Dad had a lot of flaws when it came to making and keeping friends, but he always seemed to me to be great at welcoming everyone or at least early on he greeted everyone with a spirit of welcome that he shied away from in later years. My mother early on did the equivalent of early-nineties Pinterest parties, making exceedingly complicated cakes that Tara and I later found out were made by several of the mothers of our college alumni. I don’t know if it was a readers digest thing or a specific magazine or what, but it seemed like loads of our peers had a very specific train car cake, a very specific clown cake, and so on.

That doesn’t make it any less nostalgic for me. It doesn’t matter how many times the east coast children of upper class white folks tell me their father ordered lobster and let the sea beast crawl along the kitchen floor before cooking it. To each of them individually its seems a sort of cornerstone memory in their childhood. 

We could not afford to mail order lobster. We could afford elaborate birthday cakes with sweat equity. We lived next door to the railroad tracks. And that’s where things got dodgy for mom with a bum that rode the rails.

I’ve promised in this to keep my mother out of this whole memoir both for her sake and to focus on my dad. It’s generally rather difficult because certain stories irrevocably involve her. But to do this, I need to set the stage a little broader to show an interesting contrast in my father.

Consider these birthday parties with elaborate cakes and my genuine interest in folks big and small. Dad would invite family (including, as I said earlier, rather extended family), friends, neighbors, parents of my friends, and other folks tenuously connected. At least that was my impression.

He also later encouraged this behavior. I think I invited literally everyone in my first grade class to my first grade birthday party. I don’t remember who all was there, but I remember flitting around like a little butterfly, nursing the wounds and flowers of each. One had a migraine and took sick to my father’s own bed to be nursed back to health. Two others fought out in the backyard with swords and clubs and lightsabers. Girls talked at the kitchen table. 

But I invited them all, rich and poor, in our grade and outside and parents, neighbors and otherwise, friends and family.

I got that impulse from the sort of witty welcome banter of my father and grandfather both. 

And dad exhibited that welcome in my early birthdays. Welcoming everybody has fanned into flame these long years, predominantly through the anthropologist and international studies and mythology teacher of ours, Chris DeWelt. He has given Tara and I minds and hearts fit for the United Nations, if the UN ever actually got anything done. I’m thinking now of international goat roasts and our list 400+ people long that we invite to our monthly salons.

Probably because of this, I’ve been radically offended when I’ve entered a home and my hot tea was whisked away from me not only before I was finished, but before it was even cool. Or that I didn’t have a single coffee table, night stand, or even TV dinner table to set my teacup. It smacks of the greatest inhospitality, internationally, to have no place for a tea cup or a coffee cup, no place for someone to lay their drink, let alone their head. 

Dad seemed the opposite of all of that to me, welcoming everyone as he did.

It’s why it was odd when he got really angry with the bum. That rode the rails.

And with mom for letting him in.

Mom, generous spirit that she is when at her best, had been taking care of me inside the house on circle drive. That house’s back forty, so to speak, was a steep slope and a treeline of the sort that only emerges in the troughs of train track ballast. Folks who live near airports learn to tune them out. So do folks who live above 5^th Ave restaurants. 

And thus, near railroads.

Folks would comment on it when they came over and, in much later years, I would associate the rails of that house with the house in SE7EN that’s only ever shown in fifteen minute increments in order to avoid the El train noise. 

It was a cattle car with a door open that this bum hopped off. I’m reminded of John Hodgeman’s now infamous “e-hobo.com” site with hobo names like Stewbuilder Dennis, Cholly the Yegg, Holden the Expert Dreamtwister, The Rza, Jack Skunk, Jack Skunk Fils, Lord Dan X. Still-Standing, Marlon Fitz-fancy, Bazino Bazino: The Kid Whose Hair Is On Fire, Whispering-Lies McGruder, Nit Louse, Dan’l Dinsmore Tackadoo, and Hobo Zero. 

I know some folks distinguish hobo life as a choice where as homelessness happens to someone (thus the need for posts on Homeless Assistance, to assess Homelessness in Santa Cruz, California and the Quest for Community, and Two Americas :: Thoughts on the Foster-to-Homeless Pipeline). I’m reminded too all of these hobo signs they’d scrawl on telephone poles and trees and fences:

I’m willing to bet that they marked my mother’s house with a cross: religious talk gets free meal. Maybe not. Maybe just good place for a handout. Or kind lady lives here.

I like to think that the hobo in question would have shared the good news of the family who practiced welcoming everyone.

She fed him some sort of sandwich. Probably bologna or maybe tuna salad. There may have been cheese involved. Cheese often inserts itself into hospitality. 

Dad came home rather livid. And he was shocked in later years at the naïveté of my mother, but also at her faith. He would tell the story to simultaneously recount and relive his anxiety.

But also at his hope to welcome everyone. 

That moment: both of my dad, generally, welcoming everyone and of my mother welcoming the stranger, the foreigner, the person who was precisely other, the philoxenon to combat xenophobia, all of that rooted deeeeeeep down in me. 

I wanted to grow up and be the kind of man who would say “yes” and open the door to the smelly man in holey jeans who happened to ride the rails.