Sunflower Neighbors

Another beginning, in the middle of Parkinson's

My dad lived in and out of hotels after our parents divorced. I can’t find actual statistics on this, but I imagine it’s a fairly common scene: exit domesticity, enter exhumed bachelorhood—plus pool. At ages nine, seven, and five, we were old enough to sense the frayed edging of our family, especially in the pity of other adults. But we were also young enough to enjoy elevator rides and pizza on Christmas Eve.

After a few months, he moved to friends’ couches and spare rooms. It’s a strange stack of time across these places and in my memory: laundry mess at that guy’s house, a surprisingly cool backyard, then fall and winter at another’s. About three years passed before my dad was able to rent in our middle-class hometown. Not unlike Odysseus. Although my dad was more of a Circe guy than a Penelope.

I inherited my dad’s devotion to our seaside hometown and to personal odysseys. Painting by unknown artist via the Art Institute of Chicago.

This style of life—of adventure, of divorce in the suburbs—braided us together and over again through those early years. Parkinson’s still seemed vague in my dad. Occasional overhits of his meds came across like a dance party to us kids, as I suspect he aimed for. He was troubleshooting, troubleshooting. Many respectable people assured us that our dad was lucky to be diagnosed in his day and age; didn’t get fresher than a new millennium. A cure was sure to come.

Until then, the prospect of brain surgery energized my dad as much as a trip to Sharper Image, the number two supplier of unnecessary furnishings and gadgetry for divorcés (number one being Costco).

He lived for a time above our Godfather’s pizza restaurant.

Yes.

We lived above a pizza restaurant and played in the courtyard. Basically this. You get it.

That apartment signaled a welcome stabilization—it smelled good, and it wasn’t a hotel. Plus, we got the chance to live in the “old” part of our town, in the heart of the original grid design and out of the cul-de-sacs. Indeed, this little seaside community was dabbling in new life as a desirable hamlet outside Seattle.

Our childhood stepped through the last currents of the 20th century. We didn’t know this at first, but we played and moved and dreamed around a town that was still affordable—still waving goodbye to its muddy years of oil docks, lumber mills, and small farms. The tech? Dial-up. AOL. Landlines. Bicycles.

Meanwhile, our Tuesdays, Thursdays, and every-other-weekends seemed to spring out from the courtyard of the pizza restaurant as naturally as the surrounding Madrona trees. We saved up quarters to buy coffee shop bagels and a beverage called “yoguccino”. Better than it sounds!

But halcyon days are more about contrast than my millennial nostalgia. We had streams and streams of gray, rainy days, too. Each of us kids endured several painful mournings that I can still hear, now. My dad was a very openly emotional person. When he did lie, it was very poorly done…and oddly formal (“I have never told a lie”; “I have never smoked pot”, etc.). We knew his sufferings and usually overlooked his shortcomings. We were collectively bewildered. What, exactly, was happening? To him…to us?

Parkinson’s looked like a long drive down a dark road. It counted out prescription bottles and Gatorade. It didn’t go well with alcohol or sleep. It was so enmeshed in divorce, as if the dictionary ordained it. It was creditors calling. It sounded like bad karaoke and bar lights on a school night. It felt like our Costco couch and a good movie, paused for ice cream, then—wait, come on, where’s the remote?

It also looked like severe hope. The kind of hope that you find in people who live with eight months of rain a year, give or take. Kids who run barefoot on gravelly beaches. And the loads of hope you find in the sports-coaching, left-leaning, single dads of America.

One day, my particular dad decided to walk the road of our Godfather’s house instead of, I think, watch golf. At the end of 4th Street, he found the last “For Rent” sign of our childhood.

My dad had recently cleared eligibility for disability benefits. He was very affable, very charming. And he had three kids to outweigh his credit scores. A few months later, that beautifully basic rambler became our home in the truest sense of the word.

Van Gogh plays a specific role in my family’s lore.

We settled in with the same skunky furniture and the vinyl records, the baseball mitt collection, and the random towels that we’ve always had. This time, though, we belonged to the place on setting foot there. How comforting to root; we were worn in together already. Our literal and proverbial screen door opened and shut, come one come all, for over ten years.

Winter sunflowers near me in my current town.

Sunflowers lived across the street. An anonymous family owned (and still does, mysteriously) a quarter of an acre in this sea village, this proto-suburb. Each spring, they cleared the lot by hand. They tilled with the old tools. They enriched the soil with compost. They planted their rows. Gradually, summer days passed and corn, peas, squash grew and grew. And the sunflowers bloomed.

Together we were humble neighbors. We looked out the window, away from the TV, and there waved the proud flowers. We ran up the street from our Godfather’s under their sentinel stare. The train blared, the church bells sounded, the sky grew pink then black, and the sunflowers remained. When alive, they followed the sun—obv? not to young me—and even when hollowed out by winter, their presence steadied on.

Sufficiently put: I’m writing Hey Sis to give like that, to generate that kind of golden yellow at my back. Hope’s not for fools. It’s for friends in the dark.