Oil and Vinigar
by
Dick Prosapio © 2006
In the middle of eating a salad today I came upon
a feeling that has accompanied me from time to time; it's a regreta
regret that I never really let myself know my father. I'm not deeply
sad about it, I just regret that in real time, in tangible time, not
in imagination or wish filled thinking or delusion or prayer, but
right smack dab in the middle of living life I never really tired to
bring him in close enough so that he could share himself with me.
Not that he would ever say something one of my
contemporary men friends might... some sort of "I feel such and
such." a sharing of deep feeling. It wouldn't have had to be that
way at all to be a genuine moment between us. No, it would have been
as simple as me saying, "Sure!" when he said, "Hey Dick! You want to
put some of this olive oil on some salad."
That simple.
Raised by an uptight mother who felt that there
were right and wrong ways to live life, even down to eating, olive
oil and vinegar on a simple lettuce and tomato salad were a bit too
down and dirty, spoke too much of the peasant life she felt my
father's parents came from.
I'm exaggerating of course. I'm trying to make
things more simplistic than they really were. My mother ate my
father's salads all the time, she ate the Italian food his family
fixed and fixed a lot herself. But there was a certain spice she
peppered reality with when it came to food that let me know at an
early age that it paid to be fussy when it came to eating anything
my father ate.
Maybe it was just that she wanted to keep me as an
ally and tried to make sure there was always a distance of some sort
between my father and me. She didn't try anything new, I shouldn't
either. This was not communicated in spoken language of course, it
was a feeling transmitted by a more powerful control tool.
There I was eating the salad I had just tossed
with oil and vinegar, a thing my father always used to make up and
which I never ate, maybe I was a fussy eater then anyway, and
thinking, "Gee, I wish he could be here so we could share this salad
together. He would know then that I really loved him."
In other words, I feel a tinge of fear that he
might have though that I was rejecting him in rejecting his salad.
Did I mention that I was raised to be guilty?
Now; there is a place for a good and healthy sense
of guilt. I know a bunch of people who could use a dose and I don't
just mean teenagers. But there is a line between how much guilt is a
good thing and when the line is crossed and it becomes much more
than a nuisance. In fact, it begins to be crippling.
Each of our daughters is burdened by a degree of
guilt, one with way too much, one with far too little and the rest
range in between and are doing OK with the portion they've been
given.
Too much and you are responsible for everything.
Everything going wrong that is. (You are never responsible
for things going right by the way.) Too little and you are
responsible for nothing. In fact, everyone else is responsible and
you have had no role in the action at all. At the one extreme life
is hard for the one burdened, at the other, everyone else has to put
up with the one who carries nothing at all.
Most of my life has been spent at the former end
of the stick. This was not my father's doing; and in a sense, it
wasn't totally my mother's either. Being the first born, I just sort
of took it on as my lot in life, when bad things happened, it was,
somehow, either my doing or my job to make it better.
"Somehow."
I never could and I never did of course, but
that's how I felt. There's still some of that left in me; a cop
drives by and I check everything, the obvious things of course, but
then there's also the mental checklist of anything I might be cited
for. All the guilty pleasure thoughts and angry fantasies and
downright crazy internal journeys that might be written across my
face. This all happens in a millisecond and isn't a dwelling spot,
but there it is/was and is still..a part of me.
.and there I was eating a salad my dad might have
prepared, feeling guilty that I hadn't enjoyed a little mix of oil
and vinegar with him.
Only in my imagining do we share it now, and this
memory as well; I actually did prepare a big spaghetti dinner
for him once, cooked the sauce all day just the way my grandmother
taught him and me. He liked the sauce and thought my Italian sausage
was too hot. I don't remember if he fixed the salad or not, but I'm
sure we both ate it.
We were oil and vinegar all right, but in the end
he's as much mixed up in me as the salad he, and now I, tossed up.
Yep, I still miss him and, damn it... them.
