Paul Harvey and My Father With the Detox Shakes

He put the drink aside years before, but his hands still shook as he worked the wood in front of him.

My father, ever busying himself in the dust-filled, smoke-choked garage with his newest projects. Some he would find at flea markets, these fortresses of a former age. They would come through the garage door, huge wooden cabinets so old even my father had not been born before they were already dust-covered in an attic somewhere.

Others he found in auction houses, dragging my eleven-year-old self with him. I, bored to tears, would shuffle around aimlessly. He would get me up far earlier than I would be even on school days so he could have the best pickings of the bunch. A wise miser, he, seeing within the chests and cabinetry something special. They’d been repainted over the years, the owners deciding the best thing to do for them was to “spruce them up.”

Most of the time, that sprucing would be the worst color schemes the 60s and 70s could dream up.

Like Michelangelo staring into the marble, seeing the sculpture already existing within the stone, my father could examine the deepest heart of the wood. Passing one cabinet after another dresser, his hands would run over the tops and sides of each, feeling for… something within.

Finally, he would stop, tapping the edges a few times before turning to me with a smile. I knew it was the “magic moment” when I saw that sparkle.

The end of the day would see him a few dollars poorer and an antique richer.

I saw my back breaking and large hospital bills in my own future, having to muscle the object through those garage doors. He’d get upset with me if I let them down with too strong a thump, but by that time I was just grateful to be home again.

I’d leave the embrace of the room with the sound of his electric sander starting up echoing in my ears, and the heavy scent of paint stripper choking my nostrils.

I did not go out there often as he worked. It was a loud affair, with the radio blaring and the power tools running continuously as he spent hours removing all the paint from these things. It was something he had come to love doing after he stopped besotting himself with whiskey.

Our relationship was still, at that time, strained from the abuse he had put me through just a few years before.

Yet, I would occasionally wander out there, bored with the latest game I was trying to beat on my Commodore 64, or needing another book from the library. Even then, I was a voracious reader.

The times I most enjoyed being with him were when the sunlight streamed through the windowpanes. Dust always present, I’d watch the motes pass through the rays as the radio droned on with the sounds of Johnny Cash or some sportscast.

I wasn’t interested in the sports. What I waited for was Paul Harvey.

My father’s fingers, the tremor ever-present, would slide across the wood, sanding each strip down to expose those roots originally so lovingly made. Nicotine stained and worn from years of hard work and even harder living, they would trace each gnarl and weft of the wood, as he laid one coat after another of lacquer to give it the best shine.

I wanted to be out there when Paul Harvey was on the radio because dad would actually talk to me, then. Not like a father to a son; not even as a recovering alcoholic abuser to the person he had targeted.

No, he would speak about his life, his dreams — shattered though they were — and about what he wanted for the future.

He knew he was broken. He understood, even then, that there was too much to make up for. I think he even felt there would be no true reconciling between the two of us. He had, unfortunately, gone too far too many times.

It was in those moments in the garage, though — with the pithy, sometimes pun-laden, always educational, every-man voice of Harvey wandering through the corners of that garage — I would wonder if there was a chance.

I’m much older now. I am actually years past his own age in those moments and have children of my own. They, too, have reached their own adulthood.

I see my father there in that garage, creating beautiful things out of wood long before abandoned as useless, and I think I understand him better than the child did.

I wish I could tell that boy things would get worse for him before they got better. I long to reach back through time and stroke his hair, to comfort him in the coiled viper fear he endured even in those languid moments of peaceful listening to the hum of the radio.

That child was scared, knowing at any moment the man before him — tentatively trying to find a bridge between them — could strike out. He had many times before.

He never did after the drink stopped passing into his gullet, though. He truly was, at that point, a different person. Wholly changed, and, I think, hurting nearly as bad as that child over the actions he had taken.

I’ve heard Paul Harvey many times since those days. His old shows still play on the local radio here and there and, of course, they’re easily found through the wondrous and magical technology of the internet.

Each time his voice reaches my ears, I am reminded of those times in the garage. It feels like home.

A damaged, frightening, disturbing, broken, and, oddly, at times loving home.