“Tic-Toc Heart”

My Dad (with cancer) holding Beau otherwise known as Dool

 

One day shortly after the birth of my son, Beau, my Dad was holding him while I made my sixth pot of coffee for the day.  Most times when my dad was holding Beau it was just a matter of utility.  My dad would hold out his arms and not move an inch while I did whatever I needed to do at breakneck speed, all the while glancing back to make sure his arms hadn’t started the downward descent that always threatened to unload my son like a load of mulch on the yellow shag of our carpet.

When I came back around the corner this time he was holding Beau’s head in his hand.  He could literally palm the kid’s head.  His hands were huge till the day he died, though the rest of him shrunk like Alice going down the rabbit hole.

He lost some of his hair; he stopped eating and his fine proud cheekbones sharp as blades sunk; his legs dwindled down to twigs; his chest turned in.  He became weak and he became afraid.  It seemed it was just weeks ago that he was on the basketball court whooping my three brother’s butts, even though he was closing in on fifty.

For a second I thought he was going to crush Beau’s skull with his baseball size mitts.  He was scary like that when he was sick, but instead, he said,

“Look, Dool’s got such a little head I can hold it all together in my tic-toc heart.”

Half the time I knew what he was saying, even when his cancer confused it for me.  He had a brain tumor and a damn frustrating one that took the words he knew in his brain and twisted them before they left his lips.

I knew tic-toc and heart meant something sentimental but pretty much everything you say when you are dying and holding a newborn is sentimental.  It’s like a recipe for tears; I just didn’t have that many to spare back then for I was a young lass full of sarcasm and disbelief.

Instead I turned my head, grabbed my infant bundle and grumbled off for my freshly brewed cup of joe and my afternoon smoke.

But I got it.  Well, I got it enough that I knew I should write it down, which is what I did with most of the things that I couldn’t take that year and it’s what I did that night under the privacy of my bed covers.

I wrote a lot those eleven months or so.  I wrote two composition books full of garbled self-indulgent mush.  I wrote what I ate, when the baby pooped, what clothes I wore, what clothes I couldn’t wear, who called and I wrote about my Dad’s half a head scar, his hospital room, a “Do not resuscitate” sign on our kitchen wall and I wrote about his damn old tic-toc heart.

Today, eighteen years or so later I uncovered those two composition books and it seems to me, he meant this:

That time goes fast and all of the sudden before you know it you are sitting on an eighteen-piece sectional made of brown velour in the 1990’s, and you are dying of cancer, with ice-cream dribbling down your sweatshirt while you hold your first grandchild whose name you can’t even remember.

Life does happen fast.  Throw a kid in the mix and it’s light warp speed.

I was twenty years old, I had a little boy named Beau and my dad had just died.  I wasn’t allowed to drink a beer in a bar but they let me take that baby home.

The thing is, you never really understand what it’s like to have kids until you have them.  You never know how passionately you can resent their intrusion and love them in the same breath until, you just do.

Despite the ninth months of preparation you are still surprised that you are supposed to take that baby home; it’s like asking you to understand what it’s like to go skydiving or to have sex.  It’s like asking you to understand what it feels like to win the World Series or have your first kiss or lose your father to cancer.

But after nine months of waiting to get your greedy hands on that baby, it’s not too long before you sort of want to get it out of your weary paws.  You “God bless” your friends that babysit your newborn; you consider giving custody to the ones who will keep it overnight.

You wait fervently each day for naptime and you consider poisoning the mailman when he lets the box clang shut or suffocating the dog with a soiled diaper when he barks madly at the dust bunnies and wakes up Junior from his afternoon nap earlier then you had hoped — because quite frankly you would be fine if he slept until dinner.

Sometimes you can’t wait to get to work.  The car seems like a haven from everyone’s constant neediness; that includes the kid, the spouse and the woman on the telephone who tried to get you to donate money to kids with cancer.

The kid becomes school age and if you are a stay at home mom you suddenly have exactly 5.2 guilt-free hours to be away from your child; until your husband realizes that you have exactly 5.2 hours of freedom and offers to stay at home himself or insists you get a job for 5.1 of those hours.

The kid becomes a “tweenager” and the moniker alone is enough to make you weary.  He has sleepovers and you, yes you, are happy when it’s not your turn to host.

Let’s be real, you are ecstatic.

You breathe a sigh of relief as the kid heads to Grandma’s for the weekend. You give thanks when he is legally allowed to babysit his younger brother.  I mean, sure, he still doesn’t know how to put a plate in the dishwasher but it’s not like he’s putting the eight year old in the dishwasher, or at least you hope he’s not.

However, it has been a good week since the little one’s last shower and he still smells lemony fresh.   HMMMM?

The kid becomes a teen and gets a job and between that and his social life you can lounge around in your undies on a Friday night if you like because the chances of him being home are nil to none.

And while you are happy, your tic-toc heart begins to flutter.

He goes on vacation with other families and has weekend soccer tournaments; he’s gone for days at a stretch at uncles, pals, and grandma’s.

It starts to become a regular thing and just when you think that maybe you could get used to it; you realize you have to whether you like it or not.

All of a sudden you are sitting in front of the computer with him looking at visual tours and debating which dorm room is the closest to the cafeteria where you can eat all you want for less than five bucks.

He will have his own bed and curtains and door key and you wonder how he will clean his clothes, eat three square meals, make it to class, take notes, remember to carry his school id.

You wonder if he will miss you and the one thing that you know for sure is that you will miss him and you wonder when exactly the tables got turned.

Your tic-toc heart starts beating faster.

You now know you will miss everything about him. You will miss heaps of towels on floors molding; you will miss his surly attitude first thing greeting you as you wake to the new day; you will miss the way he puts the orange juice bottle back with less then two drops in the 64 o.z. jug.

You will miss how he could go through the contents of the refrigerator like the Tasmanian devil demolishing your one hundred dollar trip to the grocery store and then have the gall to look at you four hours later and say,

“There’s nothing to eat.”

But you will also miss how he played Ninja Wars that day with his little brother for over an hour and you remember thinking his little brother would flop down and his tongue would come out he was so excited.

Time passed like that for me.  One minute I was on an eighteen piece couch watching my Dad grow weaker and smaller as my baby grew stronger and healthier every day until here we are eighteen years later — and I can’t even borrow my 20 year olds’ clothes because he’s five inches taller than me, outweighs me by sixty pounds and his hands are so big he could palm his little brother’s head.

I want him back but that’s not the way it’s supposed to work, because “Dool” is all grown up and Dad is long gone and I am supposed to be a grown woman, able to deal with such matters.

But the two of them are always close to me. I hold them dear in the heart I inherited from dear old dad and it ticks on and on; happy, sad and otherwise.