[on veteran’s day] morning pages.
i think about my father who was a white poor red headed and later blonde-headed michigan rural person who never got passed the 6th grade. i think about how he was racist and loving. terrible and passionate. i think about the glorious lady slipper photography in his black room and his knees almost wrapped in wild blueberries and toad hopping bogs. i think about how he served his country as any poor kid would as a merchant marine, had racist understandings of his straight white cisgender maleness and went to the philippines to find himself a “docile asian wife,” who later turned out to be my mama. who was never anything as docile as hot prickly oil in a deep frying pan of smelt or bangus. i think about how he defended soldiers and talked about how rich bankers in “the big city” were stealing all our trees and making us talk like robots. i remember how he was gone for 4-6 months out of the year at sea, transporting weapons to kuwait and iran for private contractors that had him in the ship’s gut around rust, steam, oil, and asbestos. i remember how his globetrotting ways were part-colonizer sending me papyrus from egypt. i remember how he was always coughing, coughed yellow, green, then red red red, then black some. i remember how a grown woman at the time, though faking it, people didn’t comprehend me to be my father’s child once i came to visit him every few years. instead, i was a mail-order bride, a concubine, a racist colonial white man’s wet dream. how we both sat in the bakery i grew up in and how i swirled my hot cocoa and he his coffee, glaring out of the storefront window in squirmed silence. how a good country boy marine who made fresh icecream argued with my mama for being too fancy with her seafood eating ways in the lower peninsula of michigan at the lip of the mackinaw bridge. how he never understood she never really left the ‘pinas and nibaliw beach where fresh oysters were as common as storm season. i remember his coughing and smell of mucus piled with sanka coffee and apple tree twig in harmony with high sky unsalted lake air. “mesothelioma” i remember people saying, cancer people saying. it was due to the asbestos on the ship, shipyards, on equipment. i remember how veterans no matter how confused or complex or powerful, ended up like my nature photographer dad who didn’t really wanna leave his home, his family and most importantly his pictures behind and eventually, this killed him.
