By MICHAEL J. VAUGHN
I was sitting in front of the wood stove reading the paper one evening when my father came by and set a bright yellow box next to me on the end table. Condoms. An unopened box of 12--ribbed, with spermicidal lubricant (Dad's a devotee of Consumer Reports and buys only the best).
"These are left over from my brief dating period," he said. "I thought you might be able to use them."
My father has an uncanny ability to endow small actions with volumes of meaning, and this was one of them.
I'll start from the beginning.
When my mother died 2 1/2 years ago, my relationship with my father was destined to go through large changes. In hindsight, it seems that my mother served as an unwitting screen between us.
Mom and I were both extraverted, verbal types, given to gossip, amateur psychology and hours-long philosophy sessions; we were both obsessed with the nature of human character and human characters. In a typical visit to the house, I would share a couple of sentences with my father--a question about work, a question about health, a reference to some Bay Area sports team--and then adjourn to the kitchen table for a marathon chat session with Mom. Dad, given to an understated, more introspective nature by genes, a tough childhood and 20-odd years in the Navy, would retreat to the den with his newspaper.
When my mother passed away, my relationship with my father would necessarily become more direct. But that was only the beginning. After being accepted at three different artists' colonies, I realized that keeping up rent on my apartment at the same time would be an impossibility and asked my father if I could move back into the house. And so, we were housemates.
And what's more, we were single guys. As the time of mourning wore on and my dad thought about the idea of dating again (something my mother had insisted upon, instructing us to "get his butt out of the house" if he began to mope), I found myself in the unsettling position of counselor. The sum of my dating experience was, after all, approximately four times that of my father, and he was returning to a radically changed landscape. Young men in the '50s didn't have to worry about dying if they slept with the wrong partner.
The strangeness of the situation was intensified when Dad went on his first date with the widow around the corner--whose daughter had been my sixth-grade crush.
I'm not saying I sat around giving my dad great advice like some Babe Ruth Westheimer--I'm too smart to say I really understand much about this thing we call love--but one time I did hit the bullseye. On the eve of my departure for my first artist's residency in Wyoming, he had begun dating an old family friend--high on my mother's list of recommended successors--and he found himself surprised and alarmed at the strength of his feelings for her.
"There are no rules to this game, Dad," I said. "I've been looking for the right woman for nearly two decades. You may have found her after two months."
When I came back from Wyoming six weeks later, before I could even pull in all my bags, my dad came up to me with a boyish grin and a different kind of energy about him. "I'm getting married," he said. Six months later, I sang at my father's wedding.
It may have been something my mother said or something I thought up myself (the two are not very different), but you don't have to worry about life bringing you changes: It will, and in very unexpected ways. The best you can hope to do with these curveballs is go with the pitch, try to hit a single the other way or at least move up the runner.
In the last few years, my family--new and old--has been facing curveballs, sliders and knucklers, and in a very twisted '90s sort of way, they all seem to be summed up within this bright yellow box of condoms. These little rings of latex represent health, safety and love, after all, and I couldn't think of a better gift a father could bring to a son.
Michael J. Vaughn is a Sunnyvale novelist.
This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, June 12, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.