Walking down that hall again, I didn’t know what to expect. I knew Dad would be in his chair, watching the big TV, but would he launch into the litany of complaints we sarcastically refer to as his “organ recital”? Or would he be slumped over, dozing with the audio plugged into his ear?
Good to see you! came the greeting instead.
Good to see YOU, I replied, actually looking at him in the face.
And I discovered that it was so, as I said it, that I was in fact very glad to see him, almost to my surprise. His eyes are so blue! He still has hair on top of his head at 81 and a half, and his eyes have that twinkle that he gets right before he delivers a silly joke or a bad pun, as he is wont to do. “Well, Mom has made me an artichoke, so we can go into the kitchen and chat! The artichoke won’t be able to chat, but the two of us will make up for it, I’m sure.” So silly, and so Dad, and it made me SO happy.
He’s a goofball and a geek, and I’m just like him. We started talking about my trip to New York, and I shared about working on the 19thfloor with glass walls overlooking the Hudson and the Statue of Liberty in the near distance. We glanced at the incessant tube and our conversation veered into North Korea, which led him to start another of his standard stories: this one about the time he visited the northeast part of China, and the delegation took him to the North Korean border, which he got very close to, but never crossed. I’d heard it all before, like most of them. 60 years of stories, all designed with retelling in mind. But I wasn’t impatient. I was out here with him, watching his blue eyes twinkle, and realized he’s been giving me that same look since 1956, when he first held me in his arms. Now if there’s any holding in the arms, it’ll be me doing the holding, since Parkinson’s has taken away his legs and his drive, and some days his spirit. But not this day.
What is that city, Doug, near the border? I have no idea.
Go get the China map, you know the one with the red cover, on the shelf under my nightstand.
Mom rolls her eyes, saying without speaking—Why? Why do you have to look up the city just because you don’t remember, what possible difference could it make?
I jump up and practically run for the map. I know exactly where it is, and I know it will make Dad happy to be using it. Who am I kidding? It makes mehappy – map-happy – to be looking for a faraway city with my Daddy. It is us, SO us, geeking out over a map of a foreign country, looking for some arcane bit of information for its sheer arcanity, if that’s a word.
Yanji, I say.
What?
Yan-ji, I repeat.
Yes! That’s the city where the Chinese took me to get a closer look at North Korea.
We found the city on the map, and we saw that it was good.
Mostly what was good was doing it together. It was like the olden days, when we carefully planned our cross-country trips with the family of seven. I was the navigator, and faced daunting questions as an eleven-year old, such as:
“Doug, we have about a quarter tank of gas left. What town should we stop in for gas before we run out?”
I couldn’t Google it, or check Yelp, or even phone a friend. This was 1968… no phone, (no pool, no pets, I ain’t got no ci-gar-ettes)… we were kings of the road and out there on our own armed with paper maps and cash to buy gas, with an ice chest of sandwiches to make it through the day and an ability to do math in our heads to figure out gas mileage and distances.
It was up to me to judge by the size of the dot on the map whether the town was big enough to have gas stations—not all of them did—and I had to check the recent gas receipts (faithfully kept in chronological order in the glove compartment) to see what kind of mileage we had been getting in the ’64 VW Microbus, to determine how far we could go before we needed gas. And we wanted to wait until the last minute, like a NASCAR pit stop, to keep the number of stops to an absolute minimum, since Dad always liked to cover at least 500 miles in a day, and I was his main partner in that accomplishment, so I knew the answer was definitely NOT, “go ahead and stop at the next station you see, no use risking it.” Wrong! It was always worth risking it, to see if we could do it, to test our mettle, as Dad would say.
So here we were again, poring over the map together, fifty years on.
The way Mom and the others roll their eyes at us, ridicule our overly precise calculations and general geekiness, just makes it better. They don’t understand. They can’t understand. Not the way me and my daddy do. The map held a world, and we entered that world, just me and Daddy, and in those moments time stood still: my father approved of me, and needed me, and wanted my advice, and I didn’t need food or drink, or my mother, or friends, or something else to do. We floated above the earth in our special bubble, just we two.
And so it was again, in the den, leaning over the China map in his big chair that stands him all the way up, since his Parkinson’s took his ability to do that on his own a few years back. We find the Korean border, and the spot where the Chinese took him. We are lost in our cartographic reverie, the way I got lost in his blue eyes.
So good to SEE you, Dad.