Page 5 of Slanting Towards the Sea
FIVE
THE MORNING AFTER THE disastrous bank meeting, I go to the kitchen to dish out Dad’s medications into his pill organizer.
It has compartments for five parts of each day, seven days a week, and it’s still not enough.
There are some pills I have to place in the same cube, even though one precedes the other and should be taken in chronological order.
A mundane task, this, but it always makes me feel melancholy, the fact that Dad needs so many pills to make it through the day.
The weather has turned to jugo, the warm and wet southern wind that brings rain and joint pains and bad moods.
On days like this, Dad’s right side hurts more, the pain distracting him from anything outside himself, and for once, I’m thankful for it.
It’s doing a wonderful job of making him forget about the meeting.
The volume on the TV is too loud. More news about corrupt politicians that no one ever does anything about.
This whole society has turned apathetic.
Half of our government ends up imprisoned each year, and they just replenish new members from the same unending pool of incompetent, corrupt fools.
Unbelievably, there’s more of them to pick and choose from, while there’s fewer of us living here.
I wish the journalists would just stop wasting our time reporting about it.
Dad shuffles into the kitchen. “It’s your mom’s birthday tomorrow,” he says over the voice of the reporter. “We should buy flowers and lamps for her grave.”
By we, he means me. They took away his driver’s license after his stroke.
“I’ll buy flowers, but I won’t buy a lamp.”
“Why not?”
I stop popping pills from the foil and give him the we’ve been here before look. “Plastic. Why do we keep honoring our dead by polluting the Earth that we’re supposed to be saving for our children?”
He pours himself a cup of coffee. “What do you care? You don’t have any children.”
His words a precise jab.
He’s not mean on purpose; he’s stating a mere fact.
He’s always been like this, not entirely aware of the emotional impact his words can have on others, so I take it in stride.
It’s better than talking about the bank.
He wouldn’t be able to understand my failure, or to accept it.
My dad lifted himself, single-handedly, from unimaginable poverty, and he would not survive tumbling back down into it.
And even if the failure of the Lovorun project wouldn’t exactly impoverish us, I know this is how he would feel.
Once, when I was twelve, he took me to see the place where his mother had raised him.
His father had died when he was a baby, the youngest of four boys.
Their home was a small rectangular single-story building made from stone and concrete, with an asbestos roof, thick walls, and a ceiling so low even I had to walk inside with my back and knees bent.
On the inside was only one room, and even though it was empty at the time, Dad showed me where the beds had once been, where they’d stoked fire in the hearth, where he’d done his homework under candlelight.
Dad was born a few years after World War II, and the electricity hadn’t come yet to this village, nor had the running water.
His family had so little that once his mother had to borrow a bag of potatoes and turnips, and that’s all he and his three brothers ate for a month.
When he was ten, a neighbor gifted him a rabbit for his birthday.
Dad kept that rabbit in an improvised cage, and every morning, he got up before school and walked for kilometers to get it fresh grass and clover from the fields surrounding the village.
The rabbit was plump, with shiny brown fur and glistening eyes, and my dad treasured it like a pet, a toy, and a friend all at once.
But one day, he came home from school to the smell of meat cooking, which startled him because they rarely had meat.
Sometimes, his mother would get small dried bits at the butcher’s, but when eight hungry hands reached for it, she reminded them that meat was not for eating, it was to give the greens some schmeck.
But this time, the scent was overpowering, gamey, doused in the aroma of red wine, and he didn’t have to see the empty cage or his rabbit’s skin drying on the laundry line to know.
He ran away from home, didn’t come back until it got too cold to stay out in his paper-thin clothes, the mended hand-me-downs worn almost to shreds by his three older brothers.
Afterward, he didn’t speak to his mother for days.
This, he told me, is what poverty does. It takes away even what you think is inherent to a human being. Dignity. Pride.
On that day, my father swore he wouldn’t be poor when he grew up, and that’s a promise he kept.
But no matter how much he’d earned, how much he’d accumulated, there was always this need for more.
Not because he was greedy; my dad is a very generous man.
But because that poverty is still catching up with him, threatening that if he doesn’t make more, more, more, it will come and reduce him to what he’d been that long-ago day.
He is over seventy now, but in his core—I can see this clearly as he frowns at the TV news rolling by—he is still a ten-year-old boy getting home to the smell of rabbit stew. And the part that kills me is that he will die, still being that boy.