Memory of a Gordian Knot
When I was sixteen years old, I had an emergency appendectomy. But that’s not what I want to write about. This is about my father.
After the surgery, decades ago, I ended up on my back for several days and wasn’t allowed to sit up. At the time I had (and still have) very fine long hair, which tangles easily.
When I was finally permitted to sit upright, I discovered that the hair at the back of my head had turned into a knot, almost as though it had been felted like a Turkish fez.
My mother, impatient by nature, started to rip through the knot, complaining about how it had been neglected and threatened to just cut everything out. I’m not criticizing her; she was just an impatient and practical person.
Neither of my parents were particularly fond of physical demonstrations of affection — they were not “huggy” people. In fact, other than at my wedding, I don’t recall my father ever having hugged me. It wasn’t neglect, it wasn’t awful, it was just how things were. Those were other times, other attitudes.
My father took the brush from my mother’s hands and said he would have a try. Then he put the brush down, found a fine-toothed comb somewhere, and began … ever so slowly … literally one hair at a time … coaxing the knot out of my hair.
It took him about two hours. I don’t think we even spoke. And he never hurt me once. It was almost meditative, as though there were no other place in the world, no other time, nothing more than this knot of hair.
My mother was unimpressed, and perhaps a little put off, by what he was doing and how well it worked out. To her, it seemed a ridiculous amount of time and effort, when a pair of scissors would have worked more efficiently. She was fire to my father’s earth.
To me, that single afternoon became a distinct memory, like a painting capturing a sliver of time. A Vermeer of a hospital bed. Sitting upright, one hand resting on my lap while wearing some hideous hospital gown, the other arm rigidly extended outward because of the IV needle (back then they inserted an unbending needle into the crook of your elbow). I recall the scent of the scratchy hospital linens, a combination of yellow laundry soap and bleach; the wafting lily-of-the-valley perfume of my roommate’s (a nun) hand lotion; and the aroma of chicken soup (actually stracciatella, as we were in Italy at the time) like a homey silage from the hallway.
It was July. There was no air conditioning, so it was quite warm. I remember indirect summer sunlight suffusing the room, and gauzy window curtains almost breathing in the breeze.
I haven’t written much about my father because his nature was so understated. Quiet, gentle, private, reserved, honest, good, generous of spirit. But this pinprick of a memory in some ways encapsulates who he was to me, and perhaps who I was to him.
My father’s hands moved like a whisper.
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