GRAFTON — My father taught me to box when I was still so short he had to get on his knees to spar with me. When I grew taller, he taught me basic self-defense techniques.
Both my parents believed that women should be intellectually and physically competent so they could manifest their ambitions and dreams. Real-world skills were an important component of a well-rounded education. Boys and girls, they believed, should know how to cook a meal, clean a house, do the laundry, sew a button, drive a stick shift, change a tire, hammer a nail, sharpen a knife, and take out the garbage.
I'm not sure my mother believed that boxing was a required course in the family curriculum.
But I know she agreed when my father told me, “It's a tough world for women and you need to be able to take care of yourself.” During our lessons he reminded me to “pay attention, trust your instincts, and use your noggin.”
These instructions were applicable not only to boxing but to all of life.
* * *
Daddy taught me to dance, too. Sometimes after dinner he'd roll back the living room rug and put a record on the turntable.
I'd take off my shoes and socks and stand on his feet while he spun us around the floor. My mother stretched out on the couch to watch, and we sang along to the music they'd danced to when they were courting. Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong - they all came to our party.
It was easy to follow Daddy's lead when I was already stepping on his feet and we sang, “You like potato and I like potah-to, you like tomato and I like tomah-to... let's call the whole thing off.”
Around the time I turned 15, I stopped following my father's lead. That was because fairies had slipped into our house in the dark of the moon, stolen my father, and replaced him with a troll. During that same year, my parents were probably wondering why the fairies had stolen their precious baby girl.
I thought those changeling stories were only about babies.
* * *
The troll who replaced my father was totally unreasonable. When I wanted to walk downtown and meet my friend Peter at the movie theater for a 7 o'clock show, my mother said yes and the troll said yes, but I had to be home five minutes after the movie was over. The theater was over a mile from our house.
“Dad, I'd have to run faster than Roger Bannister to get home in five minutes!”
Bannister was the first man to break a four-minute mile back in 1954; I knew this detail because my father had told me. I thought I'd made a sound argument. The troll remained intractable.
“Peter isn't my boyfriend,” I wailed. “He's my friend!” That was true.
The troll shook his head, glanced at my mother, and said, “Like a terrier in a groundhog hole.”
I knew he was trying to insert some humor into the drama, but I was not amused.
Some months later, the troll caught a love-struck Romeo throwing pebbles at my bedroom window. I didn't hear the summons of the stones or the slam of the back door as the troll charged into the night in his sock feet to defend my virtue. They raced down Mt. Vernon Street until Romeo ducked into the woods or the troll ran out of breath, depending on whose version of the story you believed.
In the ensuing years there was a lot of shouting in our house, most of it generated by me. This was a new kind of sparring, and it wasn't fun.
Although the troll and I didn't say anything truly terrible to each other, the decibel level was too high for my mother. She advocated for détente, to no avail. Mother was hardly a pushover, but she did realize that no good would come from locking me in a tower until I was 40.
What made the burr under my saddle especially irritating was that my friends couldn't see the troll.
“Your father is so handsome and funny and charming,” the girls said.
“Your dad is so interesting. He knows a lot of cool stuff,” the boys said.
In response to their outpourings of adoration, all I could say was, “Yuck!”
* * *
My father and I were lucky. We had many years to talk about everything and laugh about our follies.
When I learned to use my noggin, speak quietly, and stay out of groundhog holes, I discovered that my father was an excellent listener.
I finally understood why he'd tried to protect me from boys with ducktail hair cuts and bad reputations and every other danger in the world.
Love and fear often race side by side. Fear doesn't subtract from the love, but it can cause the mind to veer wildly off course. During one of our conversations, I confessed I'd been glad that Daddy had chased Romeo away. I wasn't enamored of that boy, and I hadn't known how to “call the whole thing off.”
My father chuckled and said, “That kid was the star of the track team, and I was gaining on him.”
“Yes, and it's a mercy you didn't have a heart attack.”
A couple years before my father died, my parents and I were having dinner in the dining room at their retirement home. After dessert, we walked across the hall to the auditorium to watch the Friday night movie.
My Father, My Hero, stars Gérard Depardieu as a divorced dad who takes his adolescent daughter on a Caribbean vacation. It's frothy and facile - not the sort of film that normally held Daddy's attention - but he was mesmerized.
There's a scene where the daughter sashays around the hotel pool in a skimpy bikini. Depardieu leaps up from his chair and dashes after her, making a clumsy attempt to cover her up. She is - predictably - mortified.
My father laughed out loud. Then he leaned over and whispered in my ear.
“Does this look familiar?”
For a split second I didn't have a clue what he meant. There were moments when his wit was too quick for me, even after a series of mini-strokes had rattled his brain.
Then I got the joke. I laughed and looked over at Daddy. His smile lit up the dark room.
* * *
We buried my father's ashes in Sharp's Graveyard, the little country cemetery that adjoins my mother's family homestead in Fair Hill, Md. It was a cold December day. Friends and relatives were huddled under the tent, and snow was swirling across the hill behind us.
I was remembering all the times Daddy and I had walked the old cart road behind that hill, talking about anything and everything, in the days before pesky suitors came between us.
I was thinking about the way life spirals in and out and up and down; how we converge and diverge and how, if we're paying attention to ourselves and one another, the spiral is more spacious in the end than it was in the beginning.