Dad said before I take him to the VA for his chemo appointment, we need to see Leo. We pull into Leo’s home, which is a broken-down trailer on fifty snow-covered acres. Leo’s hand swells like a puffer fish from fixing his burst pipes, so he needs us to help him buy a bushel of apples so he can make applejack moonshine. While I open the car door, I remember something Dad said yesterday, “I don’t know my son.” I can’t let it go. Because I don’t know myself.

Dad’s a walking version of Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” Leo’s former CIA turned outlaw biker who quit selling trap when his wife got hooked. She died years ago after an insurance scam gone wrong when her house went up in flames. Then, Leo cleaned crash sites for the state after his unfulfilling career as a gang member. Then cancer came.  Now he lives off the land. Beard down his belly. No teeth. Suspenders hold up his Dickies.

But me? I don’t know.

Sometimes Leo and I brag about who fought the most cops at one time. Him: 4. Me: 8. But his cops had guns. Mine with batons and on live TV.

We slide out of Leo’s drive. Plow trucks ain’t come yet and I catch a tiny skid but I pull out with ease.

Leo says, “Be careful round this turn.”

Before I was a librarian, I worked as a UPS driver. I know my way around mountains and snow, but Dad winks to tell me to cool my shit and keep driving.

I say to Dad, “So what do you want to know?

“Turn right,” he says. I do, onto a road where the snow resembled crushed oreos in icy milk. On the right stands an eight-point buck with three does. I catch that cervid’s eye. He looks sure of himself. Like he’s king of his little piece of snowy earth.

Oh, to be young and think you’re the baddest motherfucker on two legs again. He has four legs. But whatever. We’re all baddasses until life grinds us up and turns us into bologna.

“You don’t know me?” I say. “What do you want to know?”

“I just wish I could’ve been there when you were a kid.”

Dad brings up my 16th birthday present, a chainsaw.  Terrified by the warnings that the kickback would drive the chain into my skull, I didn’t want it.

He talks of another time. When I was 33, I applied to university, and I asked him, “What if they reject me?”

“Where did you get off thinking you wasn’t worthy?” he says. I told him it’s called hypervigilance.

“Rick let you down so bad.” He lights up a cig, a habit he picked back up after being diagnosed with stage four.

Rick, my first stepfather, loved cocaine, whiskey, and motorcycles. He used to beat the shit out of me and my mother.  Some people ask their kids to pick a switch. I was to choose a 2 X 4. Sometimes he thought I was pretty like my Mom.

He went to prison. But not before he ruined our lives. Dad has his role in this too but we’ll get that in a couple minutes.

I remind Dad that months before I moved in with him on my 16th birthday, I was homeless and that he saved my life. Dad exhales smoke through his nose like he’s the four winds of the apocalypse and stares into the road.

Leo pops in with “Be careful here. A real purdy teenager lost her life after catching a skid. I’ll tell ya. Nature gonna take you when she do.”

Leo knows my dad through my Uncle Allen, an unemployed pastor turned 7-11 manager. I ask him, “Hey, did my Uncle Allen ever tell you how he once shot a police officer?”

Leo shakes his head no, and there’s an awkward silence.

Allen’s one of the best men I’ve ever known. It’s just the way it is. My male role models were:

1. Dad: who served probation for three years

2. Rick served three years in jail.

3. My second stepfather, four years jail.

4. My third stepfather, 11 years.

Mom did time twice for drugs and been on methadone for 18 years. One stepmother got nabbed also for drugs. And there’s another stepmom, she didn’t serve time but she’s a racist. Like a member of the Women of the KKK racist, so we don’t talk about her.

I’m none of these people. I’m a bookworm in a pile of scrap metal.

Leo points out another death, this one was a terrible fire. Smoke filled the sky and everyone knew for miles.

“Let me ask you this,” I say to Dad, “What am I?”

“You’re my son,” he squishes a finished butt in the astray and lights up another cig.

“Not who, but what? Where am I from?”

“If we’re being technical, you were born in Killeen, Texas.”

“But I’m not a Texan.”

“No. No, you’re not.”

“And I was raised in Florida and in the Appalachian Mountains, but I’m not Floridian or Appalachian.”

Leo interrupts with, “Driver was higher than the moon. Course, his daughter OD’d and his wife went crazy on meth. Detroit guys came down and killed his brother for being a snitch. Anyways, be careful.”

I nod.

Dad says, “Don’t you live in Washington, DC?”

“Saying I’m Washingtonian is a good way to get popped in the mouth.”

