Carry The Fire

It is said that the phrase “Be not afraid” is mentioned in the bible 365 times. One for each day of the year. I think about this on a Sunday at 1:48pm as I listen to a couple voicemails from my dad. The first is the day he told me his cancer had reached his brain on April 20th, the second was another one I didn’t even realize I had from May 12th. In the first one he sounds strong yet fearful, the second he sounds frail and resigned. I thought I was done writing about my father, but in all the funeral hoopla and aftermath I forgot I heard Cormac McCarthy died. Then of course I had to think about The Road.

I think I read McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel sometime in 2007. I can’t remember if it was before or after I saw the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of McCarthy’s book No Country for Old Men. It’s kind of a blur, I was in my early 30s and was still heavily on the sauce. Everyone my age was on the McCarthy train big time in those days and I was no exception. About the only thing I can remember about reading The Road for the first time was the ending with the child watching his father die. It nearly moved me to tears, which was odd since I had not had kids yet, still had both my parents and all 4 of my grandparents. To this day I can’t understand why it charged me with so much emotion at the time. Maybe it was some sort of premonition. Perhaps it was just my own fractious relationship with my father that was still in a weird holding pattern around that time.

I thought I’d give the film adaptation of The Road another run last night. I hadn’t seen it since it came out in 2009. At the time I was thoroughly and completely let down. I just had so many nitpicks, things they left in…things they left out. A smoking hot Charlize Theron as the mother? It all seemed just ok to me, and I moved on with my life until I saw it on Tubi the other day. And here I sit, wallowing in decaying sense memories once more.

Fresh air, nothing but gorgeous fresh air on the day of the burial. Sunny and light. 5 years ago (almost to the day) we buried my grandmother here, it was unseasonably cold and windy. My grandmother had been in deep freeze all winter waiting for the ground to unthaw in this desolate North Dakota prairie. The stench of formaldehyde around the casket was horrendous. Not so today. As I lift the left front of the casket with the other pall bearers and spin it so my father is facing the farmland in the distance, I am at peace with this as a sort of chapter’s end. Then, as we slowly let our end down on the roller contraption set up above the 6 foot hole, I happen to glance up and see my daughter uncontrollably weeping. Oh shit, she wasn’t at the funeral that was held 2 days and 483 miles ago in Minnesota. It was her last day of school and she had a field trip to a Waterpark, so my son drew the short straw for that ceremony and my daughter accompanied me on the long ride through the prairie (exactly as she did 5 years ago when she was seven…which was 3 months before I stopped drinking for good). After I set the casket down with the others I go to her and comfort her, she has never known death like this. I cry for the first time in days, not because I’m sad about my dad, but because she is sad.

I took a trip to the Badlands with my father during the Great Pandemic of 2020. It is the only trip I ever remember going on where it was just him and I by ourselves. He had just found out he had prostate cancer and had to go in for a procedure at the end of the summer. He mentioned going out there by himself before he had to do his “medical stuff” and I jumped at the chance to make my friends jealous that I was leaving quarantine behind. I wasn’t that afraid and besides I had to go in to work at the TV studio every day of the Pandemic so I had a different perspective. Also there are about 2 people who live in that part of North Dakota and we would be outside most of the time looking at buffaloes.

It was the best time I ever had with him. He was like Viggo Mortenson showing the kid in The Road the places he lived as a kid. The ancient hoodoos and trails for days were a strong tonic for all the Trump, Fauci, and George Floyd hysteria going on back in the real world. My dad beat the pants off his prostate cancer, but a different more powerful cancerous demise would await him down the road.

The movie version of The Road is better than I remembered it being. It’s amazing how stupid nitpicks and peccadilloes fade away with time. It’s beautiful “show don’t tell” cinema. Instead of wasting time on narration telling the viewer “money is worthless here“, Director John Hillcoat just takes a simple shot of the father/son duo stepping over windswept dollar bills while they search desperately for food and fuel. There’s also a brilliantly vibrant night shot of a fiery tree line hellscape as father and son push a shopping cart to oblivion. It could be end times, pandemic panic, nuclear holocaust or raging wildfires, it’s all the same. The timeless feeling of the human need to shelter our children from the horrors of the world. We must protect our young at all costs, but those costs are many and they ultimately bring about our own demise. We have to teach them about death, so they can continue to carry the fire.

There’s a scene in the film in which the father finds an unopened can of Coke and we watch the son take his first ever sips of the sweet liquid. We relive our own “first coke” in our minds, then the kid insists on sharing it with his dad. It’s touching on so many levels. It reminds me of that old Warhol quote:

“What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.”

It makes me think of being a child and having Rolos and Coke with my old man. That’s all the dude lived on in his early 30s. A sweet, but grotesque diet to go along with the gut bombs he ate from McDonald’s. Yet he was seemingly never out of shape because he worked outside with his hands his whole life. I’m sure everyone reading this now has a similar sense memory of their parents and drinking Coca-Cola. We are all part of this bizarre American experiment and it’s good to remind ourselves of that sometimes.

Family is light in the never-ending darkness. We all swim naked through life, using familial bonds as our clothing. At the same time, the brutalities of life will never cease to exist…until we cease to exist. I keep thinking about the conversation I had with my old man when I called him back after hearing his ominous voicemail. I had let it go to voicemail because I already knew what he was going to say and didn’t really know how to handle it. My sister and uncle had seen the scans and told me the situation was dire. I dutifully called him back after work that day and asked him what we should do and how I could help? “Just give me a call once in a while…” was his only reply.