Smoke Rings

Blowing smoke rings always makes me think of my father. He is the one that first taught me to blow them when I was a kid.

While I carried a lot of resentment toward him for most of my life, I have a lot of really nice memories with him. Blowing smoke rings is one of them, although that also has some weirdness to it as well.

The rings I blow these days are of the smoke from cigars … Not necessarily fine cigars but they’re not the King James stoggies favored by my grandfather. Back when I was learning, the rings were significantly more intoxicating but it was the act of creating the rings and laughing at them that I remember most.

Rick was my father but he wasn’t there for much of my life. I share a lot of the responsibility for that rift as my anger and resentment was pretty significant and he respected my wishes when I told him I didn’t want to hear from him. Part of it might have been fear, although from what I hear, he didn’t have a lot of that.

I guess sometimes the apple and the tree may drift apart but remain much alike.

I remember Rick and my uncle Rodney saving sparrow chicks when their parents had died. The nest was in my grandparents’ car port and the pair took the young birds into the house to care for them.

That was around the same time that skateboarding was becoming big and my father and Rodney boarded a lot. They taught me and my brother to as well but we three didn't hold a candle to Rodney. He still surfs and sooner or later, I’ll have to join him on some waves to try and learn to myself. Maybe there is some peace for me to find on the water, I know most of the people with opinions I trust feel that the sea is where God share’s his greatest sense of peace in this world.

I’ve no memories of my father on a surf board but he took us fishing more than once. One time I remember specifically. I hurt my foot taking a catfish off of a hook. When I got the shoe and sock off, the sock was no longer white but crimson with my blood. At six, that will freak you the heck out. But Rick made me laugh. He was good at that.

Later at a pier, he hooked a puffer fish and it fell onto the planks as he unhooked it. I nudged it through a hole in the pier with my foot and watched it drop to the water below.
“You won’t regret this,” Rick said in a falsetto voice. “I’m a magic fish and you’ll catch a lot of fish to eat for setting me free.”

We all laughed.

Just as a matter of record, we didn't catch much on that outing but one of the few fish that was caught was hooked by my brother Shad. As Rick tried to get it off the hook, a gust of wind took his cap from his head dropping it into the water. He stared at it for a few moments and said, "Man, I'm going to miss that hat. It had my favorite earring on it."

Maybe I inherited that ability to make others laugh, but I’ve never been as relaxed with myself as he.
I’ve been told of his coolness under the pressure that you only get staring at the wrong end of a gun and remembered similar reactions from myself. But I’ve never had that general ease that he displayed to the world around him. And it was genuine.

Rick is not the older fellow inside a time and illness ravaged body that I saw a year before his death. It’s the comfortably swaggering youth that walked over to me and my cousin Rodney at Six Shooter Junction with a soda. Back when he was still daddy and not Rick.

Daddy is the guy I would visit at my grandparents’ house every weekend and we’d watch TV, skateboard or some other thing. The relaxed guy that smiled all the time, genuinely smiled.

How often do you see that these days? Often there is a sense of irony behind a smile these days. Sometimes it’s just plain cruelty. But the fact is, some folks genuinely smile and you can’t help but think of it for days to come.

If you’re lucky, you meet a person or two that shares such a smile often, and you find your mind wandering to it when the weight of the world’s cynicism is dragging you down. It’s like an oasis for your mind.

Daddy was that guy.

Rick was the guy that disappeared for several years. The guy I resented.

I received an e-mail from him about a year after I had started working at the local newspaper. In it, he said, among other things, that he’d had a hard life and that it had made him a hard man. I knew then and know now that there was a lot of truth in that statement, but the cliche delivery of that line somehow offended me. I remember my immediate response was to think, "Really, well I've lived an angry life and am a very angry man."

I knew then I had to work on that and make sure that my kids didn’t think of me as some angry father in years to come. I have to leave this world sometime and I wanted to make sure that my kids had happy memories of me.

The truth is, I don’t know how they’ll think of me. As the guy that took them fishing, the guy that would stop in mid-hike to take 20 photos of a butterfly so that I got one that I liked, as the guy that fixed things, the guy that worked all the time, the guy that made pancakes or the guy that got mad.

