a day like today ...

I love days like today, the ones in March that have a hint of spring to them. Even though we know New York won’t see real spring-like weather until the fall … we always seem to skip from winter straight to summer.

On a day like today, you would find me in Mrs. Warner’s 7th grade Spanish class. The only drawback to this situation was that Spanish class was right after lunch and it was an elective. I elected to take Mrs. Warner’s class not because of my love for the romantic language of Spanish but because my 11 year-old, distorted - by puppy love – mind had convinced me that this was a good place to work out my crush.

Any way because I chose to play with the language of love, I had to sacrifice recess with my crew … Tony, Stevie, Mike, Kenny, Allan, Allen, Malik, Scott, Paul, and whoever else was rolling hard in 7th grade with us. We played football everyday, seriously everyday. And it must have been some sort of championship tournament because I remember getting mad at Tony one day and trading him for Allen in between plays … like some George Steinbrenner shit … 7th grade recess football was serious and I was missing it for a crush …

Well, they all laughed as Tony told the story. He was looking directly at Jus and K, his head tilted towards the floor slightly and fighting very hard not to allow any of those tears behind his shades to slide down his still chubby checks. “Your father was a good man,” he told them and after a pause he very gently returned to his seat.

I was standing in the back so I really couldn’t see who was next to speak but when I saw that gait I knew exactly who it was. It was almost like looking into a mirror, those deep brown eyes – so hard to read sometimes, the walk, and the confidence, it almost dripped off of him. Shit, I knew who that was no hesitation … that’s my boy. My oldest. I couldn’t believe the sheer amount of satisfaction I was able to feel at that moment … I knew I did it, I knew I had accomplished what I had set out to do … I had been a good father, I raised a man. Someone who could stand on his two feet and decide for himself, feel comfortable within himself but blessed with the capacity to go outside himself.

“My father was a lot of things to a lot of people, if I had to choose a word I would have to say he was an ‘enigma’. Most people just really never understood him. A lot of people thought they knew him, thought they had him figured but you never really know a person until you lived with them – my dad use to say that all the time – and I lived with him … and sometimes I didn’t understand him. I think his mind just worked too fast for most people and by the time they caught up to him he was some place back where he passed before on the journey. He always saw life as cyclical, ‘it all comes back around’ he use to say.”

At that point I saw my boy start to break – he started to fall under the weight of the reality that he wasn’t going to see me anymore and I wasn’t going to see him. He knew we couldn’t play catch again or playstation, or any of those types of things again. The things we did when he was little and in turn did with his children. He knew we played hard for every inning of the game, we held no regrets because we loved hard.

I couldn’t look any longer; I had to get out of there. My tears were racing down my cheeks filling my mouth with the taste of salt and sadness as I watched them let me go.