Missing

   Ualoheke-Akua once asked me the following: “Who would you imagine being on the extreme, opposite end of the spectrum from, say, the Dalai Lama?”
 
   “Huh?” I replied. Akua and I had waded out to a perfect little sandbar, about sixty feet off shore, and we were casting out into a school of Spanish mackerel, snagging one now and again. Both of us had had to go chest deep to get ourselves out there, but it was proving to be worth it. Good fighters, those Spanish mackerel.

   “You know. Like, the Dalai Lama is all about inside-out, True Self kind of shit, right? So, who represents the other side for you, the opposite side?” Akua explained. “Who would you say best represents outside-in thinking?”
 
   I paused, but not for too long. “I dunno. Maybe my dad?” We each had a little flask of rum to sip on to help us ignore the fact that we were pretty far off shore. I took an extra sip of mine just then, figuring I might need a little extra burn in order to continue down this particular conversational path.
 
   “Get real, man.” Akua explained to me that ancestors – even recent ones – don’t count. “You have to choose an archetype, a character, not a real person.” He had reeled in his line, and was adding a new chunk of squid to his spoon. After Akua cast back out, I saw him grab a few Bugles to munch on. He had some stashed in his over-the-shoulder pouch. He used his squid fingers.
 
   “The Dalai Lama’s a real person,” I replied.
 
   “Don’t get all brainiac on me here, OK?” Akua was getting serious. He had a strike just then, yanked his line hard, but missed hooking the fish.
 
   “Geezus H, dude.”
 
   “Don’t lash out at Jesus. For real. I mean, on the off chance that Jesus was a real dude and the son of God and all, I don’t suggest fucking yourself over.” Akua looked at me with his most serious face, but then threw in a wink. “We’ve talked about this before.”
 
   “Sorry. Sometimes I forget. I’m bad.” I meant it. I was bad. Back in those days I sometimes had a real hankering to lash out at Jesus types. “Well, OK,” I said. “How about a used car salesman?” I asked, hoping Akua would get on with whatever it was he was gunning for. I was starting to worry that his loud, crusty voice was going to scare all the fish away. “Is that enough of an archetype for you?”
 
   “Yes, yes!” Akua’s eyes gleamed. “That’s the ticket!” And then he went quiet for a while.
 
  The silence was golden, and we each hooked a couple fish. But alas, I had already taken the bait, so I couldn’t resist figuring out what Akua was after.  “So…” I said, inviting him to carry on.
 
   He was more than glad to do so. “Imagine a kind of spectrum where the Dalai Lama’s sitting on your right shoulder, and the Used Car Guy’s sitting on your left. Every decision you make in life, every day, is registered by this one needle, see? The needle always points over to one side or the other, left or right. The Dalai Lama side is thinking inside-out, and the Used Car Guy is thinking outside-in. So. Where’s your needle been pointing of late?
 
   “Seriously?” I asked.
 
   “Yeah, seriously.” Akua grabbed a few more Bugles with his squid fingers and chomped them noisily. He really loved those little boogers. “And while you’re thinking about that, think about this too…” He paused to fiddle with his reel. But the pause was totally contrived. I could tell. He was going for some sort of dramatic effect. He continued, looking up at me with one raised eyebrow. “Even if you have this magic needle, this magic left-right pointer, and even if you can trust it to be dead-reliable – what’s missing from your sensory toolbox?”
 
   “Missing?” I asked.
 
   “Yeah. Missing. Like, what else do you think you’d need in order to sort stuff out, figure out if you’re tangled up in something good or something bad?” Akua was staring me down in his special way.
 
   Sadly, I just stood there, feeling a little clueless and slightly overwhelmed. I went ahead and cast back out, watching as my spoon made a perfect arc, way out toward the horizon. A rogue seagull made a swoop at it while it was airborne. Thankfully it missed.
 
   Then I had me a thought.

*          *         *

   “The Olds is fucking gone. It’s missing.” My dad was beside himself.
 
   My mom wasn’t looking particularly perturbed. I was watching her, and I was surprised to see her acting so calm and cool.
 
