couch and place a quilt I made, my first quilt, folded in half across it. And a couple of hours later I’m ready for bed and I hesitate, know how cold it is back there, I can hear him snoring. I finally decide to cover him with a second quilt and quietly creep into the backroom, carefully, without making a single small sound.

He is deep asleep, still. I slowly raise my arms and begin to lower the quilt, as if onto a sleeping bear. And the moment the edge of the quilt brushes his calf, buried below a sheet and the first quilt he is up like a jackrabbit. Literally is upright in a split second and I jump and immediately apologize to his disoriented and darkened face, just a little scared and more regretful. He is fine, he says no problem, he says he is warm and I leave.

I go to bed myself with a pit in my stomach. I’m not sure why. I wonder what he dreams about. I wonder how long this will last, will he jump from his sleep when he’s 70? Will he propel cats across the room from a deep slumber? Will this always be here? I snuggle deeper into my own quilts, shiver from the chill in this winter air and think hard on light things, fireflies and dusk in late spring.

September, 1968

 My mother and her friend, a nice Southern girl who my mom met dealing cards in Tahoe, drank a bottle of cheap blush and then convinced my grandmother, the one who scrubbed the tub after every bath, to lay on the diningroom floor so my mother could pierce her ears.

"I was so drunk I forgot to numb the second lobe!" my mother giggles 35 years after she forgot the ice, 20 after she 'got sober', 5 after she disappeared for a week.

I look carefully now at my grandmother's 90 year old lobes. They are soft and stretched and when I ask her how long she's had the holes she tells me, "Oh, I had it done just last week. That oriental girl at the salon you know." I look into her milky eyes and wish I could shrink into one of those big opal studs and go back in time. Watch from her lobe at all that has passed. Smell my grandpa's cologne when they embrace, whisper in her ear to punish my mother, make her sit in a corner. Tell her to write a second letter to that dark-skinned boy in Vietnam.

That same month my grandmother felt the dull needle casually pierce, my father realized he was afraid. After an overnight flight, a stop in Japan, he and hundreds of other boys deplaned to the mindnumbing heat that would cradle him for 11 months.

"When we got off the plane, the guys who were leaving were waiting to board," he tells me now from his little home hidden in the mountains, deep in the forests of Northern California. I nod, a coward behind the camera. "They watched us from behind the fence and all I remember is one guy looking straight at me as I came down the stairs, and I heard him say, 'You guys are fucked'".