Incidents from the Back Yard

Summer, 1959.
The lime green Ford pickup with its white plywood box of a camper mounted in the bed pulls into the gravel driveway and stops on the cement slab of the carport’s basketball court. My brother and I stop our game. We stare at the California plates on the stranger’s truck. A man steps out of the driver’s side and announces cheerfully, “We’re here”. My brother and I stare all the harder. This man is a diminutive, fleshier copy of our dad.
“I’m your Uncle Max,” he says. His wife (Geraldine we find out later) sits like a bleached-white plaster statuette inside the cab. She looks at us with blank eyes on a blank face. For an instant, she reminds me of a raccoon caught on top of some garbage can under the glare of a flashlight. This visit is completely unexpected and, as the next few days unfold, thoroughly unwelcome. My dad comes out and showing great restraint shakes Max’s hand while opening the door on the passenger side of the truck for Geraldine to step out. He asks them inside for a glass of iced tea as the midday summer heat builds.
Mom is livid. She is 38 years old, four years younger than dad, and stands 5’2” tall. Her auburn hair flashes in unison with her angry eyes, but her Kentucky-born charm is on display for Max and his wife. This isn’t the first time she has had to be the perfect hostess on short notice, the proper doctor’s wife. But in the next few days of this short visit and behind closed doors, mom releases her anger in clipped conversation and she confides in my brother, my sister and me. It is not simply that they didn’t call ahead. She just doesn’t like Max and never has. Geraldine she doesn’t know; she is simply the latest wife.
To further complicate the situation, my grandparents—the parents of dad and Max—are staying with us on a planned vacation. They are as surprised as mom and dad at this unannounced drop-in by Max. They, too, are cool and distant, knowing their sightseeing trip for today is cancelled. They warm slowly to him. What should be a family reunion with shared jokes and shared experiences becomes an increasingly tense, awkward series of scenes. And it starts with an uncomfortable one a couple of hours after their arrival. Mom says she will clear out a room for them to sleep in and Max says that won’t be necessary. They will sleep in the wooden camper he has built. My folks protest about how hot it is and how it doesn’t cool down all that much at night, but Max won’t listen. He doesn’t even pull his truck under the shade of one of the many trees in the backyard.
I look to dad for an explanation and he only smiles shyly at me, shrugging his shoulders. This reaction from my dad will be repeated several times during their four day stay. The next morning Max and Geraldine look like limp rag dolls as they drag themselves slowly out of their camper. It only cooled to 80 degrees last night and that must have been like sleeping in a sweat box. Geraldine says nothing as she goes into the house to shower.
Later that morning, we all sit in the shade on lawn chairs or on the cool grass and we kids listen as the adults talk and catch up on each other’s lives. It is relaxed and easy going . . . except when Uncle Max starts talking. Then there is an undercurrent, an expectancy that something embarrassing is about to happen and no one can stop it. Even at 11 years old, I start to see a clearer, more focused picture of what is taking place. The awareness that family can embarrass family starts to grow in me. My dad is a general practitioner who went back to medical school for two more years of training in abdominal surgery. He keeps emotions and situations under control and yet is balanced with good humor and love of family.
Max is the opposite. He moves from job to job. He doesn’t know when he is talking too much, when he is making people uncomfortable with his actions. Sitting in his lawn chair, he takes off his shoes and holds them before us like they were trophies from some sporting event. These are the latest products that he is selling as a sideline business venture. The dark brown shoes are a woven mesh on the tops and the sides of the solid soles. They are plastic and they are hideous. Centering in on my brother, Max twists the shoes back and forth as though he were wringing the water out of a dishrag.
“Bet you can’t do that with your leather shoes,” he tells my brother.
“Why would I want to, Uncle Max?”
My dad looks down at the ground and then away toward the neighbor’s yard shaking his head. His face is flushed red and he looks back at us boys again with that small smile. Max puts his shoes back on and walking rapidly toward his truck yells over his shoulder at all of the sitting family members, “Stay there. I want to show you something I know you have never seen before.”
“No, Max. Please. Maybe another time,” Geraldine says in a tentative, pleading tone. This is one of the few times she has spoken the entire weekend.