   “I can’t believe you just left it sitting there. Geezuz H Christ. What the ever-loving fuck were you thinking?” My dad’s face was beat red and his arms were flapping this way and that. “It’s the worst goddam part of town, for Chrissakes!” What he meant by the ‘worst part of town’ was this: He imagined a lot of black people lived south of Elm Street, and he figured they’d be keen on stealing his Oldsmobile if they saw it abandoned in the median down there.
 
   My mom was Stone Cold Steve Austin.
 
   “When you have a goddam breakdown, here’s what you do. One, you go to a pay phone and call for a goddam tow truck – you call Derek, for fuck’s sake. And two, well… Well, there is no fucking two. All you do is just call for the fucking tow-truck, and that’s all you have to fucking do!”
 
   “Well, I guess I just wasn’t thinking,” my mom said calmly. Mom wasn’t even trembling. I couldn’t make any sense of it. Normally, she’d be crumbling and whatnot in the face of this level of rage and accusation. I noticed her serenity, but Dad didn’t. He was too far into the red to register anything about his surroundings. “Thanks a bunch for being concerned about me, by the way. I was able to get back home just fine, thank you. Midge gave me a ride. We stopped at the mall on the way back and I picked up a card for Kelly’s graduation.”
 
   My eyes must have gotten pretty big right about then. At that point in my life, I had not yet learned that my dad had no way at all to detect sarcasm when delivered in its purest form, uncut. I just figured he was going to explode upon hearing that my mom somehow made time to pal around with Midge in the midst of the Oldsmobile crisis.
 
   “Well, fuck me sideways if the goddam police can’t find the Olds. Fuck all.” My dad was on a different planet, one with little to no oxygen. He had to pace back and forth in order to stay alive. Tiny beads of sweat were forming just above his brow.

*          *          *

   Here’s the thing: My mom had always hated that Oldsmobile with a real passion. To her it was an unattractive, unreliable shit-wagon that, in all likelihood, represented everything that was wrong about my dad’s way of thinking about the world. She had asked him numerous times about getting a different car. She was worried it was going to leave her stranded somewhere.
 
   On the other side of the fence, my dad unflinchingly, unwaveringly, believed in Oldsmobile. I mean as a brand. So, there was no way he was going to give it up just because his wife didn’t trust it. For what it’s worth, the Olds in question was a palm-green ’81 Cutlass Supreme. We had had two other palm-green Oldsmobiles before it, but never a Cutlass Supreme. Hell, that was maybe just one tick below a Cadillac Eldorado, and it was a real symbol to my old man. Nonetheless, this third Olds was destined to be the last. The end of an era. For our next car, my dad would succumb, like so many others, to the siren song of the rice-burners. The Toyota dealer ended up giving him peanuts for the Olds.

*          *          *

   Anyway.

*          *          *

   As for the abandoned, and for-a-time missing Olds, here’s what went down: After numerous break-downs and let-downs and so on, my mom finally decided that she’d had quite enough of the old Olds. So, when that palm-green cruiser started to spit and sputter once again, this time on Henderson Road, the busiest street in town, my mom had no reservations, whatsoever, about parking it in the median and, well … just walking away. She called Midge, her good friend and our next-door neighbor, on a nearby payphone, and that was that. Out of sight, out of mind.
 
   My dad had car-pooled to and from work with a co-worker so my mom could have the Olds for the day, and so he could have the satisfaction of sticking it to Jimmy Carter and his jacked-up gas prices. When my dad got dropped off at home that evening, and saw that the Olds wasn’t in the driveway, the interrogation had begun. That soon led to him calling the police, whereupon he learned that the Olds wasn’t where Mom had left it, whereupon he began shouting her down for abandoning the Olds to all the hoodlums down south of Elm.
 
   In his mind, my dad was thinking, “Oh shit – the Olds has been stolen by the coloreds.” In her mind, my mom was thinking, “I could really care less what happened to that shit-wagon.”
 
   Funny thing: Our friend, Derek Shell, father of my best friend at the time, Scott Shell, lover of all things related to Star Wars, had spotted the Olds parked in the median on Henderson Road at some point just after my mom had abandoned it and went shopping with Midge, and had recognized that it was our car – presumably because of the ‘Elephants Eat Peanuts’ Republican bumper sticker – and had taken it upon himself to do us the favor of having it towed to his Shell station over on Powell Street.
 
