A Holiday with My Old Man

My father’s left hand wrapped around the neck of the telecaster, his fingers landing on a chord as he gave the instrument a few strums. We were in my living room in Queens, New York, the ambient light from the city skyline illuminating the clouds and spilling dull and blue from my apartment’s rear windows. It was Thanksgiving weekend, my father in town from the west coast. He was showing me simple chord progressions on my roommate’s guitar, enjoying the feel of the instrument against his body.

“It’s like this,” he said, lifting each finger individually off its string. “First finger here, second finger here, third here.”

I nodded along, paying more attention to my father than to any of the words coming out of his mouth. He looked different to me, not like the man I’d known most of my life. My father – who I associated with his khaki pants, his blue sport coats, his suits and ties, his law firm, his proper speech, his tucked in shirts and his clean-shaven cheeks – looked like a different person with Dave’s electric guitar in his hands.

“I’ve thought about getting a guitar again. I’ve thought about it for years,” he said, playing a Beatles tune.

Another side of my father was being revealed to me; a hipper side, a non-professional side, a fascinating and almost artistic side. It wasn’t temporary either, rather I saw that side of him most of the weekend – while he was playing Dave’s electric piano in our living room, while he was talking to me about books and movies he likes, while he was watching Dave’s band play at their Sunday night gig…

This was a holiday visit from my father, the first of my adult life. In the three and a half years since I graduated from college, I’ve mostly lived on people’s sofas all over the country. With the exception of the few months I was married, my father’s five-day Thanksgiving visit was the only time I’ve had a companion accompanying me all day long. I liked the company, even skipped my writing as it would have required me too much silence and privacy, but by the time he was packing up to leave, I was missing the solitude of my work. My father’s visit was only five days but it was the longest time I’d gone without writing for as long as I could remember.

The night before he left, I listened to my father play the piano as I lay in bed. Dave was playing along with him on guitar. I could overhear the two of them talking, conversing as any friends would, and for the first time, I heard my father not as a dad but as a man. In that moment, as he fingered the keys of the piano chatting with Dave about musical talent, and booking gigs, and finding success and tuning an instrument I could see my father as more than just my dad, more than the suit-wearing attorney I so often believed him to be. I realized that maybe he was starting to see me differently too, and just as the seasons and the years and the circumstances were marching on in our lives, so too was the nature of our relationship

From the other side of my bedroom door, I heard Dave strike a chord on the guitar. Then my dad came in on piano. The beat and the music played on.