Column: Love in the time of Crossplay

1.

I frequently phoned my widowed father to take a long-distance pulse check.

My parents were married two months shy of 60 years. A Diamond Jubilee denied. Sixty! Ancient love. Not bad for a 1962 shotgun wedding.

Dad only spoke of mundanities: post office visits, adding flowers to Mom’s grave, talking to my younger brother, Patrick—Saint Patrick—who, like Dad, remained a hometown holdout and was equally as silent. My father, born in the mid-1940s, represented the tail end of The Silent Generation. He avoided displays of vulnerability as if they were contagions.

He was a tool and die guy. A decipherer of engineering schematics and a master of meticulous measurement. After 30 years as a machinist at an aluminum plant, he was offered a decent early-retirement package. He then decided to open his own shop, a dream come true: Saalman Machine and Tool. My father never dined from a lunchbox again.

In his shop, he made things for things that made things for things. It’s that simple. It’s that complicated. Like love.

My childhood bedroom was converted into a business office, and Mom became office manager. A framed wall map was populated with a rainbow of push pins marking the locations of his customers throughout the United States. Mom and Dad lived vicariously through their points of sales. They vacationed in only one place: Biloxi.

The map’s push pins ended when she ended—and in a way, so ended my dad.

2.

Every day, my father visited her resting place, the same spot where he and I sat side-by-side on front-row folding chairs under a funeral service canopy. During the service, I put my left arm around Dad, his gray head bent forward. As far as physical father and son contact, we set a record that day. Normally, an occasional, brief handshake served as our hug. My daughter, who sat behind us, was so surprised by the moment that she captured the scene with her camera, her father-grandfather togetherness as unexpected as finding Bigfoot in her Canon crosshairs.

Dad talked to Mom during his cemetery visits, sometimes speaking aloud if he had the graveyard to himself. What he said to her, aloud or in his mind, he never said.

On Oct. 14, 2021, we knew it was only a matter of hours / minutes / seconds. I whispered into her left ear that it was OK to let go, that she had been a great mother. Dad burrowed his lips into her left ear, sharing soundless somethings. I looked away, to give them privacy. Mom, unresponsive, had embarked on a one-way, morphine-fueled, magic carpet ride. Her last wish had been for more morphine. We obliged. Our final act of love.

She was loaded into the hearse, and I imagined my parents’ better times. In southern Mississippi, they enjoyed gambling, fresh seafood, gambling, views of the Gulf of Mexico—oh . . . and . . . did I mention gambling? During their last time in Biloxi, Dad knew the odds were grim that they’d ever return to the Vegas of the South. Their final vacation almost didn’t happen—she was declining fast from colon cancer. In hindsight, it was a forced swan song, more bittersweet than sweet. Both knew they were really pushing it this time.

Biloxi or bust. You’d thought they were actually moon bound, not Mississippi bound. The salt air. Fried shrimp. Coffee at sunrise and beer at sunset while perched on their beachfront balcony; by day, entranced by the cetacean celebration of dolphins breaching brownish green waters, racing one another through a synchronization of wave hurdling.

In the Midwest, we don’t have dolphins, but we occasionally see a star shooting through our ebony ocean sky, and that too fills us with childlike wonder. We watch our meandering meteors scratch across the nightscape, and we hold our inhales. Shooting stars are signs of good luck. The spotter is entitled to a secret wish, but it must be made before the meteor fizzles into nocturnal nothingness. Hurried wishes—but wishes just the same.

Today, when I see a shooting star, I think of my mother, still out there somewhere, traveling on an incredible journey, and I wish that I was with her, holding her hand—even if for just one more hour / minute / second.

3.

Dec. 31, 1962, was etched near the base of her headstone. A few weeks after what should have been their 60th anniversary, Dad and I met at her grave.

“Happy 60th,” I said to him and her, belatedly. “I’m sorry I’m a little late.”

“It doesn’t really matter,” he said.

“Huh?”

“We’re not married anymore.”

I noticed his ringless finger but then remembered he had never worn a wedding band. Machinists wearing jewelry around their drill presses and lathes and milling machines is an

accident

waiting to happen. Jewelry that becomes caught on the moving parts of machinery could

lead to the degloving and severing of fingers and hands, the resulting shop floor spatter nothing but a macabre gumbo of swarf, bone and blood.

Band-Aids were his jewelry.

“Of course you’re still married,” I said.

