costa rica

But idolatry is so often an annoyance to the object of the worship. Flattery, love, adoration is so easily squandered as oppressive because it is either unrecognized as a great gift, or it is something one sees as necessitating requiting and therefore a burden. In my father’s case, he was young and as I said, working terribly hard and so he was tired. He had a bad temper in those days like so many men when they are young and likely missed the cues. We all adored him, all seven of us, at least I think we all did. I know I did and if he yelled I didn’t care. He made it up to us on the other side of anger when he would grab as many of us as he could, all five feet five inches of him, wrestle us to the ground, trapping four or five of us at a time, tickling us mercilessly, each of us screaming, calling in vain to our mother for help and struggling haplessly to get away and cherishing every moment. I tell you I am smiling now as I write this, sixty years later.

Also in that drawer was a gold pocket watch with engraving, someone’s initials perhaps, I don’t see it clearly. I believe it had belonged to my father’s father, whose own father came from Ireland as a child with no parents and with less than nothing. And so my grandfather possessed little finery and so this watch was truly a treasure and a beauty at that. This watch was the one item I removed not just from the drawer but, further, from my parents’ bedroom. I wanted to keep that watch a little longer, to hold onto that for a little while. And I must have kept it overnight because I had it in my pocket when, as a family, we took our sailboat out on the Potomac River so it would have been either a holiday or a weekend. Somehow, for some reason, I took that beautiful, sentimental, treasure from my pocket and was quickly jostled by the water or by coming about and the treasure, this portal my father held into his own father’s world fell into the water and was gone. My father said something, not much of anything, nothing that I can remember. This time he didn’t yell about the darn kid. He didn’t chastise me. Perhaps, he knew there was no use. Perhaps he was too angry to yell. Perhaps he hated me just a bit at that moment and who could blame him and what child wouldn’t fear that she has just driven away the object of her idolatry? And I can sadly report that all these sixty years later I never did ask for fear of the answer and never ever did I talk with him about those marvelous things in that drawer or the connection I felt with him through those treasures.