That proverbial clean slate.

Everything is going to change. No, this isn’t about the Charlie Kirk killing and the impending civil war I contend has already started. And no, it’s not a nod to the YA novel The Maze Runner when the Gladers find Teresa in the box, and she cryptically blurts out this line. This is about my life, my hobby, my blog. It’s going to change. It started to yesterday.

Almost a year ago, Susan and I sat with my father as he slowly died of heart failure. Each day, his condition worsened. The entirety of our last day with him, he was mostly incoherent. Around seven o’clock, with the outside light fading into night, with Susan and I preparing for our ninety-minute drive home, my father became suddenly lucid. We talked a bit about what comes next after we die. He affirmed that he lived a great and satisfying life. And he dropped this bomb: “I made a mistake. I made a mistake with the kids. Jeffrey…” He fell silent.

I tried to prompt him: “What mistake, Dad? What do you mean?” He fell asleep, and we drove home. My father died later that night. I never learned what mistake he made, but my mind has thrown together a variety of possibilities. Sounds like something out of a mystery novel, right?

Like most writers, I read. Not as much as I used to, but still, a fair amount. Besides news and op eds and blog posts, I primarily read novels. Many times, in the middle of a good book, I’ll think ‘this is a great plot, where do authors get these ideas?’ I’ve had a lifelong block against writing fiction. That doesn’t mean I’ve never done it, I have a handful of times, but it’s always a thinly veiled version of my own life. And while I’ve published two novella length memoirs, the almost fiction stories I’ve written are mostly flash and never longer than short. Certainly nothing that could be expanded into a book. Novel writing just wasn’t in my cards.

Until now.

I’m getting up there in years. OK, I’m about to turn sixty-three, not so old, but both of my brothers retired by my age. I’ve never felt ready. When I take an unstructured day off work, I tend to laze around all day, and at four in the afternoon, guilt drives me to lace up my shoes and run a few miles.

“Hey Jeff, what did you do on your day off?”

“Uh, went for a run?” I envisioned my future retirement just sitting on the couch all day poking at the CNN and New York Times websites.

Susan thinks I deserve to retire. “Well, you could write.” A lofty goal for someone who comes up with an essay topic every eight or nine days. But over the past year, that last exchange Susan and I had with my father has gelled into a surprisingly interesting plot and the skeletons of some engaging characters. It feels like a book length work of fiction. I plan to write a novel. I’ve even given it the working title of Half.*

No, I’m not retiring just yet, but I’m currently rearranging my life to work less hours. I plan to free-up four mornings each week to write my story. I’ve subscribed to a podcast series called Deep Dive, in which some of our best contemporary authors offer advice on how to approach this all-consuming task. I understand it will be difficult, frustrating and at times painful, but I also hope to have fun. I started writing yesterday. I was terrified and exhilarated, simultaneously thinking “I can do this! and “No I can’t!”  

So where does this leave us? I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll still feel the urge to write and read blogposts, but maybe I won’t. I don’t want to be one of those bloggers who simply disappears one day leaving everyone to wonder if I died. So, goodbye? I doubt it, but I hope to see you much less, because I’m supposed to be writing Half and not essays for WordPress. But ultimately, I’m going to write what feels right, so maybe I’m not going anywhere (this essay right here an obvious lesson in procrastination). Regardless, wish me the luck that I, in turn, wish each of you.  

Peace.

*Half will not be the title of a book I write. The story has filled out and morphed from when I started thinking of it as Half. But rather than continually changing the title of my project as it grows and matures, this name serves as a useful placeholder.   

Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

Papa was a headbanger. No, I didn’t call my father Papa, but when I wrote “Dad was a headbanger,” the Temptations song Papa was a Rolling Stone popped into my head. I needed to change what I wrote. Of course, Suzy is a Headbanger by the Ramones could have just as easily sprung up in my brain. Then I would have had to write “Jerry is a Headbanger.” Sheesh, it’s hard to get started on this story. Regardless, Papa, Dad, Jerry, he was a headbanger. And by headbanger, I don’t mean a metalhead with goth tattoos and long greasy locks he tossed in time with Sabbath or Metallica or Napalm Death, I mean he banged his head on shit. All the time.

