Postcard

I couldn’t guess how many times I saw my father before moving away from southern California to go to graduate school, but the number must fewer than ten. I can’t even remember those times. I conjure a front yard or a curbside where he might be approaching me. He has just gotten out of a pickup truck, and he has jeans and a white T-shirt on, as in the two or three photos my mother has kept of him. He wears the awkward smile, the one I know because it’s mine. But I don’t hear any words, and I don’t see him finally reaching me, and patting my head, or hugging me clumsily. The scenes don’t fill out because they probably never happened. During my undergraduate years, I must have had some encounters, probably coinciding with gatherings at an older sister’s house. Both re-established contact with him after they became adults, which made sense, since they had at least spent some years living with him. It may be that the most times I saw my father, though, were in those early days when I was still a newborn, when my parents may have still entertained the thought of patching things up. But as for birthdays, First Communion, elementary and high school graduation—times I might remember—nothing.

Not that I minded, really. When my mother left my father, I was still inside her. The two of us moved with my two older sisters to my grandparents’ house, where we all continued to live—much more comfortably than we could have ever lived otherwise—until the children left for college or its alternative. My mother never gave up staying with them. I remember my grandfather’s anger on the day of my high school graduation after receiving a phone call that my dad would not be attending. He had had a motorcycle accident that left him in a cast. I accepted the explanation, but my grandfather, who generally gave others the benefit of the doubt in such matters, would have none of it. Unforgivable, he said.

In the months before I left California for graduate school, I was sitting in on a few classes at the university. I had graduated in December, but I wanted to maintain the momentum I’d gained during fall term learning Chinese, and I wanted to take additional advantage of a religious studies professor who was teaching two classes, one on ways of spiritual transformation and one called The Oracular Tradition. So I sat in on the three courses while waiting for my life to move on. To make up for the work-study salary I wasn’t getting paid anymore, each day I delivered hundreds of Los Angeles Times in the middle of the night over a long, winding route through San Diego neighborhoods. By early spring, a cat started coming around to my front doorstep, a cat I started feeding canned fish and milk to and that I named Ch’ien, after the first hexagram in The Book of Changes. It was my first cat. To have been chosen by it, rather than the other way around, felt somehow mystical. It met me at the steps when I returned from my deliveries at 5:00 a.m., and it sat on one edge of my desk as I wrote through sleep deprivation and the weird in-betweenness of my life during those days.

Finally in June, it was time to leave San Diego and move to Montana. Miraculously, everything I owned fit inside, or on top of, or over the back bumper of my Toyota Corolla. I planned to leave early afternoon to beat the traffic and so as to head into the desert by dusk. I’d left a small space near the stick shift for Ch’ien. At my sisters’ suggestion, I would stop at my dad’s place of work in an industrial section of Los Angeles to say goodbye.

He had always driven a truck for a living, and now, in his fifties, he worked dispatch and did some short hauls for TRW, a big aerospace concern with facilities all over California and Nevada. I parked in the middle of a lot the size of ten football fields. Maybe fifteen cars were scattered across the asphalt. I found my dad inside the dispatch office, and after some awkward introductions to his co-workers, we went outside, where we leaned against the building to talk. I remember him lighting his first Pall Mall.

Even today, our conversations have an awkwardness about them. I think we both realize we’re strangers, even though we have some obvious common bonds, including my sisters and, now, his grandsons. Back then, though, there was no shared memory to speak of. I certainly didn’t harbor any resentment toward him in loyalty to my mother. It was just that I didn’t know him that well, and these types of meetings we had felt obligatory. Two introverted strangers, straining to chat.

Still, it might have been the opportunity to share with him any hopes I had for my new life. I was heading off to graduate school, trying to get better at something I loved. I was moving to Montana, a place I loved. Instead, we marveled at how stuffed the car was with my belongings. We talked about the Pendleton Roundup in Oregon—only, I think, because it was the closest he had ever been to Montana. He asked about my sisters, who were fine. Eventually we came around to the subject of my cat, who by now had hopped out of an open window and disappeared.

We spent the next fifteen minutes looking for her. It was too hot for her to have wanted to crawl under a car and up onto a manifold, but still we looked in the wheel wells and now and then got down on our knees to look under the cars and in all directions at ground level. We couldn’t understand how she could get lost in such a huge lot with so few places to hide. After a while Dad had to go back to work, and I told him I would check in with him before I left. An hour later, nothing. Only the suspicion that Ch’ien had found her way to the end of the lot, where some short weeds grew and a set of railroad tracks led under the interstate to a new urban wilderness beyond it.


I left her somewhere in that lot. It was near the time when traffic would start to lock up. I went into the dispatch office and told my father I was leaving. We shook hands. He asked me to send him a postcard from my new state. I wanted to get beyond the city and cross the desert in dark through what would pass as cool weather. If I could make the Utah border by midnight, I could get a little sleep in the turnout alongside the river. I could sleep before it began heating up again.