#babylon-lore

In practice, however, zero-tolerance programs almost always sink into madness. The motivations never line up right - too many incentives for cheating.

The first victim of the program was actually my friend, Sam. I was standing next to him in line when one of the fourth graders gut punched him. There was no reason for the punch, he was just small and in arm's reach. Sam got the wind knocked out of him, but he managed to gasp out the phrase stupid motherfucker right as the playground aide ran over to keep the peace. 

(Sam had an incredible vocabulary for a 2nd grader. Consequence of his dad being a recently divorced mechanic.)

Puncher got a two week suspension. That was fine. But Sam got a one week one for verbal abuse, which was beyond the pale. But that’s just what zero-tolerance is, right? No hitting became a rule everyone had to follow, and it didn't stop when someone hit us. So our options as kids were to somehow make like Jesus and ascend up to heaven… or solve things ourselves. 

We started solving things ourselves. 

I'll be honest, I think that was always the plan. A school can do a lot of things to reduce bullying, but if the goal is zero, there's only one path forward: Shoot the messenger. 

---

My part in the story was a few weeks after that. Long enough to know that the school's new unofficial policy was to suspend kids that reported problems, short enough to have no idea how to defend myself. It turned out the 4th grader that hit Sam was part of a trio, and that trio had their sights on me next. 

I asked some of my classmates what to do, and they said that the best idea was to just ignore the bullies. Refuse to give them a reaction. That was dogshit advice, but it was common enough in the early 2000s and it's not like I can fault 2nd graders for not knowing much about life. 

Anyway. I took the advice and I ignored my bullies. I ignored them when they said nasty things about my mom, and I ignored them when they bounced soccer balls off my head, and the one time I broke was when the biggest of the trio grabbed my arm hard enough to leave finger shaped bruises. We were watching a movie in the gym when he did that, and I leaned over and told him he could hold my hand if he was scared of the dark. Which worked, thank God. The grip hurt bad enough I had to excuse myself for a bit to keep my composure. 

I think a more mentally flexible kid would've changed strategies by then. Clearly, things were escalating. But it's hard for me to change my mind, so I stuck to my bad strategy, right up until the day the big kids caught me after school. I was crossing the baseball field when they got me. It was just one of those places you had to walk through to make it to the bike rack. 

The big guy, again, was the instigator. He pushed me down then stood over me, yelling for me to get back up. But I knew that if I got back up, he'd just push me down again, and for whatever reason, their Bully Code didn't allow for kicking a kid that was already down. So I stuck to the grass, and they tried a bunch of things to goad me into standing back up. Eventually, I started kicking at them while on my back, and one of them took the opportunity to grab my leg. Second bully thought that looked fun, so he grabbed my other leg. Kicking me like that was off limits, but dragging wasn't, so they just started pulling me around that way. 

They were so much taller than me that I was almost vertical during the pull so all my weight was put on my shoulders. And the fields were just made of unkind stuff. There was crushed gravel all over the place, spilled out from the divider between the big kid playground and the little kid playground, so every time they dragged me over a piece it just ripped a new gouge up my back. The ground itself was sunbaked caliche and dead crabgrass. There was a grit to it, like sand stuck to the outside of a clay pot. 

It grated all the skin off my upper back. Everything between the bottom of my neck to the bottom of my shoulder blades. I don't know at what points I went from yelling, to screaming, to just crying, but I did, and I know they seemed almost giddy every time it changed. Eventually they finished off with one loop around the baseball diamond and that hurt the worst. The dust there stuck to the snot and spit all over my face and made it into a foul mud, and the same happened in my shirt. The dust stung like salt, and the gravel in the lines tore open a few more cuts for dirt to pour in. I remember them stopping, and actually crying again I was so relieved. It was done. Thank God, it was finally done. They were done hurting me. 

They left me on my back near homebase. They'd finally got the reaction they were looking for.

It took me a few minutes after that to stagger back to my feet. I was able to wash the snot-mud off my face in the bathroom, but I couldn't bring myself to touch my back. It just felt like it was on fire. Then I made it back to the bike rack. 