From my earliest memories, I knew my father was accident prone. To gross out my brothers and me in our first decade of our life, he frequently popped out his bridge revealing a gap where his four front teeth belonged. He lost them playing hockey in high school just a few years after he grew them. During intimate moments like evening story time on the couch, he would jag his eyes to the side to show off a train track of red stitch marks where his smashed eyeglasses sliced his eyeball during a squash match. And who could possibly forget the great Cann taboggan incident of 1969? My father broke his wrist, and my brother David sprained his ankle. Other stories abound: the time he locked his thumb in the car door; the time he peeled the skin off his calf and shin like a banana; the time molten lead splattered his face; I could go on.

Comparatively, his headbanging was pretty tame. In fact he never even seemed to notice. Walking down the basement stairs, he would smack his head on the low hanging ceiling at the bottom of the stairs. He wouldn’t react; he’d just keep walking. Installing a sump pump, he whacked his head against the cinder block wall while wresting with a bolt. Cabinet doors, kitchen counters, getting out of the car, the dude just bumped his head. Like Les Nessman on WKRP in Cincinnati, he frequently wore a Band-Aid on his forehead.

I’m the headbanger now, and an arm-banger and a knee-banger, etc. I attribute most of this to poor vision. Sitting on opposite ends of the couch in the evening reading books, Susan will sometimes stretch out her hand, fingers waving, looking for a touch, a squeeze, an acknowledgement of our closeness. After fifteen seconds, incredulous, she’ll blurt out “Can’t you see my hand?” The answer is no, my peripheral vision sucks. Outside of the clear tunnel before me created by my eyeglasses, the world is a mystery. If I don’t already know the open cabinet door is eight inches from the side of my head, I’m almost guaranteed to smack my temple on it.

Like my father, I don’t notice these bumps and bangs. Several nights ago, I crept through my almost pitch-black bedroom to grab something from my closet. When I flipped on the light, I noticed a blotch on my arm, a bleed below the skin with two tiny, bloody pricks in the middle. It hurt like it just happened, but I had no recollection of any sort of incident. Did I walk into a wall? A piece of furniture? Did a vampire bat swoop down out of the dark and nip me? Did I bang into something on the way to my bedroom? I find it disconcerting that I don’t remember.

My blotch has been with me all week. Something to look at and ponder as it faded away. For a while I saw a demon’s face, but by the time I took the above photo, it morphed into a buffalo. Did my father get to a point where he looked at his scabs and bruises and wonder where they came from. I’m certain he did. Maybe we all do. My theory is we get used to physical pain. The older we get the less we feel. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism to deal with creaky bodies. Or, with a litany of age-related health issues, maybe those minor cuts and bruises are just the least of our problems.

~

A few years ago, Bruce at the Vinyl Connection wrote about Papa was a Rolling Stone, a song I hadn’t heard in years. I listened to it as I walked to work that morning. Later in the day, I commented on Bruce’s post that listening to it was like a religious experience. I’ve probably played it a hundred times since then, no small feat since the song is twelve minutes long.

Suzy is a Headbanger, from my favorite Ramones album, is NOT a religious experience, but it sure is fun. Have a listen.

At my 8th grade lunch table, we compared hands, budding palm readers, one and all. Marcus Pappas blurted out “Cann’s and mine look like old lady hands.”  He had a point—thin and boney—but it irked me that he said this out loud. Marcus died thirty-five years ago while still good looking, except, I suppose, his hands. My hands resemble weathered saddle bags, scarred and spotted with tea stains. Still thin and boney, add wrinkly now too. Veins squiggle beneath the surface like caffeinated worms.

