Overnight

None of us thought my father would get another job, there was something awful about seeing him at breakfast all clean-shaven and white-shirted, the way he looked when he swung out the door with his briefcase empty, I knew, but for a cheese sandwich and a paper airplane.

Out of the blue my father had to quit his job as a commercial airline pilot.

At first I wondered whether his fear of heights happened all at once like the way my voice had changed overnight or if it was a more gradual thing, but judging by the new wide-eyedness about him I think it was sudden, also new, and this is what I mean by the way he looked in the mornings when he went out the door, it seemed as if there was something heavy in his mouth.

My school was downtown and sometimes I’d see that swinging briefcase when I went to Woolworth’s for lunch, I’d see him go into office buildings like war he’d shoulder the door open and I’d see him come out those same doors not war not peace. Through my own reflection I saw him on the other side of windows, in coffee shops or the library, sometimes on park benches or sitting still on some hill somewhere, I don’t think he ever saw me back, this went on all of grade 10 and 11 but at the beginning of grade 12 he got a job, janitor, my high school.

I had mixed feelings about it.

I mean it would be a relief to not have to look for him like Waldo every day – but but but – who wants their father pushing a broom down the hallway of his youth?

I am not sure I am normal. Does everybody feel this way? Is it normal to question one’s normalcy? There are a few things I am concerned about, I bear my own heaviness that’s for sure, but I am mostly concerned about the way I borrow emotions because I don’t really get many of my own. Like on the day he said at the dinner table that he got the janitor job at my school, I copied my mother's reaction, I mean right to the bone, I made the same gestures as her the same face and folded my hands the same way in the same coordinates of my lap, and I got, in a sort of cloak-and-dagger way, the feeling her body language conjured – I am ashamed to say it was shame itself.

So there he was on Monday morning. He didn’t have a uniform at first so it looked weird, you know, as if he were just borrowing the broom, but a couple of days later he got a grey uniform which was better – and also worse.

Thank goodness he started work an hour before I started school – no doorway calisthenics necessary or sidewalk etiquette required – he walked to school in normal clothes with the overalls in his briefcase along with a cheese sandwich and, you guessed it, a paper airplane.

Not everybody knew he’d quit his job.

Isn’t that your dad? Is that your–? Matt! What’s your dad doing here? Matt? What's goin’ on, Matt? Matt Matt Matt

It was a big deal at first but by winter things calmed down. In the same way he didn’t see me downtown, he didn’t see me in school, even when I walked solo down the hallway he didn’t look.

Those long hallways.

I don’t know if he had the idea all of a sudden or if he thought about it a while but he did something that changed everything, such a simple thing, one day he took the paper airplane from his briefcase and sent it down the middle of the long, shiny hallway.

We kept our classroom doors open to prepare us for the chaos of university or maybe just life, and so it caught our collective eye, Mrs. Rule wandered into the hallway to see what that flash had been, I saw her lean out and turn her head one way and then the other. When she stepped out of the classroom, I got up and stood at the door. Mr. Smith was in the hallway, too, my dad holding his pose like Baryshnikov at one end, and his sleek white airplane, still airborne, at the other end. We watched it in the spotlit hallway slowly slowly slowly it cascaded elegantly, without apparent gravity, gracefully to the ground.

Mr. Smith clapped and Miss O'Kell sort of laughed, next thing you know my dad always had people around him, he showed the little kids how to make construction paper airplanes, and with us he got technical, he talked about drag and drop, lift, weight, thrust, he drew diagrams, dashed curves and symbols we'd never seen but were eager to understand. Along with Mr. Smith he started a Flight Club (you know the first rule). He was invited to make guest appearances in classrooms, he came up on stage during many assemblies, and pretty soon if your teacher was away you might be lucky enough to get him as a sub. I didn’t know you could just suddenly be a teacher but they made him the home room teacher for the grade 13s just when I was in grade 13 – what an honour.

I don't know. Maybe all the knowledge and enthusiasm was in me from the start, but it sure felt like an overnight thing. I went to bed kind of a troubled kid one night and woke up different the next morning.