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Kamikaze Curve
Every few weeks I go to see Roger and that takes me onto the interstate that runs right past the cemetery where my father lives now. Lives to me anyway. I can just about see the grave from the highway and I wave as I speed by and say hi dad, as if he was sitting in a window watching. I don’t actually visit very often, certainly a lot less than when he was actually sitting in the window waving back. But it’s the thought that counts, right? More and more it’s the thought that counts. Barb thinks that I should have spent more time at my dad's deathbed. She can't imagine staying away for a minute. But families are different about death. Ours certainly are. And he wouldn't have wanted me there. If I'd been there and he'd seen me and my mom there at the same time, he would have worried and wanted to know who was running the shop. And if he'd awakened and asked my mom, where's Jonathan? and she said, he's at work, he would have been content, knowing that his other baby was in good hands and would live on. And he would have smiled a little and nodded. Going to work while he lay dying was my last gift to him. A few days after the funeral I walked around the still closed-in-mourning shop. Wandered in and out of the rooms that he and I and my mom had built together. Went out into the plant, ink smell strong. I sat in the office we shared. I looked back at the 40 years of hard work, the effort, the sweet sweat, the pain and pleasure of constant birth, the people. I looked around. I looked out the window. I looked forward. I thought about it for oh, maybe two seconds and then I pulled the plug on the only sibling I'd ever known. There’s a really sharp curve in the interstate here. It’s so sharp that it’s out of spec for an interstate and is one of the things that keeps the road from being part of the interstate highway system. It probably seemed like the only thing they could do at the time. They’ll have to straighten it out some day, but until then it’s known locally as Kamikaze Curve. I think of it as Dead Man’s Curve.
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