I last saw Marcus at Tilden pool in the mid-eighties. My neighborhood had two pools with competing vibes. To me, Tilden seemed the more laid-back pool. And, it had a swim team. Tilden pool attracted the athletic families. The other pool, Old Farm, is where the rich kids went to bask in the sun. My family wasn’t wealthy, but we weren’t athletic either.

Tilden threw annual parties on the Fourth of July. Beers, burgers, a greased watermelon in the center of the pool for the teenage boys to fight over. My high school friend Drew invited me as a guest one year. Drew’s family were Swimmers—note the capital “S.” When he teamed up with my brother and me on a triathlon relay team, Drew’s leg was the ocean swim. Tilden families! His older brother coaches swimming to this day.

We were just out of college, still living at home. Drew guarded at the pool on weekends, and I settled into the job I loathed for the next ten years. Marcus showed up at the party. His feet were messed up, misshapen, apparent through his heavy black boots. He walked using metal crutches with forearm cuffs. Dark glasses shielded his unseeing eyes. He roughhoused with his service dog on a grassy hill, the two of them smiling, juking, and rolling around. Much of the crowd looked on. My vocabulary still underdeveloped, I didn’t yet know the word, but I understood performative when I saw it. Marcus wore a goatee, and his wavy hair flipped up at the bottom of his ears. A beautiful boy at the end of his life. 

~

In my first weeks of college, I looked to qualify the growing internal ill-ease that washed over me. I charred my knuckles on my desk lamp’s molten metal shade. I sparred with a fire alarm box, punching out the safety glass. I plucked the shards from under my skin to hide the evidence of my crime. I held the glowing ember of a lit cigarette against the back of my hand in a deserted minor league ball park. My friend O looked on, his expression inscrutable. Thanksgiving break, my mother clenched my scabbed hands and tried to read my mind.

~

In the final weeks of my junior year, I punched an oak tree leaving my knuckles rough and swollen. I sneaked out of a mixer early, too self-conscious to talk or dance with my date, I abandoned her for the night. I craved destruction. Not the tree, though, it was four feet wide. A week later, a different tree, a twin, a couple dozen yards away, crashed to the ground on a sunny afternoon. Across campus, drinking beer on the lawn, we looked to the heavens and wondered about thunder from a blue sky. Had I punched that tree, I could have claimed victory when it fell. I couldn’t untwist the cap from a plastic Pepsi bottle for years. Arthritis flares when I make a fist.

~

My wife Susan spotted a porch glider as we drove past a junk shop. The aluminum frame seemed sound, but the wooden seats rotted through, the hardware fused with rust. We crammed it in the back of our Subaru on a fifteen-dollar investment. Susan took the kids to Storytime at the library while I took a reciprocating saw to the glider, cutting off the useless parts. Dripping with sweat as I hacked away at rotten wood and rusted metal, my hand slipped into the oscillating blade, slicing off an unnecessary chunk from the end of my index finger.  

Assessing the damage under a running faucet, I could see the wound wasn’t stitchable, and it didn’t seem to impact the function of my finger, just the shape. I wrapped it in paper towels and focused on dismantling the glider before Susan and our kids got home.  

~

The skin surrounding my right thumb is numb from the joint in the center of my hand to its very tip. It’s a bizarre lingering result of a dramatic over-the-handlebars mountain bike crash. In the time since, my dislocated shoulder has hurt and slowly healed, but my tingly thumb never improved. It’s annoying and it causes me to drop stuff. The surgeon says he can’t fix it, and he says no, it won’t get better with time. As an ironic insult, despite the surface numbness, I’m often left with shooting pains deep inside after I grip something for an extended period of time.

William Shakespeare popularized the saying the eyes are the window to the soul.   That might be true for him, but for me, apparently, it’s my hands. They tell my story, draw a map of my past—a lifetime of dis-ease, recklessness and bad luck. Of course, it would be nice if my hands weren’t so chewed up, achy and numb, but wishing for that is wishing against the person I am today. We are the sum of our triumphs and mistakes.

Inspired by: https://georgiakreiger.com/2025/07/07/hands/

Image courtesy of kstudio on Freepik