I look at my cell phone and notice three missed calls from the 317 area code. Indianapolis.
Jesus Christ, really?
He does this a lot, bombs my phone with a cluster of calls, as if anything going on in his life is really that important.
I notice I have 8 voice mails waiting. Standing in my kitchen, in a t-shirt and underwear, on the tail end of a 24 hour work crush, I resign myself to wading through the voice mails, already knowing 6 of them are from him.
I started this “blog” just last week. Part of its purpose was to take all of these fragments of my story, my life, and put them together as a larger story. The other purpose was to start writing again - something I haven’t done with any seriousness since high school. I figured I’d write a chapter here, a fragment or character sketch there. After awhile, I’d sum it all up and hope I’d have something.
I wanted to share this blog with my Dad. He was a voracious writer, but he never finished anything he started. But he was always writing something, always. It was his obsession, his life’s work, and like his life, something he never completely followed through on. A tragedy, really.
When I was 8 he bought me my first typewriter. That was a defining moment for my life, one of the few such moments that my Dad had a purposeful hand in. By giving me that typewriter, he gave me a voice and he gave me an escape. Through writing, I learned to observe and criticize the world around me. Through writing, I learned to expand my imagination and develop a lust for new ideas and new ways of thinking. It’s amazing to think I can trace all of that back to a baby blue typewriter made of hard plastic, a symbolic gesture of a father sharing with his son.
Rest In Peace, Charles Burton Gilkison. July 31st, 2008.
The floorboards are covered in cardboard to hide the gaping holes. Some pieces have duct tape on the edge but it’s long lost its stick, the underside of the tape coated in dirt and nameless filth. As the car bounces over bumps, the cardboard jumps and scatters, occasionally showing a glimpse of the road passing beneath us.
I am eight years old and my legs are still too short to reach, the toes of my Keds dangling dangerously above the cardboard trap. I am pretending I am Indiana Jones cautiously navigating the rocky lip of a lava pit, the Nazi’s in close pursuit. One false step and I’m done for. If I move too slowly, I’m dog food for the villains.
Under destruction.