That’s where my older sister, Liz, was waiting for me. She was just a grade ahead of me but it always felt bigger than that. There’s some deep weight associated with being the oldest. She could see that I was dirty and tear soaked so she asked what happened. I didn’t know how to put it in words, so I just tried lifting my shirt to show her. It made a sticky, tacky sound coming up - like the plastic coat coming off a slice of American cheese. Tchhhhk. 

I didn’t know how bad they’d got me before I heard that noise.

She looked at my back for maybe two seconds before telling me to put my shirt back down. I never actually looked at it when it was fresh, but I still had straggling scars by the time I got to highschool. Long silver-grey lines, visible mostly for the dirt still stuck in them. She looked a little sick when I turned around, but she kept it cool, which I really appreciated. I always hated crying in public, and I was half a hair from crying all over again. I don't think I'd have been able to keep it together if she'd freaked out too. 

Instead, she just asked me some questions. Who did this, how long they’d been doing it, what I’d been doing, if I’d told anyone. Some 4th graders, a month, trying to ignore them, nobody. 

She mulled those answers over. I could see her trying to chart a course forward - trying to figure out what it would take to solve this problem for good. She's always had this weird, sad, blank face that she'd make when she found a solution she didn't like. She'd make that face, then think some more, then make the face. Then think. 

Eventually, she just made the face. 

Don't tell the parents, she said. I can fix this. But only if you don’t tell them. 

I believed her. She was the most capable person I knew, and her word was gold. So I didn't tell our parents. I biked home, and every drop of sweat that rolled down my back felt like acid on my skin. I remember getting home and beelining straight to the bath, because I needed something to put the fire out. Took that as my moment to cry it out again too. First time I'd cried was from pain, but the second time was from the cruelty. Second time took longer, but the nice thing about a cold bath is that the water never runs out. I could just pop the plug out with my toes and just keep rinsing and draining and rinsing and draining until my mind was as clean and empty and stark as the tub itself. Then I could go fill that emptiness up with Calvin and Hobbes. 

It worked.

Mostly. 

---

I spent the whole next week feeling nervous anytime I was outside and Liz wasn't nearby. Some days she'd beat me to the bike racks, and I'd be relieved as hell to just go home. Other days, I'd be the first one out, and then I'd have to spend a few minutes worrying about what I'd do if the big kids showed up. But they never did. Liz always got there just a few minutes later, and I'd pretend I hadn't been planning escape routes.

Friday, I was sweating by myself when she showed up a few minutes later than normal. She unlocked her bike but she didn't move to leave. She had this big, long cable-type lock, maybe  six feet of braided steel. She folded it over in her hands so it looked like a swatter and swung it a few times in the air. Made it whistle like a falling anvil in a cartoon.

Today's baseball practice, she said. All Our Guys are on the baseball team. 

Our Guys. Odd phrasing. Also, I actually hadn't known that about them, but I nodded along anyway. She wasn't really looking at me as she talked - she was inspecting the lock.

My plan, she continued, is to wait here until baseball's done. Me and you. When it gets time I'll send you outside the bike cage.

The cage was a chain link fence, maybe six feet tall, built all around the rack. They’d lock it after school as an extra precaution against bike thieves. 

Your job, she continued, will be to hold the gate closed after they're all in. Keep em’ stuck. Think you can do that? 

She was being very frank, which helped me think clearly. I didn't think I could actually hold the gate closed if all of them ran into it at once, but I knew where a big half broken cinder block was, and I knew if I could wedge it in there, it would hold. So I told her that. 

Great, she said. Do that. 

Then I went to go get the block. She gave the cable a few more experimental swings, right as I made it around the corner. 

I'd been thinking in straight lines before that. Just meeting goals. It wasn't until that moment that I really allowed myself to know what was happening. That I allowed myself to have a choice. 

I chose to jog a little faster. I wanted revenge. 

---

I came back with the block a few minutes later, then we just talked like nothing was happening. The sun was shining, and we’d both gotten into bionicles, and it was easy to talk and be people. Normal, happy people. 

