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Published in The Redwood Coast Review (Gualala, California), Fall 2004; reprinted in Utne, March-April 2005 Copyright Debra Anne Davis 2004 There’s a family story about Dad’s reading. Though I don’t remember it happening, I do play a key role in the story. My sister Beth is thirteen years older than I am. One night she was at her part-time job as an usher at a movie theater. I was at home playing with, presumably, my stuffed animals and dolls. Dad was, of course, reading. I guess at some point I decided it would be fun to brush his hair. I got a brush, and some of my little plastic barrettes, green, pink, yellow. I brushed and styled Dad’s hair. He continued reading. Mom (as the story goes) came in and reminded him that he needed to pick Beth up at work. So he left to go get her. Poor Beth. Sixteen years old and completely mortified…when her father drove up with a rainbow of barrettes covering his tangled hair. This story is told, as such stories are, because it contains that humorous central image: a grown man wearing little girl hair accessories. But the central part of it is, I think, not that Dad had gone out in public like that but that he didn’t even realize what he looked like. That he was so un-selfconscious, so satisfied with each moment he was living that he could become absolutely absorbed in an article about telescopes or moon rockets—and not even notice a three-year-old pulling on his hair, snapping barrettes into place, patting her handywork into perfection. My yanking on his hair didn’t bother him because he was completely content in that place, at that time: He was there, I was there, his reading lamp was on, the house was warm, and all was right with the universe. (It’s too bad, I suppose, that Beth wasn’t able to have quite have the same perspective on things that night.) My father did have one request in life. All he ever wanted was a pen by the phone. A simple demand, as demands of patriarchs go, yes—but one we couldn’t seem to honor. It would even cause him to raise his voice. He’d answer the phone in the kitchen; it would be for someone else; he’d want to take a message. Yet, this quick task, this basic courtesy was impossible for him to perform. For there was No Pen By The Phone! Never a pen, right there by the phone. He would complain of this, loudly. He’d pick up a bag of one dozen pens the next time he was at the drug store buying aspirin, staples, chocolate bars. He’d put several of the pens in a cup by the phone. And, slowly or quickly, they’d disappear. We, his children and his wife, would take them. We weren’t intentional thieves, just thoughtless kleptomaniacs. Frankly, though I do remember his harangues about the incredible and constant dearth of pens-by-the-phone, I have no recollection of ever actually having taken one. No memory of that whatsoever. Perhaps they got up and walked off on their own? Or perhaps I was too busy with the million other things I was doing at the moment to notice that I was also stealing the Pen that should stay By The Phone. And that I was not honoring the one clear and uncomplicated plea he had, a basic plan that would have made life better for all of us. My father taught me simplicity, to live well in the ordinary moments of life—but he didn’t know he taught me this. He taught this lesson purely by example, not by design; and so I learned it better than most lessons I’ve ever learned. He read and looked so serene, so at home with the time and space he was inhabiting. It didn’t take much: a soft sofa, a monthly magazine. My father was one of the few truly content people I have ever known. He had the same basic needs we all do—food, shelter, love—but few wants. He required only a space to himself, and intellectual stimulation, entertainment—and he got these in such a gentle way. The rest of us, living our busy, full, often disappointing and sometimes devastating lives required so much more. Or felt that we did. Looking back on all this, I wonder if I might be able to live more as my father did. He has been gone now seven years, and we all miss him, his presence, his wisdom, his stacks of incomprehensible books and magazines next to the couch. I learned from watching him that one need not search for serenity, that peace comes unbidden if we prepare a small space and a little time to receive it. Perhaps now I will be able to not just appreciate the way he lived his life but to also follow his example, to find my own precious and quiet bliss in the life I already have. To read and read and read on my couch at home and to only wish for a simple pen by the phone.
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