Empty Box

I was somewhere near New Trier when the sadness took hold. I started scream yelling random curse words like a man with Tourette’s and bawling all the way down the highway. Wounds let the light in they say. Bullshit, I say. I was two towns down the road before I realized where I was and regained my composure. The same damn Kwik Trip in the same damn town as I was last week. The ice cold air conditioning was backhanding me in the face once more. What new horror will be on the muzak this time as I clean myself up? “If I could turn back time, if I could find a waaaaay…” Really? That’s what the gods are going with on this day, of all days. The gods must be crazy. Fuck you Cher.

You know that scene at the end of David Fincher’s The Game where all the side characters in the film are there and you begin to recognize them bit by bit? A dream-like trance in which some all-knowing wizard pulls back the curtain to reveal you’ve been punk’d all along? There’s the guy with the kind face who you sort of recognize but can’t place because you haven’t seen him since you were 8. Your brother’s high school track & field coach is the hearse driver. Your stepmom who you vehemently hated between your 13th and 16th birthdays is there. Your baby sitter from summer excursions to North Dakota is there. She was so good to you and your brother while the parents shit-kicked around town into the wee hours. Now she is here, one of many older women who hug you and get makeup smudges all over your black funeral suit. You’re worried your long lost brother won’t make it, you’ve seen him twice in the last 10 years. Hey there he is, he’s wearing his old work boots in your father’s honor. Your dad’s curling buddies are all wearing their fluorescent green curling jackets with their names on the back. The same jacket you desperately searched his apartment for a few days ago, but couldn’t locate.

Like characters in a long forgotten play they appear from stage right to act out their life long trajectories, but now you are catching them at the end instead of the beginning or middle so it’s a little disorientating. A wide variety of Deus Ex Machina’s to warm your soul one last time. Then your dad crashes the party like Michael Douglas in The Game. Instead of careening through the skylight and landing on a giant inflated pillow pad, he rests silently in a silver casket. His head lain on the whitest pillow pad you’ve ever seen… but that comes later… at the end of the party when the characters have had bars and lemonade and are free to wander home. It is only then that you are given one final glance at the guest of honor before he is packed up, shipped to the prairie and planted under a tree.

The pastor gives a passionate sermon for someone she’s never met. She’s a nice lady, a summer fill-in. She keeps looking at my sister for approval as she regurgitates stories told to her by my sister before the ceremony. For a split second I stop boring a hole in the casket with my thousand yard stare, look up at this woman I’ve never met and nod a thankful approval. For some reason I just want to say “fuck this” to nobody in particular, turn around, walk back down the aisle of this surprisingly full church and drive away. I never want to see any of these people ever again. Like the 2nd to last episode of Mad Men called “Lost Horizon” when Don Draper see an airplane out the window of his corporate pitch meeting and just gets up and leaves without saying a word. Then he jumps in his car and goes on a bizarre cross country odyssey without telling anyone. I see my son looking around curiously in the pew and I don’t want to leave forever anymore. Yet that thought and that specific scene gnaws at me eternally. My dad said “fuck this” and left things a lot. The desire is in me whether I want it there or not.

When Michael Douglas kicks out of his graveyard box into the bleak burning daylight in his gleaming white suit, that is the feeling you get after your parent’s funeral. You are adrift for the first time ever in an unforgiving foreign land, untethered to finally give up or give in. Redeem or retreat. A man with a watch like that doesn’t necessarily have a passport problem does he? But at the same time you only have $18.78 to beg for a ride. And it’s 1500 miles to get back home. Haunting pictures of yesteryear flutter and flame out in your mind. Today I saw a single work glove on the side of the road that looked like it was reaching out in agony. You are not your father.

Empty Box by Morphine was the song that was playing when I started my car at 10:30am to leave work after hearing the news. I turned it off. Drove a bit. Then turned it back on. Something about it’s darkness compelled and repelled me. The spoken word section was particularly stinging to my fragile ears. I always thought it pretentious and a bit stupid, but now it rings like a perfect death knell…

I crossed into a valley, a valley so dark
That when I look back, I can’t see where I began
I can’t see my hands, I don’t even know if my eyes are open
In the mornin’ I was by the sea
And I swam out as far as I could swim
Until’ I was too tired to swim anymore
And then I floated
And tried to get my strength back

And then an empty box came floatin’ by
An empty box and I crawled inside

I listened to this song and few others over and over the next couple of days…including the one I played in my dad’s ear the night before he died. Picking up the pieces of my sweet shattered dream. Maybe the best line ever written by Gordon Lightfoot. Maybe the best line ever written period. It’s Thanksgiving 1998, we are watching football. The Randy Moss game. Any Viking fan will tell you, that was THE game. 3 catches, 3 touchdowns. Down goes Dallas. My dad is wearing what looks to be some sort of Indiana Jones hat and is holding his saxophone. I don’t know if I’ve ever actually seen him play it before. He used to strum the Lightfoot songs to us on his guitar when we were kids, but never anything involving a saxophone. My brother jokingly puts in a cd with the song Carefree Highway on it and plays it full volume. My dad’s favorite song. He hears one note of the song and elatedly screams “Pickin’ up the pieces man!!” He then starts wailing on the sax along with the music. We are all incredibly drunk, the game is long over (and yes, we did go across the river to Wisconsin buy more booze at halftime as was custom in those days).

As I look down at the table with the green colored table cloth in the front of the church, I see a tremendous amount of “dad memorabilia” strewn about…a curling broom, curling medals, a curling jacket with the word SWART emblazoned across the back of it, a newspaper article interviewing him about his Minnesota Marine Art Museum landscape project, etc., etc. I lay down a couple of his old 70s Gordon Lightfoot guitar books that I found buried under some cookbooks in his apartment.

Then I see the saxophone is there too and things finally come into focus for me. All his wives, girlfriends, failed business ventures, various estrangements and reunifications with various children and brothers…all of it, the good, the bad and the ugly made sense for the first time in my life. He was forever picking up the pieces and trying desperately to glue them back together. Torn, decaying puzzle pieces that don’t really fit together anymore but you jam them together anyway. I realize that humans have been doing this every minute of every day since time began.

My dad was 47 years old that chilly Thanksgiving Day, the same age I am now. When I revisited The Game I realized that in the film it was Michael Douglas’ 48th birthday, and that was the same age his father was when he jumped off a roof. I didn’t expect that to hit me so hard, hell I was just watching for the weird twist at the end and to escape reality for a little while.

My dad was never really a heavy drinker like me – but he was that day, meeting my brother and I at our caveman level. Gone was the foreign entity who only seemed to care about Hemingway books, retaining walls, and Canadian Shakespeare festivals – here was a dude blasting tunes with us and watching football (about the only 2 things our feeble minds could handle at the time). We had put the Lightfoot on as a goof to see what he would do, and what he did was show himself to us unequivocally. He was us, and we were him. I was just too drunk to see it. Or as they say in the bible and David Fincher movies – “Where once I was blind, now I see.”