A Song Called “Oh"

I hid behind a palm tree, hoping not to be taken for a prowler, a pervert, or a preacher pitching salvation but lacking the starch to step to the door. There was no way to get out unseen.

I was standing in the front yard of what was once our dream home for Kathy and me. I hiked two miles down a fire trail through scrub oaks and the sweet smell of sagebrush and down a paved road to get there, all so my former neighbors would not see my car, or me. I saw no one. I heard nothing but a swimming pool pump, a gardener’s leaf blower down the hill, and my racing heartbeat.

I just wanted to gaze at it again, this home I had once been so proud of and had lost when it all came crashing down. I wanted to sit on the curb and hold my head.

Then Wayne, my old next-door neighbor, walked out of his front door. Wayne, who loved to talk about leveling his backyard, or deck stain brands, or the raccoon family living under his fussily stained deck, or, or, or .... I darted behind the palm tree to wait for him to go back inside.

“Please go away,” I prayed.

Wayne grabbed the hose instead.

From my hiding spot, I could see fresh paint coated the lattice shading the patio. Kathy and I used to sit there in the cool of the evening and listen to Ryan’s drumline practicing at the high school - DahDaDaDumDum, DuDahDahDum, DahDaDaDumDum, DuDahDahDum - a rhythm of relief from my draining days spent running a large division for an insurance company.

That patio was also where my three sons told their families of a time when they had launched the goldfish - in plastic bottles - from a second story window, “just to see what would happen.” I never knew.

I wondered if the vegetable garden was still sprouting San Marzano tomatoes and ghost peppers. But, no. Those were not perennials that resurrect every spring. They were annuals - plants that bear fruit, burn out, and die.

I stayed put behind the palm tree, wiped the sweat from my forehead, and looked to the front door that was once mine. In our last months there, I would trudge through that door after work and head straight for the couch. When Kathy asked how my day was, I could only find strength to say, “Fine.” Then I would find the bottle of Benadryl and took two. And another. And another. And tell Kathy another lie about it. And another.

After losing my corporate job I finally found part-time work in the plumbing department at Home Depot. One of my duties was to straighten the aisle with the toilet seats. The display seats hung in vertical rows and behind them were stacks of boxes. To work the bottom row, I had to lift a toilet seat and crawl on hands and knees as it banged the back of my head, all while trying not to show my butt crack. This was from modesty, but also because, well, plumbing and a butt crack is just so cliché.

One day I finished the stacks and saw someone I knew; Shari. She was the marketing manager at my previous company. In fact, she reported to an Assistant Vice President who reported to me.

My face burned and I could almost hear the voice of my boss from that job when he said to me, “We’ve decided to make a leadership change. Today is your last day.”

I looked away from Shari and heard an angry mob of imagined voices - my boss, and his boss, and recruiters and creditors and society and family and myself, and we were all jeering. “You got fired.”

“You couldn’t find a job for four years, and it’s come to this?”

“You’re bankrupt, and now you’re getting foreclosed.”

“You ran a whole division. Now you run around looking for toilet parts for people who pay their mortgages.”

“You let us down.”

“You failed.”

I inwardly squabbled with the mob. “But I work with good people. And hard work is honorable, and the new depression meds will kick in, and things will get better, and ...”

“Walk away,” I thought. And I did, so Shari wouldn’t see me in my orange apron.

The shadow of the palm tree waned impotently as the sun beat down. Wayne was now watering his hydrangeas, and my legs were beginning to cramp from squatting. My shirt was wet, my cheeks slick with tears - like the night inside our former home when I slumped on the edge of the bed in a pit of despair, feeling exiled from the easier platitudes of my faith but ashamed for doubting them, feeling ashamed of my shame, feeling gutted.

I told Kathy, “The bad news is, I don’t care if I live or die. The good news is, that scares me to death.”

She called the psychiatric hospital as I slid to the floor and wept. A few months and a fistful of prescriptions later, the bottom of the pit was raised, but the top was still shuttered. I couldn’t claw my way out.

Later that summer, our son Kendon, his wife Melissa, and their kids flew in from Seattle for a visit. We picked them up at the airport.

