Remembrances of My Father
Occasionally, without warning, the drunken wreckage of my father would wash up on our doorstep, late at night, stammering, laughing, reeking of booze.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Beating on the door, pleading to my mother to open it. “These my boys just like they is yours!”
He was on his way home from drinking, gambling, philandering, or some combination thereof, squandering money that we could have used and wasting time that we desperately needed. Sometimes he was a stone’s throw from our house in rural northern Louisiana. As a parting gift, he would drop by to bless us with an incoherent 30 minutes of drunken drivel, crumbs that I hungrily lapped up, time that would be lost to him in the fog of a hangover by the time day broke. It was as close as I could get to him, so I took it.
