In the Garage

1. Of all the spaces in my modestly sized childhood home, the garage was among those where I spent the least time, perhaps second only to the downstairs room set up with a bed, ostensibly to host an overnight guest, but that was more functionally a storage space for extra canned vegetables and knickknacks I could scarcely recall anyone using—a years-of-service analog clock my mother’s employer gifted her, a small fish tank retained for over a decade after that one year when we kept fish. The bed was littered with cardboard boxes that would in time be repurposed for gift giving or moving my sister and later me to college. That space, I mostly only used as a conduit to the second bathroom, and always found vaguely eerie for the off-colored light that filtered in from the backyard shed that butted against it, and for a nightmare I'd once had of a glowing yellow spectral presence that flitted between glass jars down there (the jars and the shelves they perched on were non-existent in the waking world, and I suspect poached from something I’d seen on TV).

2. I digress.

3. My mother and father both parked their cars in the garage in the wintry months of snow that encapsulated two-thirds of the year, where the shelter offered a degree of protection for the engine and precluded a need to brush snow or scrape ice before leaving home. Remarkably, I don’t have a single memory of anyone scraping the side of a car on the way in or out, perhaps because or perhaps in spite of that seeming to be one of my father’s greatest fears. When he taught me to drive those final years I lived in the house, he’d stand behind the car as I backed out, guiding me to turn the wheel in sharp, animated hand gestures that I found more distracting than helpful.

4. A decade after I moved out, I spent one long holiday stay at the old house, when only my father lived there, thinking that nearly a week under the same roof might heal old wounds and be a step toward an adult relationship. We grated on one another and I spent less time in the house or with him than I’d expected or intended. My last memory from the trip: him standing in the path of my rear view mirror, making those gestures as I inches backward, already careful, already aware of how to turn the wheel, because a fear of hitting something in that garage was engrained in my psyche and never more so than when he was watching.

He was trying to help, my best self knew, intellectually.

I cursed at him to get out of the way of the car before he caused an accident.

He couldn’t hear me.

5. My father tried to get me to hit a baseball in that garage. I was little. Four. Maybe five or six. I’m not sure if I’d started school yet. I think it was summer.

The lesson had started in the backyard with a wiffle ball and yellow plastic bat.

Him throwing the ball, slow overhand, then in underhand lobs.

Me, utterly incapable of making contact.

Him yelling.

Me crying.

Him throwing.

Me swinging.

Him, trembling with rage as dreams of an athlete son dwindled. As failing to hit the ball that many times registered as defiance, rather than incompetence.

Me shaking.

The lesson moved into the garage. Maybe so the neighbors wouldn’t hear him yelling. Maybe mindful of us both getting sunburned. Maybe because there was little reason to fear me hitting the ball hard enough to break anything if it increasingly felt like it’d take a minor miracle for me to hit the ball at all.

In retrospect, I don’t think the entire episode could have lasted more than a couple hours. Maybe just one.

Still, I recall it on the very short list of the worst days of my life.

6. My father put me in the garage sometimes when I was little and wouldn’t stop crying. Something I all but forgot about until I had a son of my own who would not stop crying.

I held my kid a little closer when I thought of it.

7. My father taught me other lessons in the garage, in those wintry months of elementary school and junior high when I’d wait for the bus and he’d quiz me on words for spelling tests and addition and multiplication. I’d recite speeches for class presentations and oratory competitions. In the build to taking the SAT as a seventh grader to qualify for a gifted ed program, we drilled vocabulary and algebra.

One of those mornings, after getting consecutive problems wrong, he shook his head at my inability to learn, my stupidity.

I fretted over it in the day in between, knowing he’d grill me again the next morning, assuming he stewed over it all the while in between, sharpening his pedagogical talons.

The next morning, he said I’d gotten a lot better at math, and we should focus on vocabulary. Maybe a small mercy. Maybe an indicator the previous day’s frustration with me had been for show—a morning of tough love. Maybe he’d forgotten.

8. My father kept his old Playboy magazines in liquor boxes on a shelf in the garage, I suppose where he assumed me least likely to find them, but as a curious teenager left home alone for few-hour stretches, I snooped.

I was less interested in the magazines as pornography than as sheer spectacle—the still and so clearly carefully posed images of women less entrancing than sterile, undermining my teenage boy overactive imagination. I don’t recall ever getting off to these magazines, though I did make mention of them to friends, poaching one for a close friend to borrow, until his nerves about getting caught with the thing far outweighed its value. I stole another to sell to a more casual friend for a cool ten dollars cash at school. I didn’t think much about what would happen if either of us were caught. I never knew what became of the magazine, but I rarely fail to think of it now when this friend shows up on my Facebook feed—that magazine our surest connection.

9. When I returned home for Christmas, sometime in my late twenties, I found one of the glass panes on one of the garage doors covered in cardboard. My father explained he’d locked himself out and had to bust the window to reach inside and unlock the garage.

There was something absurd to the story for how strict he’d been about having our keys when we were younger and how wildly outside the realm of possibility breaking a window would have been in those days.

There was something quintessentially him to the story. Insular and untrusting, of course no one else would have a spare key. Thrifty to the extreme, of course he’d tape up cardboard and let it stand in place of glass for as long as he could.

The cardboard was still in place when I next visited a year later.

10. I remember the garage littered with the hula hoops that I never recall actually using, a bicycle I started learning to ride until I caught a cold and my father and I abandoned our flow and largely negligible progress so that I never finished learning. My father sold off most of the childhood miscellany at a garage sale that occurred during my sophomore year of college, months after my mother left him, when he had a notion of selling the house.

He’s still there.

I recall the garage as a buffer space, returning from my best friend's house, down the street from ours, coming home from the playground where I shot hoops alone and played in pickup games, sneaking in quietly when friends dropped me off after curfew and I could never tell if my father were asleep or up waiting.

When I think back to those moments, the garage can seem warm and nostalgic.

It’s been a long time. Time for tears to dry and for one car to turn into another and another. I don’t have a key to let me into the garage anymore and that isn’t a sad thing. It simply is. When this blog post goes live, it will have been nearly seven years since I last stood in that garage, and I haven’t lived with father for more than a visit, haven’t truly thought of his house as my house, my garage in over twenty years--more than half my lifetime to date.

I prefer to remember it a place to pass through now, not to wait, not to be cooped up, not to snoop.

I never saw the broken glass of the garage window, but I think I’d have liked to.