When Your Dad Is Magic You Know There Is Beauty In Weirdness
When my parents were both alive, we rushed down to New Hampshire for a Friday and Saturday to see them.
Full disclosure: when my parents (who were divorced) were together were like the Costanzas (spelled wrong?) on Seinfeld, but were totally different when they are NOT together.
And people wonder why I'm so strange.
Anyway, we arrived at my dad's house and there were all these birds swooping in toward his little and square back deck. First there were blue jays, then chickadees, then juncos, then a cardinal, then back came the jays. It was like in the Disney version of Cinderella and all the birds sing and flutter and dance around.
Em looked at me and whispered, "Is Grampa Lew magic?"
His orange cat meowed, and slipped between our calves.
"I think so," I said.
Then my dad said, "Oh! The deer are back. Those are my deer friends."
Two white tail deer grazed in the less deep snow in the back of his yard. Em sucked in her breath. My dad laughed. "They are so tame. I think they'd let me feed them, which of course I can't do, but I WANT to."
He opened his sliding glass door and cluck-said, "Hey fellas, you look beautiful today."
The deer lifted up their heads but did not run away! I swear. They just listened to him. A chickadee pranced on the porch/deck railing towards my dad.
"He is definitely magic," I told Em.
Then my dad said, "You notice anything missing?"
There was a big, stump from a huge Douglas fir he planted decades ago. The tree was gone. It was too close to the house. He had to chop it down and I was so sad because it was like a death in the family and I am really, really into trees and keeping them alive.
But then he said, "You'll never guess where that tree is?"
We couldn't.
It was in the park. The town of Goffstown cut it down and lifted it over the house and put it out in the commons.
"I thought the old tree might as well have a good end, so I called up the Parks Department and I donated it," he said as a blue jay hopped along the deck railing. "It's so perfect, such a perfect tree. Nature makes things so perfectly, so beautiful."
He smiled and he got crinkle lines around his eyes. He looked so handsome. He thought he looked wrinkled. I knew better.
There was a ceremony lighting my dad's tree and everyone applauded for him.
He laughed, telling us about it. "I felt like a super star."
He was a super star. Truth is, I would have really liked to applaud for my dad every day. I was really lucky that there are magic people and I got to be related to one.
This world is full of people who are afraid to be individuals.
My dad? He was magical because he embraced who he was and what he loved. He was a mechanic and truck driver by trade who talked in silly voices and sang silly songs and wept over the beauty of a bird in a tree. He was a man who had deer friends and watched documentaries because it was the best way he could learn. He was a man with dyslexia so severe that it took him a year to read a book that would take me 90 minutes but he still loved story and would search for it and the connections that came with it everywhere.
He was an individual and happy to not fit in perfectly, accepting of that.
In a world of algorithms and homogeneity, in a world where even blog posts headlines seem left-brain dominated (Top Ten Ways To … What Style is In This Summer … How to Become an Influencer in Ten Easy Steps ...); in a world where there are accepted and celebrated story structures for novels even; weirdness really is a choice and it’s one we should freaking celebrate.
You don’t have to be like everyone else. You can have deer friends. You can ignore bid data and algorithms and all those pressures and just be.
And if that weirdness, that difference, makes you feel lonely? You can remember that you’re being like my dad and that you can have deer friends and me, too, and maybe that might help.
It is more clear to me why you are a writer. :)