But that feeling went away when I heard the coach tweet a long whistle. Me and Liz both knew that was the signal that practice was done. I walked out and got my bric while she folded the cable in half in her hand again. Then we both waited. 

Eventually I saw the kids that drug me around the baseball diamond emerge from behind the portables. I watched them make a straight line back to the bike rack. They were laughing together, having a good time. Being normal. Like me and my sister. I realized I could let things be normal too. I saw my chance to let things go softball pitched to me, nice and easy, and I didn't even bother to swing. I didn't want normal anymore. I wanted this. I knew why my sister had that lock, and I'd thought about it, and I liked it.  

God help me, I think I needed it. 

The kids went inside the bike cage. I gave them ten paces head start, then put the cinder block under the gate. That was the signal Liz had been waiting for. 

She blitzed those boys. There were three of them, and the smallest still had two inches on her, so they probably would have kicked her ass if they ever had a moment to think. But she never gave them that moment. She picked the biggest kid, and decided he needed the first blow. I remember how much muscle she put into that swing - the cable was so heavy, and she was so small, that it kind of swung her back as she made that first half spin. Like a dog getting wagged by its own tail. 

It was a perfect connection. Flawless. She swung through her target, not at it, and the resulting slap that the cable made bouncing off the biggest kid's stomach was loud enough to echo through the cage. It brought a tear to my eye. It brought a tear to his eye too. 

The trio split after that, bouncing around the cage like fresh broke billiards. I can't describe how Liz did it, exactly, but she managed to chase the boys back together so she could hit them all more efficiently. She had a real knack for getting them right between the shoulders, so I never got to see the real perfection of her work, but she wasn't above swinging for the arms or legs if that was all she had. Those marks I could see, and they were brutal. The welts were wider and thicker than my thumb, like giant purple worms were trying to burrow out of their skin. Some even bled. I cheered on every hit. 

Liz, for her part, just had a sort of grim, single minded determination to her. She was so angry she was shaking, and so scared that tears just kept running down her face, and she was grinning all the way back to her molars, but the grin didn't get any bigger after a solid hit than a glancing one. When the kids started blubbering, she didn't change her process. I'd spent my time crying, she'd spent her time crying, of course they were getting theirs in too: That's what violence does. It brings tears. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. 

Eventually, one of the kids split off from the main herd and scrambled up the fence, gecko-style. Liz let him go. It was either that, or take her attention off the other two. Easy choice. 

Now, there were two kids left, the big one, and one of his smaller friends. Smaller friend did the same trick. I was worried he was gonna turn back, fight me and open the gate for his buddy, but he just fled for the hills. I remember thinking, damn, I hope they never forgive each other for this. I hope this ruins their whole friendship. I hope this festers into something awful. 

The one kid that was left really was trapped though. He wasn't built for climbing and he had no one to work as a distraction for him. Every time he started trying to make it up the fence, my sister would just twist up like a spring, then swing the cable with both hands right into his spine. The slap it made every time she did that was loud enough to hurt my ears. He never made it more than two hits like that before hopping off the fence and just trying to run around some more. He could get Liz tangled up in the bikes for a bit if he really tried, but it never bought him enough time to actually get out. She'd always find her way out of the thicket, swing the cable, and send him running again. 

Eventually, he just couldn't run anymore. He sat down, and my sister hit him a few times, telling him to stand up. He refused. He knew he was gonna get hit either way, so he might as well get hit sitting down. He put his arms up after a bit and let those take a beating too. Eventually he just started begging her to stop. So she did. 

He cried he was so relieved. I remembered how that felt: It’s done. Thank God, it’s finally done. They’re done hurting me. 

Liz told me to come in and show him my back. I took my shirt off, and I showed him a scab as large as a dinner plate. Cracked up like dry river mud. 

He looked sick. Started babbling about how he didn't know. Said he thought I was crying because I was just a kid - that he didn't know he was actually hurting me. That he'd just wanted to get a rise out of me and didn't know it would take so much. 

He didn't know he'd gone too far until it was too late. 

And suddenly, it was like looking in a mirror. 