On the drive home, I flinched, but I pointed to the big-box store beside the road. “That’s where I work.”

Kendon turned to the backseat and said, “Hey kids, that’s where Papa works.” I watched them in the rearview mirror.

Seven-year-old Hudson craned his neck and said, “Oh!”

It wasn’t a bored “Oh”, or a salty, eye-rolling “Oh,” it was just “Oh!,” like where I worked was no reason for shame, like it mattered, just, “Oh!,” and I almost had to pull off the freeway as a wave of gratefulness and release washed over me.

Wayne walked over to his mailbox next to what was once my driveway. On the day we had to move out, I parked a U-Haul truck there and eighteen friends came to pack up everything we owned and haul it to storage. I had not been back here until now.

I tried to go back to the house two years ago. From the main road I saw the eucalyptus grove where Hudson, as a toddler, shouldered his backpack for our ten-yard hike. I saw the stump where we rested and ate granola bars and sipped juice boxes. I drove on without turning.

Last year, I tried again. I turned from the main road and circled the cul-de-sac. This home once stood as a symbol of my success, but now it was a symbol of my failure. That was a foolish notion, but I was not above clinging to foolish notions, or conflating my resumé and a stack of lumber and stucco with my worth. And I was not above obeying the made-up angry mob as it once again heckled, “Drive away”.

Now, from behind the palm tree, the house almost looked the same – the front path, the shutters blocking light - everything but the hideous garage door. It was now a deep chocolate brown, a paint that Home Depot didn’t stock because who would buy it, a shade of 72% Cacao - that bitterly dark chocolate that we assure ourselves is healthy so we can gobble every square in one sitting - and the new owners fooled themselves that their garage door should be that nasty color, and it didn’t go with the house or the neighborhood - have they never watched HGTV? – and I hoped there was an angry chorus jeering this offense to curbside appeal. I wanted to audition.

Kendon was marketing manager for a coffee roaster in Seattle. (Not that one.) He sent a text to the family last year, “I just got fired.” I panicked. No, not him. No, No! I called to warn him about the mob.

“Don’t listen. Listen for the right song and crank up the volume. We are here singing, ‘We love you’”.

Kendon spoke with his usual grit, “Thanks Dad. I’ve got this.” Then he told me about three job leads.

When I was fired, I shut down, I numbed the pain, and I tried to hide from the angry mob. My son? He posted it on Facebook and Instagram.

Kathy and I spoke with Kendon again that evening. He and Melissa were telling their children. Five-year-old Avery began to sob and now-nine-year-old Hudson wrapped his arms around her. “It’s gonna be okay, Avery. It’s not like Dad got fired from the family.”

I joined Avery in her weeping. Not in grief or fear, but with gratefulness that I could sing a fresh lyric from a new song.

“It’s not like Dad got fired from the family.”

I stepped from the shadow of the tree and into the sun. “Hey Wayne,” I said with a nod.

“What? John!” he said with a start. Then he smiled. “Good to see you. How’s Kathy?” After we caught up, I sighed and walked away. Yes, I limped with the wounds of loss, but there was new strength in my stride because I had gone where I could not go.

Sure, I hid in the shadow of a palm tree, as I had been hiding for years. But I went there. And I am not a tomato plant that bears fruit and dies, I am a perennial who survived a brutal winter and is springing back to life and reaching for the light. And the reason I never knew about the goldfish is because they survived their fall, and so did I, and my garage door is not 72% Cacao and my butt crack isn’t showing, and I might still hear dirges of brokenness and failure, but they are fading as I listen for better songs, melodies of faith, and hope, and love, songs of “Oh!”

I lost a lifestyle, not my life. The dark night of my soul birthed wholeness as surely as it did brokenness, and it revealed hope as surely as it did despair. It unearthed the solid rock that I stood upon as surely as it swept away the sinking sand.

When I stepped out of the shadow of the palm tree and into the sunlight and walked away from that home, I was walking away from a house. I was leaving behind a place where everything that could be shaken was shaken, and I was stepping toward what remained, which was all I ever really had.

I was going home.