The scene is golden, with the flashing, setting sun blinding us through the windshield. Everything outside our car is melting into the sun: the road, the passing fields and trees, the houses. Everything is tinted gold and brown, like an old western movie. I sit in the shot gun seat, shoulder to shoulder with my dad. My polyester soccer jersey rubs against my skin. My team had lost, but my injured ego had been gently soothed with the healing power that only comes from Chinese food. So, all in all, things worked out all right in the end.
It had been like every other Chinese Restaurant we’d been to, since before I can even remember. The same cheap chandeliers, the same designs of dragons and storks on the walls, the same Chinese Zodiac placemat (that so happens to claim that my mother, a dog, and my father, a dragon, should have avoided each other at all costs), and the same laughing Buddha sculpture by the cash register. I didn’t pay much attention to what we had ordered, but I do remember what we had to drink: two Pepsi’s, one regular, one diet, one with a straw, one without. My dad doesn’t use straws. I don’t know if that means anything, but it is a fact.
Let’s turn our attention back to the car. Billy Joel is playing loudly on the radio. My dad and I are a two-man band. I am the lead singer. I belt out every chorus (and mumble through the verses). My dad is the drummer. He drums the steering wheel with his huge fingers, occasionally joining in. My dad is a giant. His shoes are a size fourteen. I remember taking secret delight in clomping around through the garage in his clown-sized tennis shoes, fetching him a can of diet Pepsi from the garage fridge. Most of my memories of him as a child are from the knees down. I remember my hand being swallowed by his when he took it. When he put me on his shoulders, seeing the world from over his dark, rough hair was like looking out over the Sears Tower: Absolutely terrifying.
But yet, despite his height and breadth, my father has the extraordinary skill of blending into any crowd. I don’t know how he does it. My mother and I have torn out hair trying to find him at times.
Sorry, I’m rambling, and I know it. The mind has a way of doing this when you are riding in a car. Especially when no one is talking.
Utter silence, but for the radio playing.
Before you jump to any conclusions, let me put this straight: nothing happened at the Chinese Restaurant. There was no argument. I did not fling my Won Ton soup in his face and storm off to the lady’s room. Nor was there was anything insulting written in the fortune cookie. Instead, we don’t talk because…well…there is simply something in this moment that seems to be telling me, “Don’t talk.”
My dad is a man of few words. To better illustrate this concept, I will tell you the story of my parents’ first date. My mom got in his car and they drove to Canada. Throughout the entire trip there, my mom could easily have tallied the number of words he had spoken to her on one hand. The silence must have been deafening. My father is one lucky man. Any other woman would have been scared off. Strangely, in front of his friends or his students, he is not like this at all. His voice booms and quakes through classrooms, golf courses, and bars alike, sending seismographs leaping across the pages. Yet, my mother and I often find ourselves on the wrong side of a Great Wall, his unfathomable thoughts inadvertently barred from us. My dad comes from a long family line of psychic mind readers, I’m sure of it. Although, he knows that my mother doesn’t have this psychic gene, he sometimes forgets. One can understand a man of this background forgetting to say that he’s going to the eighth grade basketball game Friday or golfing with Don next weekend, but there are certain phrases unspoken that make me wonder.
For example, I don’t remember ever hearing him say to me, “I love you.”
This is troubling. I have lived with this quirky, oversized, genius of a man all of my life. Out of nearly two whole decades of putting up with this strange man, I would have assumed he would have made a declaration of his sentiment to me by now. But on the other hand, the thought of hearing him say “I love you” just doesn’t seem right. Those three words would only pop out awkwardly and flounder around, like baby sea horses being born into their new aquatic environment. Or worse, the letters would only stumble over each other. The L would stub its toe on the O, which would bump the V, sending the poor consonant flying over the E into the Y, the O and the U. Or worst of all: the words would just hang there, in the air, and neither of us would know what to do with them.
Because, in all truth, I don’t want them. I know he loves me. Saying “I love you” would make me wonder if there was something wrong with our relationship to begin with. This far into a relationship like this, those three words would roughly translate into two: I’m sorry.
From the day he plopped me, a newborn, down on the table between the ashtray and the ketchup and declared to the regulars at Gar’s Bar and Grill “Here she is,” to the day he first gave me the keys to the old van, he has never stopped loving me. Every hot dog eaten, every lay-up and free-throw critiqued, every show he’s taped for me, and every Chinese or Mexican restaurant graced with our presence proceeding one of my soccer games is a sure testament to his feelings regarding his only daughter. Lord of the Rings isn’t about a hobbit and a ring. Every single page of it when read together before bedtime says “I care for you.”
I am my father’s daughter. I have inherited his height, his eyes, his stubbornness, and his love for cats. I love the same shows, the same food, and the same music. He has put his stamp on me in more ways than I could think of. What once eluded me about this man I can now identify by looking in the mirror. This is not to say I have not been heavily influenced by my mother, but when I lose my glasses, I’d much more prefer stomping around the house complaining about it then “remembering where I put them last.” My dad’s habits are just easier to pick up. It has taken years for my mother to pound good morals like neatness and organization into me. On the other hand, my dad’s lifestyle requires no formal training.
Let me stop right there.
What it all of this comes down to is two people in a car with Won Ton Soup and Sweet and Sour Chicken in their stomachs. Neither of us talks, because neither of us has to. If I wanted to, I could tell him, “Thanks, Dad. Thanks for being my Dad, and loving me no matter what. There couldn’t be a better Dad for me in the entire world.” But why should I? I think he already knows. Perhaps I did inherit some of his family’s psychic abilities after all.
Finding Love in Wonton Soup 