   All growing up, I thought Scott’s dad owned that Shell station, on account of his last name being Shell and all. I’ll confess, right here and now, that it was a real shocker to me when I learned later – sometime in my early teens, I guess it was – that Scott’s dad was just a regular worker at that Shell station, a lowly mechanic, a grease monkey. He was probably making peanuts, even though he was a real Shell.
 
   So, the missing Olds really wasn’t missing, after all. My dad cooled his jets when he found out it hadn’t been stolen, and had instead been hauled off to the Shell station where it was getting a good look-over by qualified mechanics, buddies of our friend, Derek Shell.
 
   A few days went by, and then some bad news arrived. The Olds’s engine was all seized up and what-have-you. Apparently, here was no practical way to repair it for anything less than what buying a new car would cost.
 
   Remarkably, my dad took the news like a champ. He ordered up the necessary repairs and then he then began quietly shopping for a Japanese car, something that might be more reliable.
 
   My dad wasn’t mad at my mom anymore. He became mad at Oldsmobile and the abject failure of American industrial know-how.  Mom was off the hook.

*          *          *

   There are two footnotes to the whole Olds ordeal.
 
   The first thing worth mentioning is to do with my mom’s personal, heartfelt confession to me, which occurred years and years later, after I’d left the nest, along about the time I was a junior in college.
 
   “I want to tell you the truth about that ’81 Olds,” she said to me one rainy, cold Thursday, during one of our weekly phone calls. After I was out in the world, doing my own thing and all, my mom and I made best efforts to have a phone chat each Thursday. To be honest, I often found the weekly conversation with my mom to be a bit of a drag. My mom was a heavy sort of person to talk to. I mean, it wasn’t that easy to engage with her, energetically speaking. She had tons of wisdom and insight, but she was such a trembler, bless her heart. My mom croaked a few years back, so our Thursday calls are rather one-sided now.
 
   “What about the 81’ Olds?” I asked.
 
   “Well, you know, your father got rid of that car after that last breakdown, right? The time I left it in the median.”
 
   “Oh, sure. It was a big deal. Dad bought the Camry after that,” I recalled.
 
   “Yeah, that’s it. He gave up on Oldsmobile after that.” Mom paused. Over the phone, I could hear her sipping her tea, slurping it like she did. “You know, I never did like that car.”
 
   “I know you didn’t, mom. I know you never liked it.”
 
   “It was unreliable. It was so terrible. And it was ugly, too,” she added.
 
   “I know it was, mom.”
 
   “Well, I want you to know something about that car.”
 
   “What is it?”
 
   Mom paused, and took a deep breath. “I want to tell you about how I killed that car.”
 
   “Whaddya mean?”
 
   “I killed it. I really did. I took it down to the library parking lot and ran it over those parking barriers they had there, again and again, until I heard metal-scraping sounds. And then I drove it up and down Henderson until it started sputtering and stalling, and that’s when I pulled it off into the median.” My mom’s voice was wavering.  “I never told anyone until now.” Mom paused and then added, “I killed that car, and your dad never knew.”
 
   “Thanks for telling me,” I said. “You did the right thing.” What could I say? I was so proud of her.
 
   “Me too,” my mom said. “Don’t ever tell your father, OK?”

   The second thing is this: I felt really good about my mom standing up for herself, but I knew she was fibbing about the Olds.
 
   Something didn’t quite add up. Had she really and truly ripped out the bottom-side of the Olds, in the manner in which she claimed – by driving over parking barriers and whatnot – there would have surely been some evidence of such malfeasance when the car got looked over at the garage. Surely, Derek Shell would have reported something like the following to my dad:
 
   “It looks like the undercarriage of the Cutlass got gutted before it was abandoned in the median down on Henderson,” Derek would have reported. “It looks like someone drove it on the moon and hit every single crater.”
 
   “Hmmm,” my dad would have replied. “That means we have ourselves a little mystery...”

