Macaroni and Margarine

The way I feel when I see dead people in photos? I’m starting to feel the same way when I look at photos of myself.

…

            I found this picture of my dad in a maroon photo album with half the front cover torn off. Like somebody had urgently needed to start a fire and could find literally nothing else.

(Many things were similarly 25-percent-broken in my childhood house. Harry Potter and Percy Jackson books with at least a chapter or two unglued from the spine. No tablecloth was completely devoid of paint. Every single CD looked like a dog had been playing with it).

I was helping my mom clear out her attic when we found the photo album, about a year ago. The half-ripped album was at the bottom of a dematerializing trash bag, which itself was under many, many bags of moth-infested children ‘s clothes. Other photos inside included me and my mom on a day at Sandy Neck, and my second birthday party with Scruffy the Maine Coon licking my little ear.

This picture was the one that caught my eye most.

I bet when it was taken, he had not yet gone to war (but I don’t know). He probably had not yet married Phyllis from New Mexico (which was a whole life he had before my mother. We don’t know anything about that life. He was either extremely tight-lipped with my mom or she’s managed to conveniently forget everything).

In this photo, I’d say he’s probably age… I don’t know, 25? He smoked a pack every day, and in this picture his skin looks fresh and new. So I put it on the earlier side. Obviously, he was a big boy. Only 5’9”, but a boulder of a boy. He was the eighth-eldest of thirteen. From accounts, I’ve deduced that he was the funniest and the scariest of them all. What kinds of jokes and threats he would make, I do not know.

He and the other twelve children all ate macaroni and margarine for dinner growing up. The oldest seven cooked for the youngest six. Nobody has told me anything else about his early years.

He grew up in Yarmouth, they were dirt poor, he played baseball and hockey: that’s about it.  

The fact of the matter: it is really, really hard to look at pictures of dead people and think about how little they know their fate. My dad has no idea in this photo that he has already made more than half of his journey through life. I look at this picture, and all I see is his dead skin transposed onto a skeleton caught in motion. It isn’t him.

He gave me all of these things and then just left, and now I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do with his anger. I don’t know what to do with his elephant-hide skin. I don’t know what to do about my hairline.

And I especially don’t know what to do with The Face.

(The Face you see in this picture. Mouth curled up at the edge, eyes tightly closed, chin jutting out a little bit).

How did he use The Face? He looks like he’s in pain, or embarrassment, but maybe just being facetious. I don’t know.

This is The Face I use a hundred times a day, this exact Face. I use it to say:

“Hello.”

“Not bad.”

“Very funny, guys.”

…but is that right? I don’t feel like it’s right. I feel like I’m using The Face wrong.

It’s just horse-shit when I do it. He used to make it from under the hood of a car he had just fixed. He probably used to make it whenever he was hanging out with his military friends. He used to make it whenever I had done something cute (I believe).

But in the present day, now that Dad is dead and gone, I use The Face for theater. I use The Face to be funny around my rich-rich-rich friends from college.

            What a bastardization of a perfectly good Face. What the fuck have I done?

When I’m feeling good, it feels like his face is my face. When I’m feeling bad, all I can see is a face on loan from somebody I barely know. I don’t know what to do with that.