Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of women and nonbinary writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find in this column, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.
In the days when I was still thoroughly invested in the Tooth Fairy and my dad still boasted a full head of dark hair, we’d spend Saturday mornings at Percy Warner Park. Dad’s car always rattled with empty coffee cups and loosely tied bags of soy nuts. He let his tennis shoes sour in the back seat. While you wouldn’t want to drive to church in this car, it was the perfect Saturday morning chariot for me, of baggy T-shirts and bare feet, and for our cairn terrier, Gloria, who always smelled of pennies.
Clutching a bag of Krystal cheeseburgers, I’d open the car door and let her run, praying that once I unfurled the greasy paper bag, she’d come back. This was a part of the park we dubbed the Big Wide Open Field. If I were to return now, I’m not sure it would be so big or so wide-open, but in those days, it seemed to go on forever. As Gloria sprinted up and down the hill, tearing across the newly green grass, my family shared sliders on a checkered picnic blanket and enjoyed the blue of the sky.
Sometimes we’d fly a kite or toss one of those baseballs with a silky rainbow tail billowing behind it. My sisters might attempt to tan. All the while, Gloria ran.
Dad would shout her name when it was time to go. “Gloria! Gloria!”
If the cheeseburgers didn’t work, we’d have to chase her down, asking nearby joggers to corner her if they could. Scraggly bodied, she ran and ran. Funny, I don’t remember being scared to lose her. I probably should have been. There were woods upon woods for our small brown dog to get lost in, but there was also my dad, jogging into them wearing a coffee-stained YMCA T-shirt, unafraid to be scratched to high heaven by the bushes and trees.
He always found the dog. She lived to eat another Krystal cheeseburger. She lived to nearly 16.
The other day my dad came over for coffee. He didn’t bring me a cup, but rather a bag — a very my-dad thing to do. In fact, he FaceTimed me from the grocery store to ask which kind was my favorite, and when he couldn’t find it, chased down a clerk.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said, embarrassed. “Any of those would be good.”
“No, no. We’ll find it. Excuse me, young man, do you know where I can find gingerbread-flavored coffee?”
I brewed the gingerbread coffee while we sat in my crowded home office, me on the squished red couch, him on the faded floral chair. On the bookshelf sits a stuffed dog that looks just like Gloria, which is to say, like a used hairbrush with a tongue. Beside it, there are dozens of knickknacks, little glass dragons and broken pocket watches, wooden houses and porcelain pigs. On the desk I keep a typewriter and a sewing machine. Like my father with his soy nuts, I find it hard to let go of things.
“I wish your great-grandmother could see this,” he said, gesturing with his coffee cup, his dark hair snowy at the ears. “She was just like you. She could do anything.”
I smiled. We drank our coffee — mine with milk, his black — and talked about our lives. How he’d quit eating sugar and hoped I could tell, how I would be getting engaged soon and hoped everybody would stop asking if we both planned to wear dresses.
“Wear whatever you want!” he said. Dad was always of the wear-whatever-you-want camp, even when what I wanted to wear were bright-blue pirate shirts and throngs of beaded necklaces or billowy green basketball shorts and pink bandanas. My favorite necklace in sixth grade was a drain cover hung on a length of string. He approved.
As the coffee dwindled, I read him a few pages from my latest project, a strange book that might never see the light of day.
“I like the father character,” he said. “Especially how much he loves the cat.”
My father is not a writer. In fact, he majored in math. But his finest skill, I think, is simply opening the car door and letting his children run. After all these years, he is still content to watch from the picnic blanket as we explore parts unknown. He settles in with his cheeseburgers and a sense of ease, unafraid of us getting a little lost. He has been divorced. He has fallen in love again. He has given up sugar. My father knows that no matter what happens, there will always be Krystal cheeseburgers and second chances.
How lucky I am to learn this from him. And to know that at the end of the day, whether I am 9 or 29, he will always be there waiting to gather me into his joyfully messy car, turn up the radio, and ferry me safely home.
