My Father the Hero

Michael L. Maliner

My father is the quintessential practitioner of logic. The deepest and most puzzling mysteries of the universe he can reduce to a rational sequence of uncomplicated events; indeed, the very existence of non-syllogistic reasoning is an affront to his world view. He is the ultimate left-brained being, an evolutionary pinnacle, the homo-superior who has outgrown what he calls the "vestigial penchant for mysticism." In my father's view, nothing is left unexplained, everything makes sense, and logic is to be revered above all else. It is precisely this exaltation of logic which makes all the more bizarre my father's ostensibly illogical choice of hobbies: junk collecting.

In my parents' basement one may venture to find: the very first bed which my mother and father jointly owned; an array of irreparably damaged phone answering machines and assorted other office equipment in varying states of disrepair; an old telescope, also broken beyond repair; two computer printer mufflers bought at a bankruptcy auction, neither of which are the proper size for either of the two printers in his house; two female manikins (no joke!), one seated and one standing, both bought together at another bankruptcy auction; a broken monaural turntable which was built and understandably left behind by the previous owners of my parents' house; a Magic Memory Casting Set, a gift my sister and I received when we were five and eight years of age respectively, used once, and subsequently returned to its box where it has remained ever since; a Monster Movie Make-up Kit, another gift from the same era, this one with its original seal still intact; a twenty-five year old exercise bike on which the odometer reads 205.8 miles, (my father, a numbers, statistics, and percentages pundit, would be quick to point out that that comes to approximately eight miles per year); and a potpourri of battered, unfinished wood and formica furniture left over from my sister's and my respective first apartments.

Although I readily admit not to have the trained eye of the seasoned junk collector, I have, in my more audacious moments, hinted to my father about selling-off part of his collection. After all, he and my mother both perpetually complain of the clutter about their house. "You could probably sell one of those printer mufflers," I've gingerly suggested if only to discern his amenability to the idea. "And I'm positive that any number of clothing stores would be interested in buying one or even both of your manikins." No dice. When it comes to his beloved hobby, my father, the logical being, defies logic.

When pressed on this point, my father always answers with the same pair of hackneyed platitudes: "You never know;" and "It can't hurt." A typical exchange:

"The bed Dad, why are you saving that bed?"
"You never know, you or your sister might need it some day."
"Well, then why the manikins Dad? I don't think that my sister or I will be needing those."
"It can't hurt."

These quips have time and time again been proven false. My sister and I -- both of us married and with beds of our own -- have emphatically assured my father that neither of us will ever be inclined to take possession of the bed in which we were conceived. As for the manikins and their "not being able to hurt," I'll never forget the day my father escorted the two shapely, unclothed effigies into the house, dressed them each in outfits my mother wore "back when she was thin," and then started referring to them as "girls." I can recall few times when my parents were as close to divorce. Yet, these two "girls" are still in the basement.

Last weekend, my father called me to ask if I could help him "reorganize" his junk collection. I knew that he wasn't giving me the whole story. Why in the world would a junk collection need to be reorganized. Still, I played along. When I arrived at the house, I immediately discovered what he had not told me over the phone. The reason the junk collection needed to be reorganized was to make room for a new and highly prized addition: an immense, cast-iron, double safe which my father got "for a bargain" at -- you guessed it -- a bankruptcy auction.

"A bargain, eh? What's the catch?" I asked. He was evasive in his response, but I persisted. "Do the locks work?" I asked.

"As far as I can tell they do," he answered.

"Is it a strong safe? Will you be secure locking valuables in it?" I asked.

"I think so," he answered.

Finally I said, "O.K. Dad, what is it? I can tell by your tone that there's a vital bit of information that you are loath to share. Now that you have gotten me over here, the least you can do is tell me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth."

He was reluctant to answer, but the logic of my argument compelled him. "Well, uh, you see," he mumbled while looking at the floor, then at the ceiling, everywhere but directly at me, "the safe is locked shut and no one knows the combination."

I thought that I was hearing things. Imagine, my father, logic's champion, buying a two-hundred pound, iron safe that not even he himself could open, and then hoodwinking me into spending an afternoon moving junk around his basement just so he could find a place to keep it! I was livid.

"You never know," was the best that he could muster to calm me. "And since we have to move everything out of the basement anyway," he continued, "we might as well wax the basement floor." ("Might as well" is of course the synthesis of the "You never know" and "It can't hurt" schools of thought.) Before I could say "What happened to the logical father I once knew and loved?" I found myself carrying the telescope, the exercise bike, the printer mufflers, the office equipment, the furniture, and the "girls" out of the basement and into the den.

It was at this point that I truly began to fear for my father's wits. Collecting and cherishing the junk was bad enough. But wanting the room in which it was stored to be clean, as if the junk would feel more comfortable resting on a freshly waxed floor, that was too much for me to swallow. What at first could have been dismissed as a peculiar idiosyncracy in the otherwise sensible behavior of an extremely logical man, was now beginning to look more and more like a complete breakdown of mental fabric. Not only had my father lost his sense of what is rational, but he had lost his mind.

But when it came time to fit all of this junk back into the tiny basement, a task which becomes infinitely more precarious with each addition to the collection, my father underwent a transformation. Suddenly, he no longer appeared to be the rather slight business man with a quirky fetish for junk. His very stature grew in size such that everything around him seemed to grow sympathetically. So powerful was his metamorphosis that the junk too was transformed: no longer was it junk, but a chaotic mass of mythological proportions in dire need of a Hero to put it straight. The basement became Aegean stables and my father Hercules.

This change in my father's demeanor reminded me of how I felt when briefly I had worked as a laborer. I can scarcely recall a satisfaction quite as base or as pure as the satisfaction I felt the time I climbed out of a five-foot by eight-foot trench dug by myself and two other men. My only sibling is a younger sister, but at that moment, for the first time in my life I was one of three brothers. Our muscled bodies ached, our hands were hardened with wear, our faces grimed with filth, and the fruit of our morning's labor, a canyon carved into the Earth's flesh, was there for all to see. We three were warriors making the world safe and habitable for others.

So it was with my father in the face of the three-dimensional puzzle of transfigured junk. What lay ahead was not a begrudged chore, but rather a skilled craft. My father was not Sisyphus the eternal laborer, but Hephaestus, master craftsman to the Gods. The exercise bike was artfully situated with its pedal and handlebar interlocking with the telescope in a protective embrace. One "girl" was delicately seated at an old kitchen table, the other left to stand guard over the sacred bed. Office furniture, lamps, chairs, tables, the phone machines, the turntable, all gracefully poised in a pais de deux frozen in time. No one else in the world could have so dexterously assembled such a structure of stuff. At that moment, I saw not my father the professional, nor even my father the father, but rather my father the Man -- indeed, my father the Hero.

Epilogue: Out of fairness I am obliged to let it be known that once having found a place amidst the rest of the junk for the cast-iron safe, my father subsequently found a locksmith who was able to crack the locks and furnish them each with new combinations. Once again, and to my chagrin, my father had proven that "You never know."