Daddy's Drawer
What I learned from my father's nightstand.
by Kevin Keck
June 9, 2008
Sure, it's overly sentimental, but at the time that sentiment was a great thunderbolt of grief. I'd not yet lost anyone close to me at that point in life, and so death was caricature that showed up in television movies, but little else. Suddenly I'd been slapped in the face with the real misery of life: the people we love get taken from us, and the only choice we have is to try and be ready when it happens.
My father's drawer was the vault of adulthood. All the things a parent wants to protect his or her child from for as long as possible — the loss of sexual innocence, bills, death — it was all there in his drawers, a sort of Pandora's Box that he'd stashed in plain view that revealed what he loved and feared.
As it turned out, when my grandfather died some twenty years after I'd discovered the eulogy (and yes, my father used that very eulogy with only minor additions), I had occasion to open his nightstand drawer: inside was a Bible, a flashlight, and a gun. My grandfather was a very practical man.
There's no porn in my nightstand drawer — why would there be? The internet has made the necessity of hiding it a moot point. But if my children were older, what veil would they pull back when they opened my drawers?
If my children were older, what veil would they pull back when they opened my drawers?
Certainly they'd learn that dad likes his weed sticky — my top drawer is a fragrant, resin-coated collection of ashtrays and various dope-fiend devices. That would be a drag to explain, and after Isabella showered the hallway with rolling papers like rose petals, I moved my stash to a more secure father fortress: my workshop.
But in the bottom drawer they would strike the real gold: a plastic rosary I keep, even though I dismiss organized religion; my grandfather's flashlight, though they wouldn't know by looking that it was his; a piece of one of Morrissey's shirts that he tossed into a concert crowd in Atlanta; a few literary magazines in which my first poems appeared; my father's 1968 Minolta 35mm camera; and under all that, two letters — one to each daughter that I wrote sitting in a hospital hallway outside the intensive care nursery the night they were born. If they cared to open them, they would find out a great deal about the me they never knew. But what I really wanted to tell them on their first night of life on the outside was that I was going to be a good dad and try to protect them as best I could, but that they should forgive me when I fail, as I ultimately will — I'm their father, but I'm also just one man trying to fend off the dark forces of the world.
Photo by Adam Weiss
©2008 Kevin Keck and Babble
About the Author
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Kevin Keck is the author of the memoir Are You There God? It's Me. Kevin., and a collection of personal essays, Oedipus Wrecked. Visit him at www.thekeck.com.
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