Two snotty, welted boys, crying alone in the dirt. Backs burning like fire. Ashamed. Trapped. Realizing that they'd just done something awful, and worse, that they’d dragged the people that meant the most to them along for the ride. 

I hated him more at that moment than when he drug me over gravel. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to kill anything but their own brokenness reflected. Looking at him was unbearable. Like staring straight into the sun. 

I could've hit him again if I hadn't just gorged myself on violence. But I had. I was fat with it, sick and aching - anything more and I would have puked. So I just told him to get his bike and go. Please. Just go. 

He did. He staggered to his feet, and he grabbed his bike before running away like all the demons in hell were following behind. All bar two. There was a swingset nearby, and once he was fully out of sight, Liz and I walked over to it. We picked two seats next to each other and sat for a while, talking until our hands stopped shaking. Can’t remember about what. We didn’t really know how to process what had just happened. Still don’t, to be honest. 

Then we went home.

---

Thanks to @elisabethdeep-blog, @foldingfittedsheets, @amateurmasksmith, @caramel-catss @arataya, and @rozenkingdom for being my alpha readers.

It was actually very sweet, albeit, quite confusing, because I didn't really see what he was getting out of it. And I just kind of left it as one of life's mysteries until the big state meet in my senior year, and then I did ask him, point blank, why he showed up when it was so clearly incredibly boring to watch. And he just looked at me confused because of course it was boring, but what did that matter?

"It's just where I'm supposed to be," he said. "I like being where I'm supposed to be."

My grandpa had always had this sort of alien quality to him that I didn't know how to describe as a kid. I still struggle with it as an adult. But I got part of it then, part of what made him feel so strange, and it was that he found meaning in duty. He liked having fun, but it wasn't why he existed. He wasn't trying to have fun. He was trying to do what he was supposed to do, be where he was supposed to be, and if there was any fun in it, that was just a sort of pleasant byproduct. But doing things for fun seemed as strange to him as sawing boards to make sawdust. Peeling oranges to get orange peel. There is enough work to be done. Fun will make itself along the way. 

You would not believe how much I've envied him for that. To be blessed with such an incredible sense of purpose. The Boomers never found anything like it. They saw responsibility as a weight holding them down, an unwelcome burden, and they shrugged it off every chance they got. Now they're old, and the only thing I see them doing is amusing themselves to death. Stuffing their faces full of orange peels and sawdust.

I was still processing that when he gave me a good thump on the back, and asked how the test was. Hard, I said. Good, he replied. Then imagine how hard it must have been for everyone else! 

---

My grandpa remained, frankly, in great health up until his late 70s. Even in his 60s, he could hike with me for 10 miles without really worrying about it, or throw a football twice the distance I could. He'd grown up on a farm, and it had made him strangely invincible. 

But sometime in those later years, time caught up to him and it was. I don't know how to describe it. It was like he'd aged a year a decade, starting from age 50. Then, he started aging a decade a year, starting at 75. He got tired just walking around the neighborhood. He had to sit a lot. We could sit and talk pleasantly, but he wasn't the machine I'd known growing up. 

Then that started falling too. He slept more. If you talked to him, he'd start to get tired just from thinking. He still had his moments. My grandma is frankly one of the few non-autistic people in my family, and she's deeply tied to her communities. She joined the Republicans when that meant being staunchly anti-racism. She participated in the Civil Rights movement, went to protests, took risks. She didn't want to leave the Republicans just because they were "temporarily in the wilderness." 

But he talked her into it in a way I don't think anyone else could.

I graduated college in the middle of that. I knew he wasn't doing great, but my first year out, I just kind of jumped into my job and lost contact with the world around me. It's very easy to lose track of things in your first year of being an adult. I don't want to make excuses, I could have talked with him more but it was a fair year for being busy. I scrimped like a maniac to make an emergency fund, to build a safety net for myself, but after that first year I got a job offer in Utah that came with a frankly enormous pay bump. So I went. The downside was that moving was going to eat into my emergency fund. 

