chapter one...(part 3)

The Jupiter Symphony blared at a volume the HOA would not approve. The oboe in the second movement, or was it the first, just killed me, the way the note climbed and climbed “rising into the heavens” Mr. French, my music appreciation teacher would say, “You feel it? You feel it?”.

I could tell my dad was feeling it right then. He closed his eyes and smiled. Good, I thought, let Mozart carry you away.

“Why not take up an instrument? You could travel the world performing,” he said, after a bit, turning toward me, surprising me because I hadn’t thought he’d noticed me seated opposite him on the couch.

“Travel the world performing?” I repeated. Had he mixed me up with someone else? Yanni, perhaps?

His mere suggestion brought to mind terror of the third-grade school performance kind: my umbrella jamming, not twirling, as I stomped across the stage in my rubber boots, splashing through blue paper mache puddles; my eighth grade oral report on “Trees” and Margo Strumelbaum in the back row blurting, “I can’t hear you. Can you please speak up!” my voice disappearing like the great glossopteris trees of the South Pole; and just last Sunday, standing in front of a table of six, my heart racing, my forehead glistening with sweat, botching the breakfast specials, topping the Ole Omelets with blueberries and whipped cream.

“The violin, perhaps? Something small, easily transported.”

“Daddy, I don’t play the violin,” I reminded him. It was a minor detail but one I thought he really shouldn’t overlook.

The sun was starting to set. I loved this time of evening in Los Gatos. The hills became tinged with orange and the birds darted through the sky as if on one last blast of flight before retiring to wherever they went at the end of the day. Did birds sleep I wondered as my father continued charting an impossible future for me.

“You played the clarinet. You certainly could pick up the violin. Music is all the same, really, just a matter of learning the positioning.” He was talking to me but gazing at a cookie, rotating it in front of himself like Lear with the skull. A bird flew onto his deck and clasped onto the balcony with its bony claws, correcting its balance with a small flick of its tail.

“Take music classes, I’ll pay for them,” he said and popped the cookie into his mouth. I watched the bird and thought how I could use a tail like that, something that was automatic that kept me upright and balanced, something that was beyond my control that I couldn’t mess up. Its eye was yellow and for a moment it seemed to be staring at me.

Hello little bird, I said to myself.

“Go to Vienna. Now, theres a place to study music.”

Little bird, I said, what am I going to do with myself? Tell me, give me a hint, anything. What the hell, I thought; maybe you had to try anything to figure this world out.

“Although, Prague I hear is quite lovely. Cold though. Maybe not Prague.”

The bird and I stared at one another . It cocked its head pecked under its wing and then flew off without offering me any clues or life suggestions.

I looked over at my dad. He’d piled up a stack of Pepperidge Farm paper cookie cups on the arm rest of the couch. I counted five of them leaning like the Tower of Pisa. I picked up his security guard hat that he’d tossed on the chair. Stupid looking thing that was too large for his head even though he’d sinched the plastic strap to the last hole.

He’d thought the security job would be perfect for him. Within walking distance, just around the corner. Part-time, providing him with a little extra to pad his social security and pension. Outdoors, walking mostly. But it had gone poorly from day one.

Something about Brian, the day manager, saying he had the authority to demand that my dad wear the stupid hat; and my dad telling Brian that “as a senior scientist in the semi-conductor industry for the past thirty years designing the microchips that powered the computers at the 7-Eleven where Brian bought his Big Gulps” that if he didn’t want to wear the damn hat he wasn’t going to.

Or something along those lines. I’d heard about it from Rachel.

I put the hat on my head and felt it loose over my ears. It was the kind of thing truckers wore with plastic mesh and a thick white fabric front with the company name stitched in dark blue lettering: “Allied Security”.

“How’d I look?” I asked turning toward him, running my hand over the brim in a slick cowpoke kinda way.

“Ssh!” he said and stood up and turned the music down. “You hear that?” He walked to the window and peeked out.


“Hear what? " I asked. I heard lots of things, normal things like the far off hum of Highway 17, someone beeping their horn, a kid laughing out by the pool, a lawn mower. Normal mid-summer sounds that should not cause anyone to rush to the window and peek out through the blinds like a crazy person.

But Rachel had warned me about this behavior too.

He got up and walked over to the kitchen window and leaned with his back against the wall, lifting the blind with his pinky. He looked out to the central garden. I did in fact hear something. A weed whacker. The high pitched whine of it like a dentist’s drill was coming from directly below the window, about six feet below.

He leaned his head downward and stared, the hairs of his grey mustache smashed against the window, his breath fogging the glass. I picked up an uneaten potato on the dining room table and looked out from the opposite side of the window. Sure enough one of the condo gardeners was out there trimming the lawn to a perfectly straight edge that the HOA would surely smile upon.

I ate another potato and then another while he continued monitoring the gardener’s activities. Nervous food eating was a bad habit I was always fighting against. Do I really want to eat this I’d ask myself or am I just anxious. Half the time, the answer was “just anxious” but I ate whatever it was anyhow.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. He angled his head left then right looking around the grounds. I followed his gaze. What was he looking for I wondered. I couldn’t see anything that looked like cause for alarm. Sure, things might be better: That woman lifting two bags of groceries from the bottom of her stairs really should be using her legs not her back to lift and maybe I wouldn’t have paired the blue socks with the orange shorts. I did see a carpet, smallish like a bathmat, hanging over the stair railing outside of Condo 54 that was clearly in violation of HOA rules but apart from these things all was in order, all was neatly clipped, clean, well watered, hazy and warm with the glow from a summer’s setting sun.

And yet, still he spied outside his kitchen window like an FBI agent while I reached for another potato, my fourth, and popped it in my mouth.

“Save those,” he said, letting go of the blind and heading off down the hallway toward his study. “We’ll fry them up for breakfast.”

Just what had he been looking for I wondered as I took the bowl of potatoes off the table and placed them in the refrigerator. I cleared our dinner plates and placed them in the sink. Maybe he didn’t like how close the gardener was to his space. Was that it? Did he think the guy was casing the joint? But the man couldn’t even see in the window from where he crouched.

I let the warm water whisk away the scraps of our dinner, returning our plates to their former shiny, non-fishy selves and placed them steaming in the dish rack to dry.
His brain wasn’t like mine. It knew things, endless smart things, that no matter how he tried – and oh how he tried, with salt and pepper shakers representing electrons and photons – I never could grasp what he tried so hard to share: “but wait, I thought you said the butter knife was the earth’s gravitational pull?”

So it was possible that the gardener was not simply the gardener but something else? Wasn’t it, I asked myself.