Not listening and not caring, he returns holding what looks like a bright red, three-foot long, pointed broom handle. None of us can identify it and I finally ask, “What is it, Uncle Max?”
“It’s a bull’s penis,” he says energetically. “It’s been treated and petrified and shellacked. I can get all I want from a rancher out in the valley back home. He and I are going to make walking canes out of them and sell them. What do you think?”
At this even dad is stunned. He sits in his chair with his mouth half open. Everyone sits there, joined in silence. Max stands there with his Cheshire cat grin. He is serious. This isn’t some joke. Mom gets up and walks toward the house muttering, “Jesus Christ. I don’t believe it.”
My brother and I share a basement bedroom and that night in the cool quiet of the darkness we talk about dad and Uncle Max. My brother, Fred, is four years older than me and in the darkness and in our separate single beds, we are equals in a way that has nothing to do with years. Here in this room at night we discuss many things that we wouldn’t during the day.
“That Max is something else.”
“I know,” Fred agrees. “But I like Geraldine.”
“Yeah. She seems harmless. But what is it between dad and Max? Do you know?”
“Yeah. Dad told me tonight that every family has to have a black sheep and Max is ours.”
“He is really embarrassed about him, isn’t he?” I add.
“Oh, boy . . . I hope I never embarrass dad like that.”
“Me either.”


Late Summer, 1962.
Wednesday afternoons are dad’s half days off. Another doctor is on call for him. They all share these on-call days with one another. These are the years when house calls are the standard, the norm. A patient can reach the doctor at home and, if it’s serious enough, dad leaves his dinner or his book or his gardening and goes to the patient’s home to take care of the need.
Mom yells at dad from the back porch that a patient needs him to come over right away. Whatever we are doing stops. Working in the vegetable garden and hoeing the weeds together, seeing dad loosen up with his smiles coming easier stops. The storytelling and the now-easy laughter of the natural camaraderie of a father on his day off with his sons and his daughter stops.
Dad stands up from his kneeling position in the dirt. The momentary faraway look starts. He rubs his hands together, slowly brushing off the dirt. The focused eyes reflect a mind in preparation. A set look comes over his face, as though he has a patient in the next room at his office.
He walks back into the house from the garden to wash his hands and change his clothes. We kids continue hoeing the weeds, but it is not the same without him. We will wait for his return to once more pick up the threads and reweave our shared moments on a Wednesday afternoon.
He leaves us. The doctor is in.
For the past couple of years, I join my brother and my sister in a duty we all despise: we take turns answering the phone on dad’s day off. And even though he might be relaxing on the couch in the same room, we all give the same wooden response to the patient who is calling for my dad. “The doctor is not in. May I take a message? No, I don’t know when he’ll return, but may I take a message? Thank you.”
We want dad to have his time off and we like having him home. We just don’t like these “little lies”; we kids don’t lie well. I know dad is uncomfortable with this as well, but we all accept it as a necessary evil if he is going to have any time off. One day, when I am in a rush, I answer the phone with “No, dad’s not here.”
My mother overhears and after I hang up, she sternly corrects me. “Don’t say ‘dad’s not here’. Say ‘the doctor is not home’. Remember that. Don’t embarrass your father.”
Fall, 1965.
Mr. Harris is the Spanish teacher at the high school. He has a shiny bald head and his hairline starts laterally on a line beginning at the top of his ear, circling around his head like a dark black horseshoe. With a palm fan in his hand, he could pass as a stand-in for the actor Fredric March in Inherit the Wind, the movie about the Scopes monkey trial. He is a strong disciplinarian when teaching this foreign language as it’s called on my report card. And I accept his discipline as only being right since learning a new set of rules is necessary for this new language.
However, his expectations of me personally are the problem. The B- grade is not enough for the son of a respected doctor. “A doctor’s son must get an A in Spanish, as well as all his other classes,” he tells me after class in a strong and emphatic manner with the index finger of his right hand slicing the air and me into little pieces.
“I’m doing the best I can,” I say.
“That is not enough for a doctor’s son. Do more. Stop settling for less.”
