A Few Stories That Are Most Certainly Not About My Dad
By Cal James Adam
Hello and welcome to Tea & Oranges’ inaugural newsletter. I am so happy to start off this journey with all of you, and showcase this particular piece.
In making Tea & Oranges, our aim was to provide well-written, authentic, Canadian writing in a format that would be easily accessible to you, our readers, in the hopes that you may take a break from your everyday to read and acknowledge some truly wonderful pieces from some talented young writers. This first piece is a short story written by Toronto-based writer, Cal James Adam. I read Cal’s piece as an intimate look at growing up, and those moments in which it may feel stagnant. The piece combines a tongue-in-cheek humour with raw emotion to emphasize the internalized struggle between the narrator and their relationship with their father, taking the reader on a journey that feels as if they are apart of this conflict of growth.
I hope you enjoy this piece as much as I do.
Anna, Editor-in-chief
Every year at sign of the first chill of fall (the time when the thick mists of bugs that regularly laid siege upon my town flew south or cozied up at home by a fire or did whatever it is that bugs do when it gets cold) my brother and I would flock behind my cousin as she led us past creaking faded rainbow weathervanes and gnome villages (the type one imagines might come alive at night) to a kind of billabong of sticky black tar. It is still the darkest thing I’ve ever seen. So dark that it persists like a void stain on the earth even under the unwavering light of a midday sun. At night, animals would wander into the tar. This would be a sticky and gross and inconvenient error for a deer or a moose or a fox or any animal of moderate size. For small animals, however, like rats or frogs or mice or frogmice (a regional phenomenon), this mistake would kill them. If you sat by the pools and watched for long enough you’d occasionally see the decayed remnants of a former life bubble to the top. It was like the pools had finished digesting the fleshy parts and decided to spit back the bones. We liked to sit and watch the tar. We’d ignore the broken glass and the crumpled cans and the other fingerprints of man’s detritus littered around the edge and pretend that this pit was our little window into the badass reality of nature, though looking back I realize the origin of the pit may not have been as natural or as badass as we assumed it to be. As well as being a site of quiet observance, the slick also acted as a catalyst of conversation for Finn (the aforementioned brother), Siobhan (the aforementioned cousin), and me. It was a place where difficult questions seemed to bubble up naturally. We’d sometimes talk about school, hockey, girls, geopolitics, and other things of that essence, but we’d mostly talk about Dad. For these conversations, Siobhan would walk in circles around the pit and kick rocks and throw branches and maybe quietly think about geopolitics. The specifics of these chats would range from the simple: Dad’s drunk again today. To the complex: Why’s Dad drunk again today? To the kind-of-simple, kind-of-complex: Should we get drunk again today? But these stories aren’t about that. These stories aren’t about him. Clearly. I grew up in Sioux Lookout, Ontario. It’s a fine town. By fine I don’t mean good or nice or anything like that. By fine I mean delicate; like a beeswing. Sioux Lookout (known simply as Sioux by the hip locals) was a town of two opposing trailer parks separated by a liquor store that also occasionally acted as a town hall. My brother, my mom, and I moved to Toronto at the age of seven (I was seven, we weren’t collectively seven, that would be impossible and inappropriate). My dad stayed, so we’d visit pretty regularly. My parents weren’t really separated or anything, save for the thousand miles between them. I remember one time when I was about ten or so my mom took me and Finn and Siobhan and some other snotty kid whose name or face I don’t remember out onto the lake to go fishing. It was cold and I couldn’t find my jacket, so my mom let me wear my dad’s. It was this big blue duck canvas coat with a bunch of holes in it. There was a patch over the left breast with the name of some welding company. The zipper tuggy-thingy had snapped off so there was a safety pin in its place. It hung down around my knees and left a waft of cigarette-smoke-smell trailing behind me. The arms smelled vividly like my mom’s perfume. I caught a really big fish that day. I’m sure that the big jacket diminishing my already small stature made the fish look massive relative to myself, but even as that may be so, I remember everyone being impressed. I ran up to my grandpa and said: Papa, this big fucker almost pulled me off the boat! and he whacked me up the back of my head for swearing and then said: Good job, buddy, I’m proud of you. Then I ran up to my grandma and said the same thing, but she had the mouth of a trucker and didn’t really care about bad language so I received all praise and no whack. I never showed my dad the fish. I just quietly left his jacket on a hanger by the front door, took the fish outside, and watched my brother gut and fillet and cook it. It didn’t taste very good, but I pretended like it did. I made a big show of eating everyone’s leftovers and then crashing on the couch and rubbing my belly and burping. Once while sat around the slick I told my brother that story. He didn’t remember that day. Swore up and down it didn’t happen. Maybe it was another one of your dreams? he said. Wow! Wasn’t that last sentence cryptic? Doesn’t it beautifully set up this paragraph where I unpack what it means effectively and stylishly? Nice. My entire life I’ve had these weirdly vivid dreams. Some people lucid dream. Not me. It’s kind of the opposite of lucid dreaming. I wake up and have no idea it was ever a dream. I go through the day thinking that it happened. A freaky aspect of these dreams is that I’m sure there are many that I’ve had and assumed to be real that came of no significance to my life and thus were never proven false. Sometimes I’ll forget what day it is. Or I’ll accidentally skip a day in my head. A lot of people do this. I’ll wake up on a Friday pumped for the weekend and walk to school with an extra dash of pep lassoed into my step. Someone will then inform me that it is in fact a Thursday and on top of the crushing sadness that comes standard with this horrifying event I also have to wonder if the day prior really happened or if I dreamt it. All of the summers of my tween years were spent, in their entirety, in Sioux. There was one, I can’t remember which, when my dad decided to teach me and my brother how to weld. We sucked at it, but we got better as the summer progressed. Such is learning. My brother and I had our own welding masks. His had this wicked flame design and mine had a wickeder little plastic faux mohawk on it. Our lessons stopped when I burnt the shit out of my thumb doing something stupid. My dad decided that we weren’t ready to learn. Later in the day, I worked up the courage to ask him to let us keep going. I didn’t like welding, it’s much too hot of a trade for the summer, but for some reason I really wanted to keep at it. He said no. I kept asking. Begging, kind of. When he decided that I was starting to bug him he hit me harder than he ever had before. Harder than when my brother and I put a golf ball through a different window three days in a row while playing Gockey—a sport we invented that involved us hitting golf balls at each other with hockey sticks. There are no winners in Gockey. Just survivors. Harder than when I goaded my cousin into jumping out of a moving car. Harder than when I cried too much at his brother’s funeral. The smack worked. I stopped asking. The next day my brother and I went to the slick and I decided that it had just been one of my dreams. I tried not to look at the scar on my thumb. Because it was there and that made it real. I felt the dim pulse of the pain for the next week. And I sometimes feel it now.