A Pearl of Precious Price

I remember having that argument with my father—people rioting, damaging their own neighborhoods. Just today I’m remembering. He couldn’t understand—to be born here, in this land of opportunity, and burn down something so abundant as the American dream.

“How can they?”

I often argued with him, a man I love dearly, but of whom I was sometimes afraid. Dishes broken. Heels ripped from mother’s shoes. Brother laughing while spidermanning the underside of a box spring. My own flinches winked at.

Still, my startle reflex, a delight to many, was an affront. Jump and gasp when he appeared, and he would rage at me—who did I think was there?

After our move from Chicago, Dad became enamored of a small suitcase. If you walked in on him, you might startle him shuffling through papers in the suitcase.

Physical distance never mattered. When, in Chicago, he had a heart attack; I woke up with chest pains, in a dorm in Gainesville. The night he died…he had been so afraid… . I don’t believe I will be.

Yes. I have the case. Opened in solitude, it held pictures I’d seen before, an old silver ring, a broken rosary, a calendar with notes in Polish, and a nonsensical collection of papers. Not what I’d been looking for.

When I want to beat a dead horse, I begin with allusions to Dad’s most told story—three times they stole the Church bells. Between his 1914 birth and life on a remnant of our family’s once impressive farm and his departure at the beginning of the Second World War—German soldiers, likely neighbors, stole the bells from the village Church to make armaments.

Lately I’ve been thinking about turning guns into bells.

We never argued over guns—he led, but we all hated them. Some nights, sleep came guised as gratitude that there was not, and never would be, a gun in the house.

No guns. Ever. Not even that late-sixties Chicago night when the man who taunted me with the N-word drove himself, Mom, my brother and me into the depths of the projects and left us in the car while he took a box of clothes and food and I don’t know what up into one of the buildings we turned our eyes from when going Downtown or to the Field Museum—where the highway shared its right-of-way with domicile-warehouses.

Just tonight I’m imaging not waiting in the same car where he half-cheered the murder of my hero Dr. King, but imagining what kept him walking up those stairs…to where a man he admired for his work ethic was waiting…who hurried him out and away.

Just tonight, I’m in the doorway—hurried, sorry, anxious, embarrassed, confused, and knowing why the man was laid off from his Union job.