I don’t hate my dad; in fact, I love him. He is down to earth and unpretentious. He accepts the Doctor or Doc in front of his last name when people talk to him. But he would rather be called Bud and not having any barrier of a title between himself and anyone wanting an honest, easy few minutes (or several hours) of conversation.
Making my way home after my “talking to” by Mr. Harris, however, I just wish he had another profession. I don’t want to be a “doctor’s son” and always have this personal definition of myself thrown up before me as someone else’s standard. I just want to be me; and if I slip or fall or stumble, I’ll pick myself up and try harder because I want to . . . not because I’m a “doctor’s son.”
At least this is the speech I’m practicing as I head home; hoping dad will make some sense out of all of this when I talk to him tonight.
“Don’t bother your father. He has surgery early in the morning,” I’m informed.
“But mom, I need to talk to him.”
“It will have to wait. This is more important,” she says as she continues to prepare dinner.
And wait it does, until the weekend. After I finish mowing the lawn and am putting away the mower in the garage, dad walks over to me and asks “Why the long face?” I tell him about the Harris monologue and how hard I’m trying in Spanish class. That’s as far as I get. I had been watching his face flush and I saw his jaw get a set to it. He looks at me quickly as I talk and then he stares off into the distance, his eyes squinting now and hardening. His nostrils flare out and stay there as he breathes in a slow, measured tempo.
Finally, as I am in mid-sentence and thinking I am in deep trouble, he interrupts.
“Damn,” he says softly, barely above a whisper.
A hushed stillness wraps around us as we sit at the red cedar picnic table, there in the big backyard with the rising summer heat of Lewiston sweltering and settling down on us, keeping the stillness company. The musical noise from the finches and the English sparrows seems muted now.
Dad doesn’t swear in front of us kids. When we carelessly let a swear word slip out, we receive the one-line dictum that he always burns into our memories . . . “If you have to swear, it’s because you didn’t take the time to choose the right word.” It is unspoken that we had better think about that before the next time.
Dad ends the conversation with that one, unexpected swearword and walks into the house to start making phone calls. At first, mom tries to stop him until she sees the slowly growing degree of anger he is working so hard to control. She steps back and finds something to do in another room. I watch all this from the back patio looking through the screen door as dad picks up the phone and, starting at the top, calls the home of the school superintendent. I retreat off the patio and out into the back yard and the safety of the picnic table.
A meeting is set up for the next week at the high school. The superintendent, the principal, and Mr. Harris will meet with dad. Much to my relief, dad informs me my presence is not required. (These are his formal words). It would be much later before I would hear the basics of that meeting. There is no apology from Mr. Harris to me after the meeting. Actually, there is no acknowledgment from anyone at school that there ever had been a meeting.
In the classroom, Mr. Harris continues to be the disciplinarian in his teaching of Spanish . . . “The rules. You kids must learn the rules of this language. This is not English; that is a different set of rules. You must learn these rules. Let’s start again. From the top . . .” And, as I said before, he is right. But I do not have any more meetings with him as a “doctor’s son”.
At the end of the semester when I show dad my grade from Spanish class, I feel I should explain something about what had happened, what I was feeling at the time.
“It’s just that I didn’t want to be an embarrassment to you,” I said.
“You’re not an embarrassment at all. I don’t want you to ever worry about that.”
“It’s just that I know you’re a doctor and you have this image in the community that I didn’t want . . .” He doesn’t let me finish.
“Look, I’ll take care of the ‘image thing’,” he says, accenting the last two words with sarcasm. “But there’s something else you need to understand. There are a lot more times when I am very proud of you than when I’m embarrassed by you. You’re my son, we’re family. And, yes, we don’t plan on it, but sometimes things happen and we get embarrassed.”
“Like you and Uncle Max?”
This rocks his head back ever so slightly and starts a slow, forward-nodding motion. He scans the backyard fruit trees with their bright green leaves and dark brown branches bearing down under the weight of the red, ripening apples. He sees this and the distant horizon of recent memories. The shy, down-turned smile starts at the corners of his mouth and he looks at me with wide-open, studying eyes.
“Yes.”