"Coral, hi."
Coral pulled up, waited for a middle-aged man and woman to catch up. "These are my parents."
"Oh, hi," I said, raising my hand to shake dad's. I kept raising my hand for graying dad wasn't raising his. Kept raising my hand for dad was giving me a look. A look I was all too familiar with. How about that; I hadn't been the first to lift the stern from Trent.
As if miles away, I heard Coral's voice. "This is my friend Anton. He's the one who keeps the place so nice."
"I'm the groundskeeper," I said, scratching my head with that raised hand of mine. Scratching my thinning hair got me to thinking: Here, for the first time in my life, a girl, I had a thing for, was introducing me to a dad I was as old as. No wonder dad was giving me the Trent and then some.
Seeing little future in dad, I turned towards mom. Mom wasn't graying, and her face, so beautiful, she couldn't have thrown me the stern had she tried.
Away we went, mom and I, talking garden walks. Away they went, dad and daughter, talking salmon runs. And for a time there was peace in Eden. But then it started raining, so the tough Alaskans went inside.
To demonstrate what I was made of, I remained outside--out in the rain. No, we men really needed to stand out in the rain more often. Why? Because rain softened a man. And soft always caused less problems than hard.
Sunday, Halloween, I went to the Front Desk to score my smile. Of course, lots of girls smile, but Coral's smile was genuine, as unforced as her clean voice. Which begged the question: Was Coral one to unload a smile on just anyone? No, I was pretty much it. I mean, look at the evidence. From what I'd experienced, she didn't even smile at Trent. Yet, every time she saw me coming, she gave me that sweet smile.
Coral, talking Halloween, said she was always Cleopatra for Halloween.
"Ya," I said, seeing myself as Mark Antony, "I can see you as Cleopatra."
Thinking of Coral as a kid reminded me of her parents' visit. I asked how it had gone.
Coral looked to the side. "Good," she said, though her body language was saying, 'Bad.'
I didn't say anything.
Coral looked at me. "I guess I had wanted to believe things had changed. But the same old idiosyncrasies kept popping up. You know, mother-daughter, father-daughter things I've been free of since I moved here. See, I lived with them right up until I moved here."
"Oh, really," I said, unable to check the surprise in my eyes.
Coral appeared uncomfortable with her confession, having exposed how young and sheltered she really was.
Seeking to comfort her, I asked if her parents were artists, seeing how Coral and her sister were artists.
"No," she said, "my dad's a professor, my mom's a nurse. But there was never any question--my sister and I were going into art."
Coral went on about her sister, graduating from college in the spring. A college in California, no less. "My dad always had a problem with Lynn--refusing to go fishing. So after she went away to college, he decided Lynn didn't like to fish because she was a fish. See, Lynn's college is in the town where she was born. So, see, like a salmon returning to spawn she went back to the place of her birth."
I wasn't processing much of this fish stuff; I was too busy doing the math. Let's see--graduating college in the spring--that would make Lynn twenty-two. I'd learned from a previous talk, Coral's parents had moved to Alaska soon after Lynn was born. Twenty-two years ago in 1977 Coral's parents had loaded up their baby, moved back to the land. Which brought to mind my ex-wife, Tiandra, how, in '77, I was trying to talk her into moving back to the land. But wait. I also knew Coral was four years younger than her sister. That would make Coral eighteen. No, there must have been a problem with my math.
Instead of pausing to rework my math, I said, "I hear a lot of people were doing that way back then--moving back to the land."
"I know," Coral said. "My dad worked for a corporation back then. But he saw that he'd always be owned by a superior, always following orders. So he quit, moved to Alaska where he could be his own person, piss off the front porch if he wanted."
Coral went on about all the fun she'd had when her father had visited; inline skating the waterfront here, top roping the volcano there.
"My," I said, "what a young dad you have."
"He's something. Actually, he's really old--like fifty. But has way more energy than I do."
How about that? I wasn't as old as her old man, after all. Ya, and those four years he had on me; no doubt the error in my math. Wisely, I left the math at that. No, what does a History major want to trouble himself with math for, anyway?
Coral went on about her dad. "Sometimes I wished he'd act his age. He about killed me in high school, waking me before dawn to go fishing. I didn't have the heart to tell him I didn't . . . anyway, parent issues; I guess they go on even into adulthood. How about you, Anton; do you still have parent issues?"
I didn't have the heart to tell the girl I was so old my parents were dead. Nor did I want to bring the young hopeful down by speaking the truth--parent issues go on even after the parents are dead. So I gave Coral what every responsible elder should give a younger; a lecture. "To be human, Coral, is to have parent issues. But the parent issues offspring have are nothing up against the offspring issues parents have. No, Coral, the game plan you want to adopt is the game plan I've adopted: Go forth, create your life, but what ever you do, don't go forth and multiply."
I don't think Coral had processed much of my lecture, for she should have asked about my choice not to have kids. Instead she asked what I was going to be for Halloween.
When I said, "I don't do Halloween," she lectured me on how some adults were too adult for their own good, and thank God her dad wasn't a stick in the mud like me.
****
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