Just a Kid

I wanted a mohawk.

He said, “You can cut your hair that way. But you’ll also need an apartment downtown.”

A semi-famous mountaineer invited me to go climbing. It was a technical ascent of a massive granite slab. I ran home to ask my dad if I could go. He said, “You can do it. But all you’ll ever do is climb. No more running. No more biking. No ski team. Just climbing.” My dad did search-and-rescues. He dragged a lot of dead people out of the mountains. I decided to keep on skiing.

My dad wanted to sell both of his cars. I offered to buy one of them.

“How much for the diesel Jetta?”

He said, “Thirteen thousand dollars.” This was 1987 money. For a used car.

“All right then. How much for the truck?”

He said, “One thousand dollars.”

“I guess I know which one you really want to sell.”

He said, “Life is full of choices.”

I was just a kid. I drove that stupid GMC until I had my own kids in the next century.

***

We drove north at night in silence. He started talking from the driver’s seat just as we passed a sewage treatment plant. That made the conversation even more special.

My dad said, “I don’t have to explain the mechanics of sex, do I? You know, the–”

“Nope,” I said. “No, no. I’m good.”

“Okay.” He paused. “Just don’t be reckless with people’s feelings.”

“Okay,” I said.

He didn’t say ten sentences in a year. It was nice that he was talking so much.

I didn’t understand his cryptic message. I almost laughed. I was just a kid.

I hear myself parrot these phrases to my children. I look at the confusion on their faces. They’re smarter than me. Maybe they’ll understand quicker than I did.

***

I followed him down the mountain through the green tunnel of hardwoods. He stopped short and I almost ran into his back.

He leaned into a tree and pointed at the air.

I got closer to the trunk of the beech. Then I could see the nearly invisible target: a tiny filament that stuck an inch out of the smooth gray bark. A translucent tube, as narrow as a hair, with a tiny, clear bead at the end of it.

“That’s a beech scale insect,” he said. “That’s his fancy asshole. And that droplet is him pooping honeydew.”

I squinted at it. I asked, “How’d you even see it?”

“I wasn’t looking for it. I just saw that something was different,” my dad said. “You have to pay attention.”

I tried. I was never the first one to see the pitcher plant or the grouse or the blueberries. I was just a kid.

Now, if I do my best and look close, even I can tell that sometimes the shit might be sugar.

__________

Eric Chandler is the author of Hugging This Rock: Poems of Earth & Sky, Love & War (Middle West Press, 2017). His writing has appeared in Northern Wilds, Grey Sparrow Journal, The Talking Stick, Sleet Magazine, O-Dark-Thirty, Line of Advance, Collateral, The Deadly Writers Patrol, Consequence Magazine, and Columbia Journal. Chandler is a husband and father who cross-country skis as fast as he can in Duluth, Minnesota.