Today was the second anniversary of my dad’s death. I made an agreement with my mom early on that we weren’t going to mark this day, but instead his birthday (which falls in January), but nevertheless I’ve been counting down the past few weeks, and I can tell she has been too. My dad was a really funny person; I wish, if my memory was going to turn out so faulty, I’d written down more of the things he said (I sympathize with what Zadie Smith wrote about her dad here). This isn’t the funniest story about him – I’m not sure it’s even funny at all so much as indicative of one part of his personality – but it’s in my head tonight so here it is.
In the last few years of his life, my dad got into this thing where he liked to make scenes at Cracker Barrels. It’s hard to explain, but it felt like he’d see the parking lot, and the line of rocking chairs running across the porch, and sense the waitstaff trembling inside, and be triggered into a frenzy of bad behavior. As I told a friend, I was sure a picture of my parents’ Aerostar was going to be circulated as a warning across all the Cracker Barrels in the South. On the last road trip I took with him – we must have been on our way to a family reunion — we stopped at a Cracker Barrel in Tennessee. He was having some problems walking by then, and I looked over to check on him as we were crossing the parking lot, and he was shuffling forward and gazing toward the porch with an expression I would describe as very intent. My mom also must have been on high alert, because I remember her and I working this amazing, balletic tag-team at lunch. Nothing verbalized – it’s not as though we ever acknowledged, “My goodness, our family is the scourge of Cracker Barrels everywhere” — but it was as if we’d finally figured out all the points at which these meals could go horribly wrong and how to head them off. For example, my mom maneuvered things so my dad got the interior seat, pretty much body-blocking him in; at different times I swung out of my chair to collect whatever the thing was (the creamer, the check) that, if it didn’t arrive fast enough, might be an instigating excuse, and I remember doing all this in a whirl of competency, like how you might feel if you were pulling off a complicated heist, enough so that I feel bad as I type this at all this competence we were exuding at his expense. We got to the end of lunch. My mom went off to pay the bill. My dad sat looking very tired and red-eyed in his chair. I smiled at him. He didn’t smile back but sort of nodded, in a way that acknowledged all the competence. He said, “I miss Jack Goode,” a friend/business associate who had died a few years before. Then, “He and I could really take a restaurant apart.”