And… it did. It took my wife longer than she thought to find a new job. The move cost more than I predicted. Things added up. And then, one day, I got a call from my dad, telling me that his dad wasn't doing well. My grandpa had only ever had one kidney (just born that way), and it had been slowing down as he aged. Then, from nowhere, it just turned off. He could've extended things with dialysis, but he was okay with just dying. He just wanted to do it gracefully. 

He was only semi-lucid at the time of the call. My dad told me there was a good chance he wouldn't be lucid at all by the time I arrived. He was surrounded by his kids. His wife was there. He already had a small army of grandchildren present. My dad wanted me to know so it wouldn't blindside me, but he wanted me to also know that I didn't have to be there. That I wasn't expected to be there. 

I wasn't a full time hire yet. I was still a contractor. I could have taken the time off, but it would've been unpaid, and my savings had been shrinking at an alarming rate since the move. I eyeballed it, and I listened, and I went: Okay. I won't go. I'll sit this one out. Thanks for letting me know. 

I didn't feel great about it. But I made my choice. And then something really, really weird happened: My grandpa's kidney restarted. Better function than it had in years. He went unconscious, started dying, then woke up okay. 

I was so relieved. We'd both been given a second chance. 

I made it back to Arizona for the holidays that year. Grateful as hell for that. Got the chance to see everyone, but especially got the chance to see him. He was still old, and still tired, but he was fighting it extra hard. Made the effort to sit next to me and chat for a bit. I'd never seen him that unfiltered before. I think it was too tiring for him to think about what he was saying. He just had to say it. 

When he got married to my grandma, her family was a mess. It's not exactly my story to talk about, but he came from a loving, caring, functional home, and she came from an impoverished, abusive, chaotic one, and he worked hard to show her what a better life could look like. And I'd made a similar choice with my wife. I cannot overstate how horrific the home she grew up in was. Her father belongs in prison. He's currently being prosecuted for it. And my grandpa just sat down with me and said that working with that background was hard, but it was worth it, and he was proud of me. That one day, I would be surrounded with as much love as he was at that moment, based on the choices I was making today. 

My grandpa had the kind of autism where he didn't much like physical contact or shows of emotion. But he hugged me for almost a minute when I saw him last. I think he knew we wouldn't get another chance. I think I did too.

---

It was not totally unexpected. I called my dad frequently, and he'd give me updates on his dad every time. My dad retired early, and was able to do a lot with his dad in those final years. My grandpa never had to spend time in a nursing home because my dad was there anytime he needed help. 

But he needed a fair amount of help. 

He had some falls. Had his kidney slow down again, enough that he started getting major swelling in his legs. He got oddly anxious. His whole life, he'd been almost unnaturally calm and then at the end he started getting afraid. 

One day, that kidney just went off. He went to the hospital. I got a call from my dad. Similar to the time before: He's likely to be unconscious when you get there. He has an army of people around him. You don't have to drop everything to be here. He's a very loved person. 

And I took him up on it again. I'd rebuilt my safety net, but my dad was serious when he said that he didn't think my grandpa was ever going to wake up, that he probably wasn't conscious, that there just wasn't much to do. My dad was a former ER doc, he'd seen a lot of people die. It wasn't a mystic moment to him. If you lived your life right, the last day or two didn't matter a whole lot. Like the last twenty seconds of a test. He'd told me this many times. I thought I believed it. I went to bed, and tried ignoring how odd I felt. Repeated that the whole next day. It wasn't until I got a call from my dad the day after telling me that my grandpa had passed that I realized what the feeling was. 

It was the feeling of not being where I was supposed to be.

---

For a fairly long time that was the story. My grandpa died surrounded by his loved ones. I could have been there. I wasn't. It was okay. I didn't feel okay about it, but it was okay, and the feelings were bound to match that eventually. I could wait for that eventually. 

I waited a very long time. It turns out that eventually is not particularly fast. 

I thought about it a lot. There was a lesson in it, you know? Sometimes you don't get do-overs. Sometimes, being right isn't enough. Sometimes, intellectualizing doesn't work. These were all important things to learn. I think my grandpa would be proud to see me learn them. I hoped at least. And coped. 

