The girl opens the front door to her house a crack. The toes of her small bare feet are on the colder metal door frame and her heels rest on the warmer wood floor of the house. It is fall. The leaves have started to change from a duller shade of green to sharper shades of yellow and orange. But it is still early enough in the season that the cold bite of the air is surprising to her cheeks warm and flushed from the prancing and leaping and turning, the grande jete-ing and pirouetting that she had been doing throughout the house just moments before. Her dad’s favorite evening-time music—Carole King’s Tapestry album is playing on the stereo in the living room next to where she stood. Some nights he would push the coffee table to the side of the room and take her fairy princess ballerina hands in his big dad hands and pull her onto their dance floor. She liked to stand on his feet and dance to songs like “I Feel the Earth Move” and “Smackwater Jack.” Sometimes her mom would come in with her brother after dinner was in the oven and she had some time for dancing. Then they would all rock their hips and snap their fingers and all sing along. This particular evening the girl’s mom had taken her little brother and sister for a ride in the car while she did some errands. And the dad wasn’t dancing or even sitting and reading the paper in the living room like he liked to do on Sundays. The girl leans forward on tip toes and peeks her messy pig tailed head out the door a little further. She smells something like burning and sweet and sees her dad sitting on a chair on the front porch smoking a pipe, eyes fixed on something out somewhere in the yard in front of him.
“Daddy, Mrs. Jenson said that smoking is bad for you”
The expression on his face softens to something like amused, but his gaze doesn’t change. “She is right.”
“You just don’t care?” By now the girl has stepped out onto the cement porch, which feels warmer on the bottom of her feet than she would have predicted. She walks over to her dad and leans over, placing her elbows on arm of the chair and rests her head in her hands. Her blue denimed bottom with the flower embroidered on the back pocket sticks out behind her. She is staring intently at the big man who almost looks as if he could have tears in his eyes. He doesn’t move his head, but shifts his eyes slantways to look at his daughter.
“I care. What’s it to ya?” He smirks, teasing.
“Then why do you do it?” She stands up, hands on hips.
“Pipes are different. And I don’t smoke them all the time. I just like to sit on my porch when the seasons are changing and smoke a pipe. One of the little joys of my life.” He says that last sentence with an extra dramatic emphasis and then chuckles. The girl chuckles too.
“It does smell nice. Can I try?”
“No, But I’ll tell you what.”
“What?”
“When you grow up and have a house and a little girl, then you can sit on your front porch and smoke a pipe and undergo interrogation just like me.”
The girl smiles.
“What’s interrogation mean?”
“Questions.”
“Oh.” She giggles.
“Ya know, this pipe belonged to my father. When I was growing up, my father used to like a good pipe once in a while, too.” There is silence. His eyes are full with almost-tears again. The opening notes of “Way Over Yonder” can be heard from inside the house. The little girl looks down, uncomfortably. They don’t ever talk about grandpa because they don’t want to make dad sad. Grandpa died before her mom and dad even met. “Check this out.” He blows out a few smoke rings.
“How did you do that?” ”Very well.” The little girl rolls her eyes. The dad laughs from his belly, pleased with himself.
“Da-ad.”
“What?”
The girl sighs, defeated. The dad returns to looking out into the yard.
Every fall for the rest of her life, after they have spent an afternoon raking piles of leaves, she will observe her dad having at least one evening like this. Every year she’ll peak out the window and he will be sitting there, blowing smoke rings and staring out into the front yard. She will just know that he is thinking about his dad. And every year she won’t go outside and sit next to him and she wont hold his hand and ask about the grandfather she never knew.
But for now the little girl returns to the house and goes into the living room and decides to continue dancing. The perfect ballet song is playing and she moves slowly and gracefully:
My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue
An everlasting vision of the everchanging view
A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold
A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold
Her dad remains in solitude and silence on the porch until dark.
