I remember a photograph of a time when I was five and at a
birthday party. I wore a conical party hat, its thin rubber string strapped beneath
my chin, and I was in my father’s sturdy arms, crying. “It’s all right,” he
must have said. “Everything’s going to be all right. I’m here.” He would have
carried me countless other times, too, in my early years, embracing, nurturing,
loving.
But
as I grew and he aged, there came a time when he carried me less, and I him
more. Like the time my brother Gerard and I draped his arms around our necks and carried
him, stooped forward like a crucified Christ, into Dr. Howley’s office on
Alexander Avenue when he’d blacked out in the waiting room, his bandaged hand
too tightly wound from an accident at the bakery where he worked as a mechanic. Or the time we carried him braced on our criss-crossed arms across 188th Street to Union Hospital,
stopping traffic as we went, when he’d been held up and stabbed in a robbery at
the candy store he owned in the Bronx.
And
then, years later, near the end, the time I helped to carry my father on a stretcher,
tilting him nearly upright, gripping and grimacing, down the narrow stairwell
on Decatur Avenue to the ambulance that would take him to the hospice. “You
just want to get rid of me,” he said in his ache at leaving home to die. Little
did he know, little did he know that I’d have held him in my arms the length of
all the earth and back again, whispering, “It’s all right, everything’s going
to be all right, I’m here,” could I have carried him so.
