My father, Brian Joseph Hill, Corning NY, early 1950s
My first memory of my father was when I was probably two years old, when we were living in Kentucky. My father and I are in a bed, and I’m burrowing under the covers, playing. When I come out, both of us in pajamas, my mother is standing at the foot of the bed, and she has a camera. She takes a photograph of my father and me.
But here’s what’s significant: I distinctly remember seeing how my father was posed, one arm behind his head, and the other across his chest. And what I did was to imitate him, one arm behind my head, one across my chest. I remember thinking this, that I wanted to imitate him. When my mother takes the photograph, I’m looking at her. My father is looking at me.
This photograph, a faded square, is in my attic in a box. Years ago, when one of my brothers came out from Colorado to visit my mother, they were going through the photo albums my mother meticulously kept. When my brother texted me, I asked him to pull that photo, that I wanted it. Now I have it, and I treasure it.
My father was then a student at Western Kentucky University, studying engineering. My mother was a secretary in a law office in Bowling Green. They’d been married two or three years by that point—I would guess this moment happened in early 1973.
A few years ago, I drove two hours south from Louisville to Bowling Green. I was going to visit a farm with the local Sierra Club chapter, and I was early—I’d forgotten the time change to Central from Eastern, and so I had an extra hour. So I went looking for the house we lived in, which back then was broken up into apartments.
I had a general sense of where it was, on College Street, just down the hill from the campus. I walked around a bit, not expecting to remember, but then I saw the house, 1338, a big Victorian. I got out my phone and texted my aunt Cathy, my mother’s cousin, who had just a short time back, while my mother was still alive, driven Mom down to Bowling Green to revisit. It was Cathy who’d flown with me to Kentucky from Corning, New York, in 1972 if I recall, while my parents drove.
I waited a few moments, then Cathy replied, That’s it!
College Street, Bowling Green, KY
Both of my parents are gone. When I lived here, none of my siblings had been born yet, and so it was only the three of us that lived in that house those two years. I stood before the porch and began to cry.
Susan Sontag once said that we don’t have memories; we have memories of photographs. This is, in a way, at least partly true. That photograph of my father and me holds in place this memory, as yellowed and faded as the print itself.
My last memory of my father was when he was dying. He was laid in a bed in the living room of his small house on Third Street, on the hillside overlooking downtown Corning. His brother, a nurse, was there, my uncle Mike, who’d come up from North Carolina to take care of my father. At one point, Mike got Dad out of bed, to take him to the scale to weigh him. I stood close behind, and heard my father exclaim that he was leaving his body.
My father drifted in and out of sleep. When he was awake, he would sometimes watch reruns of Big Bang Theory, his favorite show. I wanted to talk to him, but there was my brother and his brother both there. I wouldn’t have even known where to begin.
My father, 1970s
In the foyer, two of my poems hung on his wall in frames. One was a two-page poem I’d written about our trip to Ireland in 2001; I called it “Inland Among Stones,” and it was by then in my first published book. The other, a poem I’d written earlier, was about a time he took me to a cornfield, near Halloween, out on Route 352 in Big Flats. I called it “Harvest.”
In that cornfield, he’d cut down a number of stalks to bring home and tie in a sheaf around the lamppost at the end of our driveway. I was scared we were doing something wrong; I must have been eleven or twelve. Did he give me the knife to cut some down? I can’t remember.
What I had done with those poems was simple enough. I’d printed them on an ordinary printer, signed and dated them, folded them into business envelopes, and mailed them to my father. I never heard back from him.
Then I came to visit him once and when I stepped in the door, I saw them in the frames, professionally mounted. I stared, incredulous. “Dad,” I called, “what are my poems doing in these frames?”
He came around the corner, “What?” he said.
I looked at him. “Why are my poems in these frames?”
He replied, “Oh, you mean my poems.”
He had taken them downtown, he told me, and had them flattened. After he died, I took them from the wall, packed them in the Prius already loaded with things—kitchenware, a standing desk, lamps, family photographs—and drove them back to Kentucky. Those framed poems, too, are in my attic.
My father and I were never truly close, a fact that continues to pain me. From my perspective, it was clear that he had strict expectations of who I would be, and of what I would become. He wanted me, for example, to join the military, and that I would never do. During the first Gulf War, when I was about twenty, my parents argued over the table about selective service. My mother would drive me to Canada if need be, she said. My father would have none of that.
When I had just finished my undergraduate courses in Buffalo, in the winter of 1994, I was attacked in a parking lot, my nose broken. I went home to Elmira, where I had surgery to reset the bone. I spent a week in bed, still in shock. But then I stayed in bed, sleeping late, milling around the house, reading, walking the woods along the river.
One morning, while I was just waking up, my father barged in the room and said, “Get up. You’re painting the house.”
In fact, he wouldn’t let me paint the house—at least not most of it—but he certainly made me scrape the house. It wasn’t long before he made me start paying rent, and I found myself at the county employment office, and finally washing pots and pans at a pub downtown. Later, I got a temp job through an agency and began working second shift at an electronics factory in Horseheads.
By the autumn after I had come home from Buffalo, a graduate, I started substitute teaching in the very schools I’d attended. But I was restless, and by winter, a friend and I decided to move west, to Oregon. I’ll never forget when my friend and I were backing out of the driveway in a 1983 Chrysler New Yorker. My mother stood on the porch, crying. My father just grinned ear-to-ear and waved before disappearing into the house.