“Till death do us part,” he said, shrugging in the southern Indiana cold. Puffs of breath billowed from his mouth like punctuation marks. “At least, that’s what the priest said during our vows.”

Cemetery silence then. Apparently, we reached our spoken word limit. I walked to the car. He knelt at her tombstone. When he talked to her, no clouds of condensation served as evidence of words spoken aloud, as if Dad too had run out of breath.

4.

The frequency of my calls lessened.

Often, they ended abruptly due to, not arguments or disagreements (we never went that deep), but to distractions from his end: he wanted to finish his omelet before it became cold, or he had to make things for things that made things for things, or my younger brother was phoning him—Dad actually seemed excited about Saint Patrick’s calls. He promised to call me back later, but I told him not to worry about it.

In the five years that Mom’s health gradually worsened, Dad and I started to spend more time together. We did this through Scrabble.

Mano a mano: me, a wordsmith since my single-digit years and he, a lifelong machinist who never read a book since high school, squaring off at the Scrabble board. Mom rested in the living room, watching Two and a Half Men reruns. She loved Charlie Sheen.

My father and I spelled words instead of speaking. Our fingertips touched the board’s edges, as if at a Ouija board, a father-and-son Scrabble séance serving as a portal between us. During stratagems, we juxtaposed seven letters on our tile racks, seeking out bingos (there’s not a greater thrill), hiding the content of our racks from each other as if governmental secrets were at our fingertips. Unspoken words in a house where you could hear a pin drop. Each shaking of the remaining letters inside the tile bag lulled us like rain sticks.

When a game got really heated, the kitchen door was closed to block out the TV audience’s distracting laughter after yet another Charlie Sheen double-entendre. Briefly, we forgot about Mom. Soon, though, the wall clock’s clicks amplified at each second-hand advancement, as ominous as time bomb ticks. When we are born, the countdown begins.

After Mom died, I gradually stopped returning to my hometown. The visits became harder emotionally. Inside the house, she was everywhere, she was nowhere; he was elsewhere; I wished to be anywhere else.

I became a ghost in my childhood home.

Our Scrabble games ended.

5.

My father called recently!

Seeing his ID (DAD) flash on the screen conjured immediate dread.

Wait, what? He’s actually calling me? This can’t be good.

Had he tripped and fell, entangled in sharp metal swarf, bleeding out . . . calling me, from three hours away, instead of local 911 services?

Had he fallen for another online scam involving gift cards?

Had he just been diagnosed with colon cancer, too? It wants us all. Bloody cancer. Die, cancer. Die.

“What’s up?” I said, holding my inhale, bracing for the worst.

“I’m confused,” he said.

Oh god . . . it’s Alzheimer’s!

“What is nudge?” he continued.

“Nudge?”

“Numbnuts,” he said. “You know what I mean. I’m talking about the nudge button in that new game app.”

Then, I understood.

A day earlier, I had introduced Dad to Crossplay, The Times’ new mobile game app, thinking it could revitalize the fading of our old-school Scrabble ways, a shared virtual screen replacing the game board now hiding in some closet turning to dust. The Return of the Odd Couple.

Crossplay’s creator likely intended the nudge button to be a “polite” way of reminding an opponent that it’s their turn to play. Dad, though, deluged me with the nudge. Dad wasn’t being polite. He was being pushy.

“Dad,” I told him. “You don’t need to nudge me. I know when it’s my turn.”

He grew silent, as if scolded.

“Wait a minute, Dad. You never call, but when you finally do, it’s about the nudge? And here I thought you were dying.”

The thought of becoming a full orphan, versus half of one, was unbearable.

Instead of nudging me, Dad began sending me invitations to join another match of Crossplay while a current game between us was still in progress. Soon, we had multiple matches happening simultaneously. I liked to think of the invites as Dad’s way of calling me. I accept each call, each challenge, happy to communicate to him without speaking.

Two men, one 61, one 81, briefly docking together during otherwise different orbits, communicating, day and night, via words unspoken. Each hated to lose to the other.

I’m reminded of Louden Wainwright III’s “A Father and A Son,” which bluntly details the complexities associated with paternal pairing, the disconnections, the communicative breakdowns, the competitiveness.

“. . . probably it’s love . . .,” Wainwright concludes.

There are still things I need to spell out to Dad.

Probably it’s love.

Scott Saalman | 812-827-9911 | scottsaalman@gmail.com