wild

when i was small there was no indication that dad was wild. he seemed so normal- went to work every day at the phone company, went bowling with mom and their friends, played golf with my grandpa on weekends. he sang in church when the rest of us sang and ate dinner with us at night. we sat around a table eating pot roast or pork chops or enchiladas. like we didn't have a wild dad at all. thinking back i should have seen it. we all should have seen it. i am pretty sure mom knew, even then. this may even have been why she married him. but the sisters and i, we didn't go out looking for wildness. we were born into it. and when you're born into it, there's really very little you can do but let it wash over you and just breathe it in.

maybe it was because he was expecting little boys. back as far as 1968 he might have been thinking about that, about what life would be like with a few small versions of him running around. when i arrived instead they put me in pretty dresses with ruffles and jingle bells. put bows in my hair. pulled tiny socks onto my feet with pink lace and pale flowers. and although i am sure he loved that early version of me i know some part of him waited still for a boy who would be wild.

when sitting in my underwear in a mud puddle in our dirt driveway made its way to the top of my list of pastimes, he would call to me from under that old blue truck to hand him a wrench, a screwdriver. no use wasting a perfectly good filthy child. maybe this was when things first started to change in his head. the seventies would prove to be a particularly challenging time for feminists the world over. especially for dad.

but when the second child started swimming around in mom they figured again on a boy and i'm sure he was thinking about the adventures they'd have. the wildness they'd share. when the middle sister arrived instead, i don't think he loved her even a bit less. but some part of him must have been wondering what he would ever find to do with two small girl children. so when she stopped in an aisle at the dimestore before the rows of hot wheels and could not be moved until she had some, he didn't know any better and he bought them for her.

so you have to imagine that the third pregnancy, a dangerous one by all accounts, had him thinking there's no way he could wind up with three girls. slot machine odds. this one would surely be a boy. look, having a four year old girl stare under the hood of an old ford pickup with you is nice and hearing your two year old stalking through the house emitting a low growl that would make any muscle car jealous is nice but having a little boy certainly would even things up around the house.

there's a possibility he thought of dating and bras and periods and all the terrifying things girls bring into a house, but this was so long before any of that it's likely he just thought it would be nice to have someone to blame for leaving the seat up once in a while. but when this tiny promise of fairness came out into the world through all that danger and scariness with all herself intact he was too grateful to see her breathing to remember to suffer the loss of this final opportunity for a boy.

when this third child, the runt, wanted a tool kit of her own, he must have realized he could pass on his wildness even to girls. it must have been clear by then. he spent our childhood showering us with explosives and toads and rocks and smelly dogs. these, it turns out, are not exclusively the purview of boys.

and now those wild girls are grown and dad has no choice but to face what he has done, passing on this wildness. because now there are two grandchildren, boys who represent some of the most impressive specimens of wildness known to humankind. and, just like the three girls who sometimes made the church ladies or their classmates or teachers just a little uncomfortable, those two boys are his fault. he might point to all the other dangerous ancestors those two boys have and surely there are plenty. but their wildness, which is breathtaking in its magnificence, their readiness to go out and grab the world and everything in it, is not lurking under the surface. you can find where it lives just by looking in their eyes. all of them. all of us.