Loitering: New and Collected Essays by Charles D'Ambrosio Page B
Authors: Charles D'Ambrosio
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fits the denigrative power of the act. The act, not the word, is aggressive and odious. Place the focus where it belongs, properly, on the aggressive and repugnant act, and not on the word.”
Some nights, I dug into the lee of a snowdrift and hollowed a shelter for myself. Snow contains air and insulates, holding the body’s warmth so that, at a certain point, the temperature remains constant, blood and icein equilibrium. In deep snow, I dragged supplies with a pulk I’d made from a child’s sled and plastic conduit. I was afraid of avalanches and checked a slope meter before traversing open, treeless hillsides. What I feared was suffocation, particularly the inability to make my chest expand. I really knew nothing about winter, nothing about surviving the season beyond the blunt lesson in fatality I’d learned from picking up bones. Sometimes I slept in the open mouths of mine shafts, their crumbled headframes like broken teeth, where twice I found clusters of bats, hanging by their feet, their wings folded in, like the strange fruits of darkness itself.
I wrote, asking him about our home movies. For years I’d kept alive the fantasy that he burned the movies, only because I was haunted by the image of them orphaned in a Salvation Army thrift shop, reels and reels of birthdays, Christmases, and Easters, all reduced to an ironic treasure for strangers. In the past, I had wanted to believe my father was a liar rather than a man who could destroy something so valuable to his children. The movies were old Super 8s, poorly lit and without sound, but the only place left where I could see my brother’s face.
I wrote, “You intentionally destroyed something inside your children, a place of warmth and fondness, a cherished dream, a continuity that connects us in time to our history and across space to one another.”
His response was icy: “Of what sense of warmth and fondness are you speaking? It is an interesting sentiment, laced with some romanticism, but devoid of reality.” And he wanted to know, “What did I destroy in you that was not already destroyed?”
In my father’s last letter, the grammar carries the summary tone of a narrative closing down. It is framed by the forms of family affection. He opens with “Dear Char” and parts with “Love,” followed by his signature. In between, the language suggests closure, termination. My previous letter, he says, continued an “unacceptable tenor and dead-end focus.” It smacked of “recidivism”; it followed a “desolate and vacuous path.” None of my letters “added a repairment.” “So be it,” he says.
I sometimes wonder if by “repairment” he meant “repayment,” and I always pause at the caesura created by the simple sentence, “So be it,” which Catholic kids were once taught is the meaning of “Amen.” Was this the phrase that ran through my brother’s mind as he paused between his two signatures? So be it : with these, my father’s last words, I know I will never hear from him again. But I save his letters, as I save Danny’s, as I save Mike’s, neatly bound and held between the army surplus boots that my brother died in, and which I keep, filled with rocks, on my desk.
American Newness
Right inside the door of my first Fleetwood Home I was greeted by the evocative odor of American Newness, that smell everyone knows but cannot name. It was like breaking the seal on a box and getting a whiff of—of what?—of exactly what you always wanted. I know I got doped up on the smell and instantly forgot the facts of my life for the fantasy it might become. The walls in the homes I toured had the texture of those egg-shaped confections of sugar that house dioramic Easter scenes of bunnies and baby chickens. The walls didn’t look entirely dry, as though you might sink your finger in for a lick of buttercream frosting. They were immaculate and white and somehow against this backdrop even normal objects seemed likeminiatures, not quite
Some nights, I dug into the lee of a snowdrift and hollowed a shelter for myself. Snow contains air and insulates, holding the body’s warmth so that, at a certain point, the temperature remains constant, blood and icein equilibrium. In deep snow, I dragged supplies with a pulk I’d made from a child’s sled and plastic conduit. I was afraid of avalanches and checked a slope meter before traversing open, treeless hillsides. What I feared was suffocation, particularly the inability to make my chest expand. I really knew nothing about winter, nothing about surviving the season beyond the blunt lesson in fatality I’d learned from picking up bones. Sometimes I slept in the open mouths of mine shafts, their crumbled headframes like broken teeth, where twice I found clusters of bats, hanging by their feet, their wings folded in, like the strange fruits of darkness itself.
I wrote, asking him about our home movies. For years I’d kept alive the fantasy that he burned the movies, only because I was haunted by the image of them orphaned in a Salvation Army thrift shop, reels and reels of birthdays, Christmases, and Easters, all reduced to an ironic treasure for strangers. In the past, I had wanted to believe my father was a liar rather than a man who could destroy something so valuable to his children. The movies were old Super 8s, poorly lit and without sound, but the only place left where I could see my brother’s face.
I wrote, “You intentionally destroyed something inside your children, a place of warmth and fondness, a cherished dream, a continuity that connects us in time to our history and across space to one another.”
His response was icy: “Of what sense of warmth and fondness are you speaking? It is an interesting sentiment, laced with some romanticism, but devoid of reality.” And he wanted to know, “What did I destroy in you that was not already destroyed?”
In my father’s last letter, the grammar carries the summary tone of a narrative closing down. It is framed by the forms of family affection. He opens with “Dear Char” and parts with “Love,” followed by his signature. In between, the language suggests closure, termination. My previous letter, he says, continued an “unacceptable tenor and dead-end focus.” It smacked of “recidivism”; it followed a “desolate and vacuous path.” None of my letters “added a repairment.” “So be it,” he says.
I sometimes wonder if by “repairment” he meant “repayment,” and I always pause at the caesura created by the simple sentence, “So be it,” which Catholic kids were once taught is the meaning of “Amen.” Was this the phrase that ran through my brother’s mind as he paused between his two signatures? So be it : with these, my father’s last words, I know I will never hear from him again. But I save his letters, as I save Danny’s, as I save Mike’s, neatly bound and held between the army surplus boots that my brother died in, and which I keep, filled with rocks, on my desk.
American Newness
Right inside the door of my first Fleetwood Home I was greeted by the evocative odor of American Newness, that smell everyone knows but cannot name. It was like breaking the seal on a box and getting a whiff of—of what?—of exactly what you always wanted. I know I got doped up on the smell and instantly forgot the facts of my life for the fantasy it might become. The walls in the homes I toured had the texture of those egg-shaped confections of sugar that house dioramic Easter scenes of bunnies and baby chickens. The walls didn’t look entirely dry, as though you might sink your finger in for a lick of buttercream frosting. They were immaculate and white and somehow against this backdrop even normal objects seemed likeminiatures, not quite
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