Fate & Saturdays Working with Dad [Short Story]

No matter what I did, I never seemed to be able to escape my fate. As soon as I finished breakfast I’d hear, “David! Put your pencils and paper away and go help your father in the backyard!”

“Yes mom.”

“Did you hear me, young man? I’m sure your father would like to sit around in here goofing around all day too. Go see what you can do to help him!”

“Yes mom.” The only time I’ve ever seen my father “sit around” on a Saturday was when he had pneumonia or something, and that was so long ago that I can’t remember. Dad wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he didn’t have some trees to prune or lawn to mow or patio to build. He’d probably start vacuuming if he found himself locked in the living room long enough. Sit around? It wasn’t in his vocabulary. So every Saturday, from my earliest memories, was spent helping dad in the backyard. Thinking back many years later, my little 11-year-old brain would rather draw than be outside in the Southern California sun.

“Hi mijo.”

“Hi dad. Mom wants me to see what I can do to help you.”

“Here, take these clippers and cut those branches so we can get them in to the trash cans.” He handed me the clippers with the bright orange handles. I loved those clippers with the orange handles.

Under the simmering blue sky he stood on the ladder above me trimming the olive trees, the sweat rolling off his brow and down his chin. I leaned over a pile of olive branches. My job was to clip them into two-foot sections. Unfortunately, at eleven years old, I was too small to use the clippers with one hand, and when I tried to use two hands the branch would slip out or worse, I’d pinch my palm with the handles.

“You having problems, mijo?”

“No.” That was the standard answer. Actually I wanted to cry. I was falling behind his shower of branches and I feared that I would spend the rest of my life trying to cut this ever-growing pile of branches. I never figured out to just ask him why he didn’t just cut the branches into two-foot sections to begin with.

“Here,” he took the clippers away from me, “why don’t you get the rake and start raking up the olives.”

I wandered down the slope to the side door of the garage. Inside it was dark and full of my father’s tools. I could smell freshly cut grass and machine oil from the lawnmower and this strange scent that the liquid fertilizer gave off. One wall on the opposite side of the garage was covered with hoses, bags of cement, coffee cans of nails and bolts, a stack of two-by-fours, an oily push-mower, an old mattress, and off to the very back, a rack of shovels and brooms and rakes. I climbed over stacks of two-by-fours that lay in my way and grabbed the big wide bamboo rake. It was my favorite, probably because it was the one my older sister, Christina, liked and we always fought over who got to use it. She always won. But she wasn’t here today to take it from me. That made me smile.

By the time I got back to the olive trees with the bamboo rake my father had finished cutting the branches into sections and had filled the trash can with them. He was presently on his hands and knees pulling weeds out near the back fence. He turned around and looked up at me. “Well, don’t just stand there. Get some of those olives and leaves up,” he said.

There was something about him that filled me with a nervous anxiety but at the same time I had a deep affection for him. I never figured out if he believed the old adage that “A child is better seen and not heard,” but based on our one-word conversations I’d say yeah.

“David!” he said one time. “Your mother and I got a note from your teacher that you’ve been spitting out the bus window again.”

“Well, I …”

“Where do you pick up these dirty habits?” I had learned somewhere that if you spit out of a window towards the front of the bus that the spit would come back into one of the windows towards the back of the bus and hit someone unexpectedly and I was committed to figuring out if this was true.

“Well, I …”

“What are we going to have to do to you?”

“I …”

“Go to your room, you filthy cochino. I don’t want to see you until dinner,” I would start to shuffle off, “And you’re on restriction for two weeks.” Damn. I never found out if the spitting out the bus window trick was true.

1970s - dad up a ladder on balcony above garage. — 1970s – dad up a ladder on balcony above garage.

The strong arm that’d swat me in the back of the head when my mom told him to straighten me out was the same one that would lift up me and my younger brother up to screw on the lights of our Christmas tree. The eyes that helped me figure out why my kite wouldn’t fly could look right through me in to my guilty soul when I’d stolen a “C” battery from the local dime store. My friend’s dads were either really fun to be with or old grumps that no one wanted to visit. But my dad, I never quite understood my dad or the strange way him that I loved him.

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