Confessions of a Ghetto Dad

Sitting with a can of beer in hand, slouched in my plastic white chair, overlooking a plastic blow up swimming pool where my two year old was swimming in a diaper and my five year old just stayed in her bikini all day, as the falling sun filtered through the heavy leaves of early summer, I had an epiphany. It wasn’t that resounding “praise jesus” affirmative to everything I had accomplished over the past thirty years. And it wasn’t that I was satisfied to what I had become. It was the fact that when everything is put away: the logic, faith, education, family, all the work, saving, planning, technology, I am exactly this base. I am a ghetto dad somewhere stuck in the middle of the suburbs.

I am just what I was years ago and that next drink was the most complacent sip of anything I ever supped: the bitter taste of boundaries. I did it. I bumped my head against the glass ceiling that was actually the floor. As the R&B floated out the radio, performed live from West Oak Lane Jazz festival, I wished nothing more of my soul, body and mind than to watch my kids play with their bath toys in a two foot Wal-Mart pool purchased with a credit card.

Base is not a negative term, unlike its synonym ghetto. They both work as places. They both have connotations of safety within the realms of familiarity. They both have connotations of places that must be left if one is to achieve accomplishments. Edward Taylor, one of the first American poets, wrote “Upon What Base” that discussed the importance of one’s foundation, one’s beginning, on the rest of our lives’ outlook. The base is simple and first. It is something that is pared down to its elemental form and everything blooms from it. It is one of the most important words in language because it is the basis for all else. Without a base, there is no balance. Without a ghetto, there is no mansion or top floor condo.

The great difference between the two words is that base is both Alpha and Omega, while ghetto is the Omega. While base and ghetto share similar denotations and some connotations, this difference of connotation is paramount. While base remains a positive term held in the same manner as foundation, family, and tradition, ghetto’s connotations has become poverty, death, crime and hopelessness. So what filled me with such content on that deck: the base or the ghetto of it all?

It was Father’s day. My wife had to work and like every Sunday I would be left with the kids to our own amusement. The sting of guilt that my wife would work on such a holy day is tempered by her working on Mother’s day, so very few words were exchanged about the importance of Hallmark holidays, especially when it is her money that would pay the month end bills. My aloneness with the children is my penalty for not making enough money to support a weekend with my wife. She is too modern to admit her mistake, but the weak kiss and turned eyes do just as much. I was left in this three bedroom castle with a leaking faucet and a mildew basement with two kids yelling for waffles and eggs over a inane cartoon theme song that I hummed in the back of my head until noon. Let’s chalk up this one to ghetto over base.

The kids were red eyed and ornery because of a four hour round trip car ride I gave them to a train museum that I thought would be a great cultural experience. Torrential rain and the heavy smell cow shit greeted us as we pulled to a field already saturated with mud. Their feet became soggy and brown before we reached the doors. They raced through the museum, running on short legs two rooms ahead, as I yelled and hollered to appreciate the history. They ate twice as long as they looked at the trains. I brought their gratitude and redemption with lollipops and conductor hats as they proudly waved and danced in every puddle back to the car. Their happiness was easily purchased with train whistles that made me jump and streak like a banshee while driving.

They both fell asleep after my daughter threatened to pee her pants half way home. I bought a coffee and listened to their soft snores. I carried them to bed. I was my dad for a day. I give this to base. Sunday was my day. So I promised church attendance for the following week. I knew in Stonehenge they would be celebrating longest day of the year. My daughter knew it as the day I would blow up the pool. Dressed in her bathing suit at nine thirty, she brought over the air pump, too timid to ask again because of the vocal outburst that had become our morning greeting since buying the pool two weeks prior during a heat wave. Though I damned her soul for missing church, I would not disappoint or make a mockery of the first day of summer. And keeping my promise, I pumped until sweat blurred my vision, which could have helped me notice that the air valves were open. She danced around the deflated pool using all the magic of the Druid religion to raise it up. Going faster and faster, her brother emulating her but looking like a servant trying to pick up her dress train, falling down and getting up, laughing himself into hysterics.

The laughter and music from the radio echoed through the trees while the water cascaded into the pool. I wanted them to wait, but it attracted them; the same muse that must attract all those people to Salisbury. They sang and kicked. They found their island as I listened to the Phillies lose. The beer was opened as she twisted the dial of the radio. She put on the jazz and jumped into the pool, as if the sound of the sultry horn ordered her back to her revelry. I drank those cold sips, with exotic music leaking through the children’s laughter.

I thought of my childhood home, the hot concrete, the same laughter, the porch and the plastic pool, the ball game on the radio, the green hose, the sweating beer. Only my education and the years of being something else saw the ghetto in this; I saw the base. That was my epiphany. I was not redeemed. I did not find truth. I did not learn to love my kids more or appreciate my life. All I learned is that I still have a bit of ghetto in me; that this is my base. And for that afternoon, that was just what I needed.

Comments

[surviva]

great piece..........

[aprilmae]

<p>Never lose your ghetto my friend. It is the reason you can make sense of the base. It makes life that much more beautiful.</p>