It’s Easter morning, and I’m reminded of my father’s skin. He had terrific skin, the kind that could sink the skincare industry.
A few days before he died, I gave him a shave not meant to be his last. On the arc of hope from seed to affirmation, that shave was optimism wedging its hat inside his pores. After a nearly three-week hospital stay triggered by pneumonia and aggravated by complications from a pacemaker implant, things had been looking up.
I often wonder what occupied his mind in the middle of the ICU, in the middle of the night.
The Hellas was a towering vessel that unreservedly declared it operated on the basis of hope. Still, when my father, the baby of the family, left Calabria to stake out a new life in Montreal, it broke my grandmother’s heart.
His suitcase had nonetheless been attentively repurposed into a pantry and stuffed with hard cheeses, cured capicolli, dried fruit and bread rusks, my grandmother wisely reasoning that a man can survive with the same clothes on his back but not without food.
By the time the ship sailed past the Rock of Gibraltar, eating was the farthest thing on the emigrants’ minds. Between the guilt lodged in the pit of their stomach over abandoning their families and the gradual onset of seasickness, the future had become a tilting horizon.
When night fell, swallowing the Hellas whole in a raven void, there was no point in summoning sight. Sound, however, turned up uninvited. Voices swirled as in an epic poem. Mothers wishing you back. Fathers wishing you luck. Goodbyes mingling with the salt air convened to erode the tracks that might have otherwise led you back home.
Tomorrow resided in the mind’s eye. Abject darkness might have shuttered the physical world, but it also blanketed the fear and uncertainty, so you could imagine what was out there, use the night as a giant screen on which to project your dreams, and hope they wouldn’t evaporate by sunrise.
When the sun did rise, hope emerged in the form of mothers feeding their young, and in the distance, the same four notes in 6/8 time squeezing out of a beat-up accordion whose missing keys and punctured bellows clearly hinted at better days for the instrument.
There was dancing. And that wasn’t nothing.
I should have paid closer attention when my father tried to teach me how to a tie a Windsor Knot. The symmetry, the perfect triangular shape that plays counterpoint to the jawline, the balance unspoiled by the unbuttoned collar.
Teaching your son how to shave, that too is a father’s job.
I meant to prepare him for an altogether different journey, the trip back home. I hope that in the end, that shave somehow imparted to him he had taught his son well.
As I sit here in contemplation this Easter morning, I am comforted by just how much the past is prologue.