Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head [part II]

Continued from part I

The foxglove my dad dug out of his garden for me isn't doing well in its new clay pot on my rooftop patio. The tomato plants are doing just fine, though, despite the relentless baking-dish heat of the last week. The parks around my building have turned into hayfields. I can't remember the last time it rained.

In the end I took home the four tiny tomato plants, two asters, a foxglove, the smallest of the already foot high orange day lilies, and a plant with felty leaves that my dad says will grow red flowers, but he forgets what it's called.

As I followed my father up and down the garden paths, he told me about his trip to Germany. The trip he didn't take me along on, because... well, just because.

"It's a good thing you didn't come. It vas a disaster. Evelyne and Susannah didn't even come home vile I was there. Vell, Evelyne lives in Berlin, but Susannah doesn't live that far from Oberdorf. And Peter, the day I arrived he left for Mexico with his friends!"

"They would have come home if I'd been there," I said. Evelyne, Susannah, and Peter are my father's brother's children. They are about my age; just a couple of years younger.

He ignored my comment, because he knew it was probably true.

"So, what else happened that made it a disaster?" I asked, trying not to sound too gleeful. "And, by the way, it serves you right."

"I vas so sick as soon as I got there," my father continued. "Man, I hate to fly in a plane. The air is so bad. As soon as I got out I breathed the fresh air as deep as I could, but I must have caught something on the plane. My stomach hurt so bad I had to go to the doctor."

Take my word for this: if my dad went to a doctor, he must have been nearly dying.

"What about your old friends?" I asked. "Did you see Arnold?"

"Vell, yes, that wasn't so bad, Arnold was still there, but the rest of them had moved away. Arnold didn't even know where some of them vere."

Who was it that said, you can't go home again?

"They're all old men, now," said my dad. "They're going to be dead soon."

My dad is in his sixties. That's not old. Besides, in my family, we live forever. My grandmother just turned ninety.

The conversation about Germany was interrupted by a pair of chipmunks who scurried toward us from the bushes along the fence, looked up at my father briefly, then darted back under cover. If you know anything about chipmunks, you know they rarely come out into the open, and they move so quickly that usually all you catch is their shadows.

"They came right to you," I said. "You've tamed them, haven't you?"

Squirrels, my father dislikes because they dig up his plants, so he catches them and releases them in the woods. Chipmunks, according to him, don't do much damage. Raccoons, well, you don't want to get him started about them.

"No... vell, sometimes I give them a peanut," he replied. "But they like it here because they're safe. Look — did you see, they ran into that pipe there? Now, vatch, they'll come out the other end."

And they did.

"What's that pipe doing there?" I asked.

"I put it there."

"You mean, for the chipmunks?"

"Ja. Look here, too."

There is a network of pipes running along the perimeter of my father's back yard. Some are pieces of PVC, some are metal. They are all discreetly covered with plants, or bushes. But the chipmunks know they're there.


"Let me see if I've got this right," I laughed. "Squirrels, you catch and take to the woods. Moles, you spade. Racoons — no, wait, I don't want to know what you do to raccoons. But chipmunks, you build shelters for."

"Ja," he said, as if this were common behaviour in the suburbs. "Oh — you should have seen, in the spring, before the leaves were out on the trees, there was a hawk that came swooping down into the yard. I saw the chipmunk run, and I thought, nah, it's got him, but he made it into the pipe right here. The hawk, it was a Cooper Hawk, sat right there on the fence for half an hour, watching that end of the pipe, but the chipmunk had already run out the other end and was gone."

We had worked our way around to the front of the house to the myrtle and other creepers and the Japanese maple, when I felt the first raindrop fall on my head. I'd been working up the courage to ask my daddy something. That is, to tell him something. About Jack.

"So, um, Daddy, I need you to do something for me," I said, and got exactly the response I knew I'd get:

"Oh, oh. Vat now?"

I gave him a moment to think the worst. That I was going to ask him for money.

"Do you know when my birthday is?" I asked.

I know, he's my dad, he should know the answer to that question, but he's always confused it with his and my mother's wedding anniversary, because they're both in August. A year apart, the right way, if you must know.

He replied, and got it right. A good start. I plowed on.

"So, er, it seems I have, um, a date for my birthday."

* * *
To be concluded in part III