But there in the house that pierced the hill on circle drive, I learned the basics of life. Dad is good and taught me that sometimes there’s no other cure for pain but the hard break. He offered to pull my teeth with pliers, to tie a string to a door and slam it shut. The tooth fairy, I suppose, was more of a tooth troll for me. The gay one who dressed like a lumberjack and had the face from that creature at the end of Ernest Scared Stupid. 

Dad also, I remember, got tired of my brother whining for his pacifier over and again. Complaining is communication too and I find it funny that adults whine about kids whining. But in any case, dad grabbed that pacifier at my brother’s third birthday party (or maybe second?). He held it up before us all and threw it in the fireplace. It was roaring for a Illinois January winter. Firewood. Smelled of rubber. Dad said my brother never even complained, he just went back to playing. He also said he faked it. 

But I swear I smelled burning rubber. 

All I remember is the look of horror on my brother’s face. My own shock. The laughter of the crowd when Heath, ultimately, did not react. The hard break with the painful thing: the deep plunge into dark cold waters, my father taught me that. The knife in the splinter. The searing of the wound. The wood glue in the laceration, sealed. He often said, rather crassly, “Don’t pussyfoot around it,” meaning no cat’s paw tiptoeing: go sure footed, shoulder squared into the abyss and come what may. 

Courage is a piece of that, but so is a sort of healthy stoicism missing from most of society. Some will associate this with “tough guy” or “toxic masculinity” stuff. At least for men like him. I really don’t. I find it present in many women I respect too, that kind of stoic courage. It doesn’t lack in emotion — my father, like me, was one of the more emotional men I’ve known outside of certain living saints I’ve met. When I originally drafted this paragraph in Southern Illinois in 2020, he danced just last night in the tree grove fire pit he’d built in his backyard. Germania, his partner, laughed and called it ugly. “You ugly big man. Dance pretty.” Dad didn’t care about looking good. Most of the time. He cared about giving the four of us an image of him dancing — old, grey man with still the joy of dancing. 

He didn’t care about being mocked for doing cheerleading so much as he cared about giving the entire school the image of him holding up cheerleaders as the lone boy. And he cheered, truly, for all of his peers, all of his kids. Even when he was a jerk about tit, all of his acquaintances and family still held a place in his mind reserved only for his gracious encouragement.

He’s the sort of man who’d let the wind take his hat just to give you the experience of watching him play chase with Boreas. Or who would tape a pirate flag to his truck antennae just to mess with the neighbors for a little while. On, you know, talk like a pirate day.

So yeah, he was emotional plenty. But that wouldn’t stop him from crawling under the crawlspace the same night as the “ugly dancing” with a steel rod in his back just so he could repair the air duct with what little help I could offer him. The house had molded out from underneath him. The joists were rotting. It was up to us both to repair it, which required moving the washer and dryer, cutting out the floor, and installing all manner of sump pump, hose, and then new lumber. 

Joy of the rightly considered inconvenience, peace of the stoic approach to pain. “Weakness leaving the body” mixed with open tears, open laughs, open rage, open fears. 

At that house, I have this visceral image of my dad with a long hair, full black beard, hairiest black bear chest you can imagine but it’s covered in sawdust. Not for the normal reason: normally he’d have out a table saw and a planer. Or (in my dreams) out a a lathe and chisel. He’d go to town on woodworking or prepping studs for a new house. 

But in this case in those early years in the house on Central drive with the basement garage that burrowed into the hill like some sort of hobbit hole. 

Well somewhere in there lightning had struck and broke off a massive branch or something. Maybe the tree had gone bad from termites or some mold. Some act of nature had collided with this massive… I’m guessing it was a pin oak or a bur oak. Ramrod straight and tall, not sprawly like a white oak. Especially a white oak alone in a field with no other trees to prompt competitive height. This sort of tree went very, very tall and thick. When the canopy’s that tall, they really have to fight against their cousins to see the light. 

Could have been a red too. 

Dad had gone out there in the weekend to hack at it with a chainsaw until the thing gave way. Mom let me watch from the window but I insisted on going outside. So dad let me, from a distance, there on the hill in the grass far out of reach of the highest boughs so that he knew it wouldn’t fall on me. And I feel like he got nervous so he let me go back inside. 

I didn’t go back inside. I went back up the hill. 

“Well bud if you’re going to stand there, that’s fine, but you stay back. This could make a big boom.”

He’d cut it a bit higher than many tree shoppings I’ve since seen. So hewn, when it poppped free of the last embarked plank, huge splinters shot out of it and it twisted as it fell, this great thing. It spun and spun, more than a full turn so that it looked like someone had made a whisk of a giant bit of hardened broccoli. In that grinding, mixing, whisking spin, it thrust up a ton of dirt from that twenty foot grade that led to the house on the hill in circle drive. The churning hit loose dirt and threw chunks of sod and grassroot and spare leaves all over the front yard and driveway. 

There he stood peppered and salted. Half wood chip and sawdust, half trench war mud splatter. He looked up at me, sweat already draining from those curly black locks and black beard hairs and the crenelations of Oakleys to runnel and eddy down the silt and pulp, holy water making straight the way for the Lord. 

Then he grinned his stupid grin, but a fear framed only his eyes. He had a way of doing joy and fear at once like that. “Y’okay?”

“Yeah Pop.”

The grin went full. “Come see.”

And so I had a jungle gym while he started hacking at the other half. 

Firewood. One of the basics of life.

How did your dad handle the basics of life?

Tell me in the comments.