I hope they’ll think of me as the guy that loved them unconditionally. Beyond that, I don’t really know what else I need them to remember.

My step-father Justo Ybarra Jr. gave me that. In a lot of ways, he’ll always be my dad. Before him, there was Rick. And I do remember that love from my childhood, for the most part..

But absence didn’t make my heart grow fonder. If anything it hardened it toward Rick. When he called one Easter Sunday, almost 20 years ago, he asked if I wanted him back in my life and I said, “No.” And he respected that.

When I went back out, my family was quiet and uneasy watching me. They could all see the anger burning in my chest though I tried to hide it. But I couldn’t form even a fake smile.

It was Justo who pulled me aside, walked with me to the front of the house and asked me what the phone call was about.

I told him about it and he quietly leaned against the car and listened as I told him. When I stopped after I said that Rick asked if I wanted him back in my life, he gave me a moment then asked, “And what did you say.”

He listened to my answer and then he said, “Look, I don’t know how you feel, no one does. But at the end of the day he’s still your father. You may be ok with that when all is said and done, but he’s not going to live forever. When that door is finally closed forever, you don’t want to have any regrets about it.

“You may never want to talk to him, or you may wake up one morning and wish that you could, either way, if he is gone, there will be no turning back. It’s not my business, but you should give it some thought.”

Justo had passed away when I learned that my paternal great uncle Abel Toscano had died. I have memories of being less than two-years old in the front yard of my great-grandmother’s house as uncle Abel is gave me pony rides on the back of one of her pet boxers. He had stepped in and tried to help my parents work things out when we were living upstairs at the corner of Washington and 1st street and their marriage was falling apart. And had given us rides to church when their marriage was ultimately broken.

We all knew that I would see Rick at that funeral and I honestly didn’t know what I was going to do. I knew I couldn't ignore him; I would forgive him or attack him and I had no idea which. So, I prayed.

I don’t pray for myself as a rule, but I did pray for strength and I don’t know if I was praying for the strength to tear the man in half or the strength to forgive. It’s likely that I’ll never really know.
But when Rick walked past me, at that funeral home, it wasn’t God that I heard in my head. It was Justo.

“At the end of the day he’s still your father.”

I’ve always figured that Shad had turned him away all those years out of respect for me and my decision to keep him out of my life, but I don't truly know. But I felt that, if I wanted nothing to do with the man, Shad would have nothing to do with him either. Even if I could live with that door being shut forever, I couldn’t shut it to Shad. And Justo was right.

So I walked to the break room when Rick was pouring himself some coffee. I could see that he saw me walk into the room in his peripheral vision and was making an effort not to look at me. I could see his hands shaking as he stirred his coffee.

“We’ve both made mistakes,” I said. “Let’s just try again.”

As I was saying that, my brother and sister had come to realize that I wasn’t in the room and had rushed out to find me, worried what they would find. They found me hugging Rick.

We all hugged and spoke a while. We promised to keep in touch but didn’t do much of that. In the end, I do regret much of the lost time. I don’t know how different my life would have been had I said yes that Easter. I don’t know that I could have found that forgiveness in myself then. But we had that one last hug before we went our separate ways.

My uncles and aunts have told me how often Rick spoke of me and my siblings. My new-found siblings were a joy to meet and I hope to speak with them again soon and much more often. I also hope to meet my siblings across the Atlantic one day. At the end of the day, we each had Rick as our father.

He has been gone now for over a year and the door shutting still echoes.

I smoke cigars on occasion, and every time I do, I can’t resist trying a few smoke rings. Sometimes the wind is fast and the rings blow apart as quickly as they form. Sometimes they stick around for a while. But just like us, those rings all fade away, leaving behind memories of their brief visit.

This is a little more rough than I normally leave things, but I don't know that I really want to edit it much. Smoking that cigar the other night, I just tried to figure out how I would explain the man and my rift from him. I don't think this does so, but it touches on some of the points that seem important to me.