*          *          *

   My instincts were correct. My mom was fibbing. But only a little.
 
   Just a few weeks ago, I was speaking with my old next-door neighbor, Chrissy, daughter of Midge, when the Olds came up for some reason or another.
 
   “Oh, I remember that car!” Chrissy said. “I remember you got some gum on the back seat and you were so afraid your dad was gonna kill you!”
 
   “Oh, yeah, right. I remember that.”
 
   “You know,” Chrissy added, “your mom used to sit in your driveway in the mornings and rev and rev and rev the engine in that Olds. It was so loud.”
 
   “Ummm…no,” I said. “I never knew she did that.”
 
   “She did,” Chrissy confirmed. “She did it in the mornings after we had all gone to school. My mom used to get so pissed because it was so loud. On cold mornings it would make a ton of smoke too. My mom said it looked like a fog had rolled in over the yard. I remember my dad saying that warming up a car engine like that was one sure-fire way to kill it.”

*          *          *

   Do I mind that my mom could only ever cough up a half-truth, half-confession to me about her part in doing in the old Olds?
 
   Nope. Not in the least. I figure she did the best she could. She stood up for herself, in her own way, even though she was somehow unable to completely own it.

*          *          *

   My answer for my friend, Ualoheke-Akua, whilst surf-fishing for Spanish mackerel, was as follows:
 
   “I don’t really think there’s anything missing.”
 
   “What do you mean?” Akua asked.
 
 “I mean, if I had myself a magic indicator needle that showed me where I was at any old time, in relation to the Dalai Lama and some greasy old Used Car Salesman, I think I’d be content with just that. I wouldn’t really need anything else. Nothing would be missing for me.”
 
   “Nice,” Akua said simply. “But what about my first question about where your needle’s been pointing lately?”
 
   “I guess it’s been pointing over to the Used Car Salesman side,” I confessed. “Sorry. Just being honest.”
 
   “No need to apologize,” Akua stated. “That’s a good thing to recognize.”
 
   After a time, Ualoheke-Akua and I made our way back to the beach. The water between the sandbar and shore had gotten spookily deep, but we made it back just fine. We started heading up to the little trail, up by where we had parked.
 
   “I was thinking about my mom, mostly. I mean, when you were interrogating me about the Dalai Lama needle business,” I confessed to Akua while we were brushing off our feet at the trailhead.
 
   “Oh yeah?” Akua asked. “Interrogating?”
 
   “’I know interrogating sounds kinda harsh. Maybe the wrong word. I just mean your questions got me to thinking about my mom a little,” I stammered. “It got me to thinking about some old stories that I hadn’t thought about in a long time.”
 
   Akua looked me straight in the eye and told me something that I’ll never forget.
 
   “People love stories. When you think about it, getting into stories is really all that anyone wants to do. We love to go to the movies and watch TV shows, right? Stories. We love to read books, right? Stories. We love to gather around a kitchen table or a campfire or a water cooler or whatever. Stories. We love to lay in bed at night, so tired that we can barely speak or keep our eyes open, and talk to our lover about this, that, and the other. More stories,” Akua said blinkingly, waiting for an intelligent reply from yours truly.   
 
   I wish I could report that I contributed something wise, something profound. But I didn’t.
 
   Akua was on one of his rolls now. “I think the really funny thing about all this story-telling is this: The only way to find out, for sure, whether any particular happening in our lives is good or bad, is to go ahead and live through it, and then have a look back at it sometime later on. I mean, we never really know what’s good for us or bad for us until we’ve gotten some mileage on it.”
 
   I wasn’t connecting to what Akua was trying to tell me at the time. That’s because I wasn’t fully present. And I hadn’t put in my miles yet. What was I thinking about, you ask? I was consumed by the thought that I had just lost some hooks and steel leaders out on the sand bar.
 
   If I could go back to that day, knowing what I now know, I would have something sensible to say to my dear friend, Ualoheke-Akua, for sure. You see, I know now that that was the last time that I would ever go fishing with him.
 
   Just like my mom, Akua ended up dying of a hemorrhagic stroke before I could get a full handle on the wisdom being conveyed. What a thing.

– O.M. Kelsey