Chapter Thirteen A Thimblea Vase
Thirteen
A Thimble or a Vase
At first, my father’s diagnosis had made him gentler and more thoughtful. Then his former self returned with a vengeance. He repeatedly delivered the same proclamations, anticipating praise or at least tacit agreement. One old standard was about how when someone got a tattoo, something he had never done, that person was saying “I’ll always feel just like this !”
Only one day as he concluded his tattoos-are-stupid maxim, that line I’d listened to in silence a thousand times, I piped up, “No! That’s not what they’re saying! They’re saying, ‘I never want to forget this!’ Tattoos are a remnant of someone you used to love or someplace you went or some time when you were immature, maybe. But why do you have to mock people for caring about things?”
Why was I not able to let it slide? I had no tattoos. I had no investment in this argument. Why did I choose that moment to raise an objection? Had David’s sincerity converted me? It had always been rare that I argued. I’d never hit anyone with my fists or with my car. Unlike my father, I was a slow, patient driver, happy to zip the zipper when merging, to defer to others if there were any question about whose turn it was. I was not the type of person to yell at a dying man about the hypothetical meaning of tattoos. But with my father I’d become weirdly edgy.
He’d become that way with me too. He said that my disappointment in his parenting when I was a child was really on me, that I should have worked harder to connect with him. He told me that his friends didn’t like me. They thought I gave him too hard a time, and so they wanted to avoid my company. He shrugged and turned his hands upward as if their defense of him was something beyond his control. He smirked.
“Why would you tell me any of that unless you wanted to hurt me?” I said and started crying. “Even if they hate me like you say they do, why would you enjoy making sure I knew it? How could you be so unloving?”
“I don’t have the capacity to love,” he said, no longer smiling, though not particularly moved by my tears. “I don’t feel loved either. It’s like my heart is a thimble.” He held his fingers near his heart. “However much love comes in it just fills up that thimble and the rest goes on the floor. I don’t take in any more. And that’s about how much I have to give too.”
“That’s depressing,” I said.
He shrugged.
“And it’s a cop-out!”
I told him about the bell hooks book that David and I had just read, how she talked about love as something you do, not something you feel. She said that love was a verb, and that love was as important as work. I thought of a quote by Meister Eckhart, who compared love to a vessel that grows as it’s filled and so can’t ever be full. I pictured a vase swelling and swelling, growing to the size of a house.
I described to my father ways my mother and I showed him love and suggested he could just copy those. For example, I made sure that whenever he came over, the root beer he liked was in the fridge. Why didn’t he just help my mother with dinners? When he was in town buying cigarettes, he could pick up a pizza so for one night a week she didn’t have to cook? When a kid rattles on for a long time about his Pokémon cards, you didn’t have to deliver some devastatingly witty put-down. You could just say, “Wow, that seems like a lot of hit points.” How hard is that?
He asked me for the names of the books I mentioned. I told him. He didn’t write them down.