snowman

i am on the phone with my father because i have received several phone messages throughout the day reporting on his dangerous and bad behavior. now, he is no stranger to dangerous and bad behavior but his loving children have been trying, as he nears that venerable age of seventy, to rein in some of his more useless and silly bad behavior. and this is what these phone calls have been about. my sister leaves messages with these words: your father and blizzard and flip-flops and shoveling and driving in this weather.

when i confront him he pretends my sister is the sort to overreact. he tells a tale of himself in a pair of insulated hip waders going out to check the bird feeder. he calls for backup in the form of my own mother who picks up the line and says, "of course he wore the waders out later. the first time out he wore flip flops". so the stories are true.

i can see the man out in the middle of a blinding snowstorm- flip flops, jeans, t shirt, cotton hoodie, windbreaker, baseball hat. when i tell him this he protests loudly, exclaiming over these "waders" he's sporting for snowy weather. when i point out that real waders are felt bottomed and are not appropriate for snow he insists that this pair is not like that at all. they're some sort of special rugged lug-soled waders or something. they're double layer rubber so they're warm, he says. when i point out that rubber conducts cold he stammers a bit and comes up with a felt lining for these things. now, i am sure about few things in this world but i know that any waders this man bought in the great state of missouri are lined with nothing but the sweat of a lazy fisherman. it is not that he doesn't know what he wore outside. it is that he thinks i don't know him well enough to know what he wore.

i spend some time singing the praises of wool hats, fleece hats, alpaca hats. hats that cover a person's ears. hats not made of plastic mesh. he insists that the cowboys didn't wear wool hats and i tell him cowboys likely died more often from earaches and colds than from gunshots. he says they wore scarves wrapped around their heads, over their hats and he is like them, a cowboy. now i know the man has a cowboy hat or two so i rearrange my original image of him. he is standing in the yard with a bag of birdseed. he is wearing white sneakers and white tube socks. he has on a cotton hoodie, dark blue in my own image of him and over that is a maroon windbreaker sort of thing i saw him wear a great deal in my childhood. it is satiny nylon. he is wearing a light brown suede cowboy hat and the hood of the hoodie is pulled up over the back brim and its front edge is resting at the front of the crown of the cowboy hat. this, of course, pulls the nape of the hoodie up through the windbreaker, pulling the windbreaker up as well. this, in turn, exposes a small bit of skin just above his belt, his lower back. the part of a human body most vulnerable to snow and blizzard conditions. if he is not careful, this is how he will leave this mortal coil.

so i do what i know to do. i threaten to call the older grandchild, a child who worries that his dear grandfather will meet an ugly and untimely end on a lawnmower at noon in early august or in an ice and snow filled february driveway. i promise my dear father i will tell the child what he has done, all of it. the flip flops. the shoveling. the testing out of four wheel drive capabilities. i say i will encourage the child to question his grandfather's loyalty, even his love. what grandfather would play so recklessly with his own life when he knows a child counts on his existence? and this man, very soon seventy, old enough to know better, old enough to behave like he's grown, does what we all do. he makes deals. makes promises. tells things he thinks might be truths if i am willing to forget he said them. he says, "i won't do it again. i learned my lesson. i really won't. i promise". and he better be right about this because i know his grandson's phone number.