Future Ship

The Race

52 The Race i remember once my father beat me in a race. He wasn’t a quick man, an agile man. in fact, he was stocky with bandy legs, slightly bowed, a full stomach just beginning to swell. He wasn’t the kind of man you’d think could run, a man more used to sitting in his chair after dinner summer nights in a sleeveless t-shirt, a man whose chin was slipping towards double. So when he stepped out of the garage that morning and said,“Come on. Let’s race.” i wasn’t sure what he meant. We’d been cleaning out some junk my mother wanted gone, old boxes and a table with a broken leg. We stacked some lumber in a different place, and hung a bucksaw from the rafters. “Come on,” he said, and placed one foot before the other, like a sprinter ready to explode from his mark. i think we may have had a conversation, some words in which i indicated how i felt about his body. Perhaps i laughed at the way he bent down to heft a plank, or how he tried to reach a can of paint above us on a shelf. i don’t know. So much of what we said is lost, as if we’d never said it. Now he stood before me smiling, legs tensed, arms at the ready as i lined up next to him, sure i’d win. i was 12 or 13, my body exploding with energy and new strength, the way you feel at that age you can leap into the air and fly. So when he 53 counted down the seconds i was thinking how i’d laugh and taunt him later— when he burst forth, legs pumping, arms like pistons, fists clenched, until i had to stop, not twenty yards into the race, and watch him disappearing down the road, how much we take for granted, how quickly it’s gone. ...