Dogs

School wasn’t over yet but I could see the finish line. There wasn’t really anything I could do to speed it up. I was just going through the motions really. Most of the time I felt like I was at the dmv.

That weekend I’d gone home to see my folks. I seldom did that anymore. I didn’t do it for a lot of reasons, to be honest. One of the reasons was I hated the city my dad had chosen to retire in. I hated the house he’d chosen to retire in. Maybe these weren’t all his choices. But he did choose to get in a fight with Mom over the spaghetti. I asked him not to. He couldn’t help himself. He hated when she made the sauce too spicy. I never had the heart to tell him she did that for me.

But Dad always gave me a ride back to Richmond, and it was nice because he was happy to do it. And on my end, I was happy too. Dad and I hadn’t been very close growing up. I was still growing up but I mean way back when. Growing up, work always took him out of town. He was always home for the holidays. But all that in between, that was Mom and my brothers and a sprinkle of my sister. I’ll say this though, every time Dad came back home, he came back with a stack of comic books. I got obsessed with them. I stole money to buy more, and if I couldn’t find money, I found quirky ways to steal them from the store. I didn’t feel good about that. I knew the guy at the comic book store. He liked me and I liked him. It wasn’t personal.

I read all of them too. Spider Man. X-Men. Black Panther. Luke Cage. Captain America. Guardians of the Galaxy, pre–Star Lord. I collected the cards. I had folders. I started my own comic book drawing club. We had exactly one meeting. I was the only one to finish drawing a comic.

We were passing Williamsburg. I reached up and switched the station. This was a new thing. Not very long ago that would’ve got my hand slapped. I was earning trust and I understood the gravity of that. I just had to be respectful. I was beginning to understand that was the problem with a lot of the connection between the youth and their predecessors. The elders just wanted respect. They wanted consideration. They wanted to be kept in mind and to have their welfare be made a priority. So I never played anything on the radio that was too crazy. Too rock, too rap, too anything. My dad liked classic rock. He liked funk. He could even listen to Outkast.

I learned compromise this way and found out it wasn’t a terrible thing by any means. I wondered why my parents weren’t more familiar with it.

“You ever thought about smoking weed, Dad?”

“Never,” he said.

Now, he didn’t say that in a hellfire and damnation kind of way. My dad barely spoke about church in the first place, even though growing up he’d been smothered in it. He just made it sound like it was something that didn’t agree with him. Like if someone offers you a strange food for the first time and you think it won’t taste good. But he didn’t whip his head around and look at me and judge me or anything like that. He just said, “Never.”

We rode silently for a little while. I had Yogi in my lap. Yogi was our pet dachshund. Long-haired. Brown with some white patches and one blue eye. He would ride up with me on these trips and I’d kiss him goodbye when I got out of the car. Like every righteous dog, he loved to set his front paws up on the arm of the door and stick his head out the window. I’d let...