- laurie
Never Done THIS Before
July 27, 2017

image credit: Jazz & Poetry With Purpose, Carmens de la Calle and/or Andrea Vocab Sanderson
When the fantabulous Andrea Vocab Sanderson says, sort of off-hand, that you should read at this event, well... you take her up on it! This "short bio" I sent her was short indeed: Laurie Dietrich has written a lot of things and performed in a lot of places for a lot of years, but she's never done THIS before.
And oh it was so much fun! Writers everywhere, get yourself a jazz backing band. You'll thank me. Speaking of thanks - big ones to Vocab, to the musicians, to the friends that came to see me do something new, and the strangers who did too, and were kind. I wrote and performed a thing about the difficulty of having a daddy (also, by inference, of being a daddy), titled LIKE ME. Text below. When I get it recorded I'll link it here.
LIKE ME
I am more like my father
Than my mother
Oh I look like her
But I have his chilly won’t-build-bridges thing
You have to swim the moat to get to me
I don’t make it easy
I haven’t had a mother in over thirty years
Except when I look in the mirror
I haven’t had a father in over thirty years
But I can hear him when I open my mouth
When I say “what did you expect?”
When I say “figures”
When I assume you don’t mean it when you say
“Let’s get together”
When you say
“Let’s keep in touch”
Always expect the worst from people he said
You’ll never be disappointed, and sometimes you’ll be pleasantly surprised
His whole life was like that I think
Hedged against
Not pain
He took the pain for granted
Hedged against hope instead
Because when you hope for better
Things hurt you twice
You might think I’m describing a misfit man
An outsider
The kind of person who sinks beneath the surface of life
When that time comes
And doesn’t leave a ripple behind
But thousands of people came to the memorial service
It was postponed, several times, while we tried to find bigger churches
They came for my mother too
Everybody liked her
But he was the star that had blinked out
His was the chilly lost light they came to mourn
See, my father was blazingly intelligent
(Something else I like to think I got from him
But every year that passes I feel dumber)
He bought his safety his whole life with his brilliance
And his willingness to follow the rules
People paid him good money to pull oil out of the ground
The food I ate, the houses I lived in
The clothes I wore, the education I got
All paid for by the rape of the Earth
So there’s that
Being alike doesn’t mean you don’t fight
Sometimes it means you fight harder
We were both
Ruthlessly logical
Utterly skeptical
Introverted as fuck
Easily bored
Achievement oriented
But he was a child of his times
The achievement he wanted most was safety
Security for his family
And because he succeeded
Because he gave me safety,
All I wanted to do was throw it away
I wanted adventure and risk and edge
And all the answers, even if they were awful
All the answers, no matter what price I had to pay for them
I was just the way he would have been
If he’d had a father who made him feel safe
But he didn’t
And his fear for me
(expressed in disapproval and scorn)
And my disdain for that fear
(expressed in disapproval and scorn)
Made us as much enemies as family can be
For awhile
We were just starting to see each other
Over the lips of our respective bunkers
When he died
I lived in the kind of house with an actual, ongoing debate
About whether human beings were inherently altruistic
Or predatory
Mom was Team Altruism
I called her Pollyanna
I stood with my father
He told my mother once
(they were together since seventh grade)
that he didn’t love his father
Only told her once
Expected her to remember
And she did
And she told me
When I finally broke down, in frustration and incredulity, about the monster my grandfather was
A quiet monster, to be sure
Nothing flashy
Just some adultery
And some racism
And some joy in getting the best of other people
Perfectly fine for a white guy
Just another one of the boys
Your father never loved him
She told me to ease my loneliness
Alone-feeling in that hatred
But mostly, I think, to redeem my father
In my eyes
She loved him of course
Never as desperately as he loved her
(He loved her through the one small crack he could manage in the door of his heart
He loved her like a life raft)
She knew he was honorable
She wanted me to know it too
My grandfather though
What growing up with that as a father
Must have done to mine
When I was thirty years old
I stood with that old man, and some others
On a curb in downtown Houston
Waiting to cross a busy street
Across the way a group of young men
Boys really
Were flashing and strutting and laughing
The way boys do, to keep the insecurity at bay
They pack up and they cocky-walk and who can’t see through that?
It’s just youth and overwhelm and whistling their way past the graveyard
But my grandfather’s eyes narrowed
And his voice got all crypt-keeper nasty
The sound of spitting choking evil
And he said “THAT…”
Meaning those boys, those human beings
“THAT gets to live, but my son is dead!”
For a moment, my father’s death was okay with me
Because of the pain it caused his father
Forgive me, daddy
“When your father dies”
My mother said
“His funeral will be the last time I ever see those people”
She meant his family
She had more steel in her than he ever did
Disappointed idealist that he was
He’d have liked to have loved his father
He’d have liked to have forgiven his mother
My mother?
She knew no one deserves love
No one deserves forgiveness
She knew you have to earn it
When my parents died
Their funeral was the last time I ever saw those people
That’s practically true
Except there wasn’t a funeral
Because they were in pieces in a jungle half a world away
Falling out the sky is no gentle, pretty ending
There was only the biggest of the churches
And acres of black fabric wrapping three thousand bodies
All of which wanted to touch mine, when it was over
Like they could touch them through me
That made me angriest of all
“He has to die first”
My mother said
“He couldn’t live without me”
And I knew it was truth
And not arrogance
I knew it was kindness
Her willingness to be without him
(which, in the end, she never was
Their happiest ending,
To die together
It only sucked for those of us left behind)
I am more like my mother than my father
In one way
I know that I can outlive anything
But no one’s ever loved me
The way he loved her
So that’s one more sacrifice I’ll never have to make
I missed her most in the beginning
She was my friend
And he was not
I miss him more as time goes on
I want to ask her things like
“how’d you make that meatloaf?”
I want to ask him things like
“how’d you live like that?
So smart
So scared
So lonely?”
I want to tell him
“I knew you loved me, daddy”
I figured it out
That his heart was just a little wider
Than my mother’s feet
Just wide enough for mine as well
I figured it out the day they drove away
Left me standing secretly gutted in front of the freshman dorm
When he was the only one that cried.