Then, around a year ago, my job gave me a chance to do a business trip to Germany. 

Apparently, the normal thing to do on business trips is to visit a lot of restaurants. But the trip was for education purposes at a conference, and the conference was an intensely social experience, and by the time it ended every day I didn't want to see another human for several hours. So I wound up going to the corner grocery store and buying snacks I could hide in my hotel room so that I would not need to leave for dinner. I could stay in and snack and recover from the horrifying ordeal of interacting with academics. 

It turns out that fancy cheese is quite cheap in Germany. Cheap enough for me to buy several large wedges of gorgonzola. Cheap enough for me to get back to my hotel room after one particularly strange day of feeling both oversocialized from the conference, and undersocialized from the language barrier, and eat all the cheese in one sitting. Maybe I was also eating some grief away too. I don't know.  

Then I fell asleep. 

I truly don't remember the dream very well. I remember running, and it feeling like I was running at freeway speeds. I ran all the way down Utah, then back to Arizona, then into a hospital, and I pressed a button, and the elevator went to a floor, and it opened, and there, predictably, was my grandpa. 

I don't know what I'd expected in a hospital, but I hadn't expected to see him. 

My grandpa had this thing in real life, where he seemed to anchor the world. I often have this sort of waking-dreaming feeling, and it always went away around him. Like the dream either ended, or at least became his dream. And it felt like that there. All the fuzzy logic of running to Utah and going to a floor that was entirely just one man's hospital room just went out the window. 

I asked him something along the lines of Where is everyone else? and he answered something along the lines of Already gone. It's just you and me now, and I am tired of sitting in this bed.  

So I picked him up, which I could never have managed in real life, and I carried him into the elevator, and we left the hospital to go walk along a canal. I've had a lot of important talks along canals. They're part of my internal iconography at this point. 

And we just talked. I talked with him about how proud I was of him for powering through those last months, and how much his goodbye had meant to me, and how much I was gonna miss him, and how much I wanted to never feel like I had missed my chance to be where I was supposed to be, ever again, and he listened, because he was always good at that, and at some point I stopped and I said that I didn't know what else to say but that I didn't want it to stop.

And he said, very kindly, that he was glad he'd had a chance to put all of those last trailing emotions to rest, but that he was also ready for me to put him down. And he gestured at the canal for that too. There's some deep symbolism in the brain, tying the flow of rivers to the everafter.  

So I walked down some stairs carved into the concrete walls of the canal, and I lowered him in, and I watched him drift down the canal until he went out of sight. And when I woke up my pillow was wet with tears. I actually don't think I've cried that hard at any other point in my adult life. It was like all of my guilt and shame and grief was moved through in one night. In my head, I know that it was the cheese. But in my heart, somehow, I got my chance to say goodbye for real. I got my second, second chance. I don't know if I even deserved the first one.

But I have tried very, very hard to pay it back. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I'm supposed to be doing, where I'm supposed to be doing it. Trying to be like Hank.

And while it has not gone perfect, I do have a lot of time left to learn. 

Thanks for reading! This was made a response to this post which I made while I was very sleep deprived.

Another story about Grandpa Hank for those interested.

now, i’d seen her work up the nerve to do things like this before – it could take quite a while. and knowing it was about to happen made the waiting immediately unbearable. 

so i said hey. 

and she looked at me, very startled, and said hey back real small. like she’d been caught. and in a way, i suppose she had. 

and i said it’s okay. you can just say it. i’ll be okay.

i’m always okay. 

and she said: i’m really sorry. 

i loved her, you know? it was highschool, but teenagers are capable of love. the way people love changes over time just as much as the way they stand, or the way they talk, but things don’t stop existing just because they're different. opposite really – a thing only stops changing when it's fully gone.

and i said, nothing to be sorry for, and i meant it. she looked a little relived, and i was happy to give her that peace. then she left. i watched her make it through the front door, because that was just habit at that point, and then i sat there a while afterwards, checking how i felt. and the answer was not good, but good enough to make it home. good enough to limp on. 

so i put my car in reverse, took my last look goodbye, and immediately backed into her neighbor’s car. 

