Mist and gauze

Missing my dad comes on now like a fog unbidden. Sometimes welcome, like a cooling mist. Other times foreboding, like gauze over the eyes.

Two times, the cooling mist. Once, working on the yard at my parents' house. His yard. The image of him in khaki shorts and a plain t-shirt, skin covered in fine grass clippings. The whirr of the lawn mower, the smell of spilled gasoline. He'd push on past dusk, and mom would ask me to call him for dinner. He'd stop, come in, and wash for dinner, bringing the smell of soap to the table. I thought of these things the first time I was out there -- after the accident, I mean. Holding onto the rake handle -- the breeze in the leaves of the pear tree above -- I felt closer to him.

The other time, just recently. Working on a calculus question posed by a student, wondering why there seemed to be two answers to the same problem. I must have worked on that thing for an hour, finally came to a good answer. Wanted to share it with him, know he would have gotten a kick out of it. Thought about how he'd made notes in the margins of his textbooks from grad school. Thought about the time I was in junior high and figured out why you wanted low friction tires on our model CO2 car but high friction tires on real cars. I woke him up to tell him that one.

Other times, the gauze effect. I can't shell a peanut and not think about him. How they made peanuts where he was from, laying them out on the village streets. How there are weevils in the last jar of peanuts we have of his at home. I get lost in that fog, lack a good way out. Am I supposed to avoid peanuts? Never attend a baseball game? I want to toast away each memory that comes, do it justice and move on, but there wouldn't be enough time. There are too many toasts to give my old man.