The Life of Every Suburban Dad

Four factors mark the end of the day: his sub-average height, the coverage of his car’s sun visor, the sun’s habit of setting in the west and the westward run of his long street.

There’s also the speed bumps. An old and needless addition to the road, and one whose presence always puts him in a foul mood. He resents how he must contort his body so the sun doesn’t blind him during his homeward vibrato to the end of the street — and it’s a long, long street. He tries wearing sunglasses but they make the problem worse.

The increasing sensitivity of his digestive system is how he marks his increasing age. Close to home, his lower abdomen bubbles and gurgles with fecal foreboding.

When he arrives, he slams his car in park and bolts inside. Jumping over the family dog is a spectacle he performs daily, and one he hopes no one ever sees. After clearing the furry hurdle he sprints down the hallway off the dining room, past the bedrooms of his two children, and into the bathroom where the sound of the toilet’s lid impacts the porcelain tank with a loud, glassy ponk! He undoes his belt and yanks his pants down and sits just as his bowels do something that brings to mind words like "Chernobyl."

Afterward, he washes his hands and awkwardly ambles out with that unpleasant feeling one has following an aggressive BM, which makes it impossible for him to relax.

He walks the dog up the street, around the block. He sees a neighbor outside grilling.

“Oh, you didn’t need to cook me anything,” he says.

“Nice try! You’ll have to—” and the rest in the noise of a passing motorcycle. The neighbor pretends to focus their attention elsewhere when the man and dog pass by again on their way home.

Once home he hangs the dog’s leash and changes into evening wear, because if he doesn’t do it right away he will forget and sleep in his jeans and work shirt. He goes to the kitchen where his family is eating food his wife bought from a restaurant she knows he doesn’t like. He sits to eat, anyway, with an amiable smile that people interpret as naïve.

“Hello all! How was everyone’s day? Anything interesting?” he asks.

“Hi,” the children say.

“Mm.” his wife says.

They return to speaking in rapid cadence to one another, making walls of breathless context that box him out and leave him in conversational company with the dog.

“And how was your day, little man?”

The dog puts his paws on the man’s lap and licks his face, and the man feeds the dog pieces of his meal as he eats. He’s still eating when his family leaves the table, and he feeds their leftovers to the dog. He loads the dishes into the dishwasher. It’s close enough to full, and he starts it.

By now, the sun is half gone behind the horizon. He watches it as he stands outside, waiting for his dog to finish any bathroom business before going into the den at the back of the house. He reclines in his chair, the dog takes the couch. He hears his family move around the rooms, talking to one another, laughing. They do not seek him out; he doesn’t call for them. He reads the news on his phone, and posts things online that no one will react to.

When his phone shows 8PM, he promptly turns off the light and listens to the sound of a rawhide bone being chewed to mush. The day’s stresses evaporate as he stares forward with a slack expression at a picture of himself as a boy, standing on a frozen pond, smiling, holding a fish. It’s on a table by the window. He tries to recreate that feeling of joy he had doing something as simple as ice fishing. He is moderately successful. The sun’s light then exits his part of the world entirely, and he can’t see the picture anymore.

His eyes still hold in that direction. But they rest in the middle distance, between where he is and where he wishes he was. His feet are up on the old chair’s retractable leg rest with his shoes still on. The man’s inner self packs up and goes somewhere far away. He never really falls asleep. He just lies there, one hand over the other, for hours and hours—without a thought in his head.

This is every day.