Jim Kalb (the First)

On your right.

In the middle.

I guess it's always startling to look at pictures of your parents when they were kids--so to speak. My dad was in his late teens in these pictures. Traveling the world with the U.S. Navy. Drinking it up. He looks like he was having fun. I hope so.

He died of lung cancer in 1984, about a month short of his 60th birthday. He never got to retire to the small farm he'd bought in Washington Country. He only got to see one of his grandkids . . . and there are now six. I often think about how he'd love all of them, but I am pretty sure that my sassy little autistic daughter would really be his cup of tea. Both of them are shoot from the hip and ask questions later people, which can be a delightful thing--especially if you're not the target.

I started to keep a journal when I hit my 59th birthday in August, 2016, intending it to be a little book about my 59th year just to put things into perspective for myself, and maybe gain a little insight into my dad's last year on the planet. But I've had a hard time keeping up with it. For one thing, retired life as a full-time writer (at least theoretically) has not been bliss-filled, and I'm finding myself stalling out, wondering if it's a thing worth doing anymore. I've been waiting for over two years to hear back from McSweeney's on a story I submitted to them, and have had 13 other pieces rejected. And let's just say that the two pieces I've put up on Amazon Kindle (a short story and a novel) are not selling like hotcakes at present. And the last book review I had published was in the winter of 2014. (And I think that was my last review, too, as I'm not feeling the need to do that kind of thing anywhere other than right here these days.) 

Which kind of brings me back to my dad. Maybe it's about not being able to reach your dream, even though you see it clearly. Or maybe it's about running out of steam, just not having it in you to keep pushing so hard.

I remember going up to the farm with dad one weekend. I hate to say it, but I didn't do that very often. My sister Mary was much more dependable--and more skilled--than I ever was. But on one of the times I went up with him he wanted to dig holes to put in a fence. And I was so confident of my strength that after he showed me how to do it, I went at it like a madman, pounding the post hole digger into the earth for all I was worth. And dad said, "Take it easy and just go steady. Anybody can make the fur fly for a minute." And of course I thought, What does he know? Until a minute or two had passed, at which point I had to stop because I was exhausted.

Yep.

When my first child was born, I named him James after my father. Whose name wasn't James. He was born Clarence Franklin Kalb, Jr. But that was way too much for the mouth of country folks, so he was always known as Jimmy. In fact, when he got a gold pen from UPS for something, it was inscribed Jim Cobb. And my mom always called him Jimmy. He was about as far from a Clarence as anybody I've ever met or heard of.

On another visit to the farm, dad wanted to cut down thorn trees. One of us would pull the branch out so that the other could cut it, and then we'd trade off. When I was cutting one of them dad slipped and let go, and a large thorn buried itself in my wrist. It didn't hurt all that much, so we just went on working. When I got home I tried to pull out the "splinter" with a needle, and when that didn't work I tried using a seam ripper. To no avail. My oldest sister, who was a nurse, told me I needed to get it surgically removed, and apparently she had enough pull to sneak me in for a minor operation. When they pulled the thorn out of me it was a couple of inches long . . . almost long enough to have pierced my wrist all the way through. I still have a little scar from it.

That was the last visit to the farm I can remember making, so maybe it wasn't all my fault that I was such a bad son.

That doesn't make me feel any better about not being supportive of dad, though, for sure.

Which reminds me of when I went to see a spiritualist because I wanted to see if I could talk to my sister Kate (the aforementioned nurse) after she had killed herself. Not that I really believe such things are possible. I just didn't want to leave unturned stones. And after I'd "talked" to Kate--and was not at all convinced that that is what had happened--the spiritualist asked me if there was anyone else I wanted to talk to. So I said I would like to talk to my dad. And she said that she saw him sitting beside a river, smoking a cigar and fishing. And that there was a dog beside him. My dad did like dogs (we were never without one when I was growing up) and I'd known him to fish, but I don't think I ever saw him smoke a cigar. Though he did smoke cigarettes when he was young, and was still occasionally smoking a pipe when I was old enough to remember buying him Father's Day presents (invariably a new pipe or a pouch of  Half and Half tobacco). So maybe he'd have a cigar in heaven. The spiritualist asked me what I wanted to say to him, and I said, "I'd like to tell him I'm sorry that I didn't spend more time with him." And the spiritualist said that he replied, "Payback is a bitch!" Which certainly sounded like something my dad would say. And surely every parent has that Harry Chapin Cat's in the Cradle moment at some point. So maybe.

My dad liked to say, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if it weren't for your asshole, your belly would bust."

And once when I asked him about some family troubles that we were having between my new wife (number one) and my younger sister, his advice was, "The more you stir shit up, the more it stinks." 

Come to think of it, he'd have really liked my second ex-wife, too. (As did I, I don't want to fail to mention.) Also, a weird coincidence. Her first and middle names were Clare Francesca. Clarence Franklin. Pretty close, right? And one of the therapists I went to (after Clare left and I lost my sanity) told me that the voice I was hearing from Clare was my father's. Which was bullshit, but was still kind of interesting. Or at least is now. At the time, it wasn't all that interesting. Actually nothing was very interesting at that time.

Except my kids. My kids have been the primary focus of my life ever since the first one (Jimmy) was born. When people find that my youngest children are both autistic, they often comment that I am an angel or some such thing of like ilk, which is well-intentioned, I'm sure, but absolutely ridiculous bullshit. The truth is that I would not be able to live without my kids, and that our days are primarily full of joy and laughter. I love all three of them dearly. Jimmy has moved away and has a life of his own, so I don't get to interact with him as much as I'd like to these days (Little Boy Blue and The Man in the Moon), but Jacqueline and Joe are with me at least four nights a week, and we read together and say prayers together and watch television shows and movies together and go to the YMCA together and etcetera etcetera etcetera, and those are the best minutes of my life. 

And I know that my dad loved me, so I hate to say this, but it's true: I can't remember him ever saying, "I love you" before he got sick. And I can't remember him ever hugging me. And there are no pictures of him hugging me. Or holding me when I was a baby. Those were different times, of course, and that's no doubt a part of it. It makes me miss him even more, though. It makes me wish that we had had more together.

For one of his birthdays I gave him two Kurt Vonnegut books: Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons and The Sirens of Titan. I don't remember why I gave him those books, other than that I loved Vonnegut dearly and thought that my dad would think he was funny. But my dad wasn't really a reader. My mother told me later that he'd said to her, "Tom must think I'm pretty smart" because I'd given him those books, though. And he did think they were funny. I remember how he'd read a sentence from The Sirens of Titan that particularly cracked him up: "The stake was nineteen feet, six and five thirty-seconds inches high, not counting the twelve feet, two and one-eighth inches of it embedded in the iron." For some reason that extreme specificity was really funny to him.

When he got sick, I gave him one of my novels to read. I can't remember if he'd asked to read it or if I asked him to do it. When he finished he said that it was pretty good, but that he'd have "said some things differently." I didn't have enough sense (or maturity or wisdom) to take that as anything but an insult, unfortunately, so I left it there and didn't show him anything else I'd written. 

Man, I miss my dad.