My Father Never Told Me, Cissy

 

 

 

My father never told me if he drinks coffee or tea when he wakes, if he favors early morning hours or the late of night. Francis Michael White never did say how he got the nickname Whitie. It could have been the name alone or his white bright blond locks. He never said how it felt when he found out that the man he was named for was not his father after all, that the name, white was a lie but not a white one.

 

 

 

I carry that lie too, the name White and the myth that a name makes us belong to anyone. I share my name with him but what we have in common is our status as fatherless children and the genes of sister. I know her but not him, not in the way I know a memory I can call up and lean on.

 

 

 

White is the name on my birth certificate, the tan paper with the orange seal that my Aunt Worry and I went into to Boston to get when I was in my twenties. It says he is my father but I have no memory of a Dad or a Daddy, of a man holding me on his shoulders so I can see if only briefly his view.

 

 

 

 

 

I know I was a child. There are pictures and I have proof. I don’t recall being on anyone’s lap, getting a running start and jumping while someone steadies them for my landing. I don’t remember flailing arms or legs left dangling as though the adults in my life were never bigger than me.

 

 

 

My daughter screams when her father arrives home, leaps from a chair or the floor and goes into his arms, runs around his legs and yells “Daddy!” He acts as though they have been apart for months or years. He screams back her name. It is loud, their love, palpable and glorious.

 

 

 

I don’t remember the felt sense of a father’s love. I don’t recall my father pulling a long wisp of hair out of my eye or saying, “hop in the car, we’re going for a ride.” I don’t remember learning to change a tire or him telling boyfriends, “be careful with my girl.”

 

 

 

He wasn’t the kind of father who hung around the borders of my life. He didn’t plant trees to give me shade, edge borders to make the path clear but he was a seed and I am evidence.

 

 

 

Blossoming now, a perennial wildflower covering new ground, I am less angry. My father never told me why he didn’t stay for my first birthday or return for my fortieth. I have stopped waiting for him to return and rescue me from my own scorched earth or strangling overgrowth. I am grateful at least for the gardener, my mother, though only a teen who did remain to feed and fertilize.

 

 

 

What I got from my father, I hear, is poor vision. But I see my daughter riding her father’s back through the common and she is as comfortable there as she is in my lap each morning. My father never told me why he left and stayed away. I would have told him he was missed. But I can’t know, from what I know of him, if I missed out on anything other than the myth.

 

 

 

Anyhow, it’s a rainy stretch. The earth gets moist from the gift of sky. Plants can grow even in lousy soil and without proper tending. They need only to be dropped on dirt or planted.