dad 'saves' me

i'm not sure i've got this right. selective memory colorizes and distorts. but here it is: dad was playing tennis at the club. 'the club' was what they called the shingled one-story building where you signed up for golf or tennis or watched Sunday movies or bought a lemonade or a sarsaparilla on your parent's tab. the club was located near the magic door entrance to Prout's Neck (home to Winslow Homer and many of the scenes he painted and eventually a summer retreat for the rich and social registered.) it's a beautiful, short thumb pennisula poking into the Atlantic off the lower coast of Maine. it's where my mom grew up and the locus of many first stirrings of the heart and of my imaginary world, including my first public performance on a piano, an upright in the hall at the club where we put on end-of-summer spectaculars on a rickety red-curtained stage. i played a faux classical self-composed 'piece' all by myself and was rewarded with room-papered applause. one mid afternoon, as i ambled across the narrow two-lane, sand-shouldered road in front of the tennis court where dad was playing doubles, i was hit by a car. the speed limit, anxiously observed, could not have been more than 10 mph. i was 14, in shorts, no pimples yet, bright-eyed and probably on my way to see a dirty friend. i was knocked to the ground and scuffed my knees. it was no worse than that. dad heard the screech of tires, flung his racquet, shot through the pine grove to my rescue and lifted me up in his arms. he was worried and red-faced angry. he was screaming at the driver who was probably someone he knew, or maybe not. it's unclear. but i know i was proud of him. proud that he rushed to my side, that he ripped that driver a new asshole. this was before the shit hit the fan with the wake of infidelities, the bottles of gin and vodka buried in the woodpile, the embarrassed, broken man he was later to become. i had forgotten about this day, this sunny blue sky afternoon at 'Proutsy Proutsy' as he called it. the place where he was silently blackballed for his loud mouth and drunken insults. but he was so cool that day and my narrow 14 yr old chest was filled up with the sight of him.

brothers

i love my sisters. we know each other in that profound way that only time and blood can develop. i depend on them for it. i never resented their gender or tried to convert them into boys, but i think, as i began, early on, to have boy crushes, some of those friendships may have been predicated on my desire for a bro. i've always wanted one, or two. someone to compete against. someone older as a sign-post scout, or younger, the kid i could look after and protect. maybe i bought the idea that brothers, when young, fooled around and in sexy innocence played with each other or in front of each other and found out what that tent in your pants was all about, but it goes deeper than that. i wanted someone (dad not being the greatest in the bonding department) to lock in with, to compare notes, to challenge my manhood or dispel/forgive my weakness. if i 'made' brothers (the way they 'make' members in the Mafia) it was with my first friends. we walked the forest arm-in-arm as if blood related, brothers by proxy. we could cut a finger, share the cells and belong to a soul river that we self-created. that's how technicolor those first glorified friends translated. i have your back, you have mine. in Lonesome Dove Augustus Mcrae and Woodrow Call are equal to this archetype. neither was complete without the other as a foil, as a measure against himself and as a trustworthy, truth-telling pair of eyes. man-love without sexual rising. that's who i wanted. a Captain Call or a Gus Mcrae in the next door saddle. i guess i found them, these part-time brothers past, present and future in the long trail of best friends. they sustain the parts of myself about which i'm ok: loyalty, directness, an open heart, a crazy imagination, a symbiotic view, a foolish leap off the cliff and a willingness to look like shit on any given day.