crunch. 

air bags didn't go off, which was good. i left a decent dent in the bumper of the other car. genuinely couldn’t tell if i did anything to my car – anything wrong with it just kind of blended together into the general ecosystem of hand mottled, sun cracked, chickenshit spackle. 

i checked my glove box, and my car insurance info was, of course, out of date. my phone was dead too. as a teenager, my phone was less my lifeline to my friends, and more my tether to my parents, so i wasn’t particularly conscious of keeping it charged. both my fault.

i sat there a few minutes, trying to think of the best way to handle things, and there was only one answer i could think of, and i hated that answer, so i spent a few more minutes trying and failing to think of a better one, and then a few more coming to peace with what had to be done. 

then i went back to knock on my now ex’s front door. 

her dad opened, which i was very relieved over, even if he seemed less than thrilled. he looked me over, and in a firm, but slightly apologetic way said: she does not want to see you right now. 

(i think he assumed i was going to try and talk her out of the break up?)

and i said not here for her. i just backed into your neighbor’s car, and i need to call my dad, but my phone’s dead. could i borrow yours?

and he looked at me, then back at his neighbors car, which sure enough was dented, then he looked at the chickenshitmobile, and if there was something wrong with it, it just kind of blended into the general Wrongness of the car, then back to me, and i could see him imagining the last ten minutes from my pov: getting broken up with, backing into a car, having to walk up to your exes door and borrow a phone, calling my dad to tell him that i just reversed into someone.  

and his expression shifted from stern and apologetic to truly sad, which felt more kind that i deserved. things only got here because i kept fucking up - forgot to look behind me, forgot to replace the insurance forms, forgot to charge my phone. it was my mess, but his sympathy meant the world to me. i probably would’ve cried if he said sorry, or patted me on the back or called me sport, but instead he said

stay out here – i’ll bring you a phone.

and then he left.  

i found a nice spot on the lawn in the shade under a sycamore, then settled into his grass.i was trying not to freak out, and was doing an okay job. he came out a minute or so later, not just with a phone, but a juicebox and a jar of green olives, which really threw a wrench in the whole try not to cry thing. soon as i saw those, a few tears squoze out. i was still hoping i could pass them off as Manly Tears but then he told me that he’d gotten the olives a few weeks before and had been meaning to hand them off to me, and that this was his last chance for that. then i made a sound like a horse drowning in a bog, and he patted my back pretty rough, four solid thumps, like he wasn't sure if i was crying or choking on an olive, and was trying to cover both bases at once.

then he went back inside, and i made a few more bog horse noises while finishing off the rest of the entire jar of green olives, and then i called my dad.

he was about ten minutes away that day, and luckily was home. he drove over, and we went to the neighbor’s house, and from there things actually went quite nice. the neighbor was a retired man who actually said he could fix the dent himself, no need for insurance. he said he appreciated that i didn't just drive off, and i said i was really sorry about his car, and he said he was really sorry about my car, and then he gestured to the chickenshitmobile and i laughed because it really was a disaster on wheels.

then we left.

i thought we were going to head straight home, but instead we went to a gas station, and we both got several slim jims that we folded into thick enough coils that we could put them on a hotdog bun because the growing up mormon equivalent of having a sad brewski with your dad is just choosing to make bad decisions sober. then he took me to the canals and we watched the sun turn all orange and pink, and he looked over at me and said:

brains are good at remembering bad days. so you gotta make sure that a bad day has a good part in it, so you can remember that too. remember that when you have a kid. try to do a good job on days like that - they're going to be a big part of how they remember you.

and then he gave me a big hug and said he was never going to eat another slim jim again.

---

the year after that i went to college, which kicked my butt in new and exciting ways. and on a lot of those bad days, after a test that went sour, or a faux paus that was particularly embarrassing, or some other hardship of my new adult life, i’d stop by the gas station and pick up leathery, half jerkied hotdog before heading to the canals to watch the sun set. i’d take a bite and imagine my dad next to me, grimacing through the slim-jim wad, asking what good thing i was going use that time to remember. 

and in my head, i’d say you, dad.