“And you have a place in WV…”

“It’s only part-time. I guess I could say I’m a military brat, but that was only true until I was six.”

That was when my dad’s relatives kidnapped me and my sister for a year. More on that in a bit.

“And then,” I continue, “I have this drawl that pops out occasionally because I lost my accent when I moved up North. Even my speech is confused. Am I Southern? Which leads me to the weird fact that somehow I am more rednecky than most rednecks, but lack the reactionary politics. Tougher than most roughnecks, but I’m not a roughneck.  Maybe I’m an intellectual, but the more educated I become, the less I have in common with the smarty pants brigade.”

Dad nods and Leo points out another ghost on the side of the road in a poor attempt to ease tension.

But I’m not done, “I studied dance, acting, and voice in high school. Am I any of these? I went to school for creative writing but do I have a book or agent?”

We catch air over a hill.

“Slow down, son,” he says.

He grabs onto my shoulder and breathes deep, sick of this conversation. “You ever think you’re the luckiest man in the world?”

“What?”

“Most people pretend to be something whether they are that thing or not. You have no choice but to be yourself 24-7. Bitterly unique with no lane to stay in and always off-road. You are the most authentic person I know, which means you can’t fit in.”

Who knew Dad is the Redneck 21st Century Kathy Acker?

Leo adds, “And when you get to be our age, it don’t matter. Most people are fake cos ain’t no one ever won awards for being themselves.”

Maybe they’re right. Most people fear mediocrity and end up trying to be someone else.  But, I don’t. Excruciatingly, I don’t. To the chagrin of those who love me most, I don’t.

Oh, that word from the Latin, medius ocris, or middle of the rugged mountain versus excellent from ex meaning above or out of the kel or mountain. To be mediocre, by definition is to be good enough to tough it through rough mountains. Good from the word “God.” God enough. Good enough for God. To be excellent is to be Nimrod, better than God.  To be excellent is to stand on the backs of others proudly. A Taylor Swift made up of 1000 mediocre invisibles. Elon Musk on the backs of billions. Donald Trump and his stupid Flag Day parade. Shooting an arrow into the sky from the top of Babel’s phallic tower. It’s no wonder that every religion says mediocrity is the way to enlightenment. Call it hilkot deot, Derech Hashem, zhongyong, the Dao, Majjhim?pa?ipad?, wasatiyyah, the Gold Mean, pragmatism, or democratic socialism. Even Wicca. Moderation and average lives are prized virtues.

Courageousness instead of cowardice or recklessness. Confident, not depressed or haughty. Generous versus stingy or lavish. Enlightened rather than stupid or overeducated. Call it normal, down-to-earth, and middle-class. Call it accepting the terror of invisibility and anonymity in favor of being good parents to your kids. Call it everything I want.

Despite Dad’s kind words, my midlife crisis is that I’ve always wanted to be normal, to fit in comfortably, and to be mediocre like people are in sitcoms or movies. But I have no identity to middle, take pride in, or be anxious about.

Maybe my life would be more coherent if it came with a script and a stereotype—a believable character. A story where my uncle is an English professor at Carnegie Mellon. Leo and his wife have three strapping boys, but we don’t see them because they live at Hogwarts.

Dad has a girlfriend who lives in a fancy exurb selling garters, hairpins, and emotionally available lumberjacks to New York lady bosses visiting for Christmas. We’re all friends with Chuck Corra and joke about JD Vance being a fraud.

 

OR

 

My dad owns a jet ski store and an underground torture chamber in an Airbnb for unknowing suburban teens trying to get laid. Leo lived under a tree for twenty years and my Uncle lives in a gingerbread house in the woods eating toddlers. And we all went ice skating and drank hot cocoa every Friday until we rioted at the US Capital on January 6th, and JD Vance is just some dude who went to Yale and became vice president.

Instead, Dad has cancer and I’m going to lose him very soon which means I am a clusterfuck. And it’s true he doesn’t know me because when I was seven, he abandoned me and in an attempt to rescue me from my mother’s life of whiskey, cocaine, and bikers, he asked his siblings to kidnap me and keep me hidden. Which they did until the cops came and sent me to that life a year later. Then I lived with Rick, the very person Dad blames for everything. I ask him if he regrets sending me to live with his relatives and he shakes his head no.

“I was in no shape to raise you,” he rubs his big hand over his beard. “But neither was your mother.”

I pull into the farm, get out, and get Leo’s apples.  The conversation is gone. We drive back to his house and drop him off. Leo says he’ll have a mason jar for me next time.

I drive Dad to the VA for his cancer treatment. The doc brings back good news. The chemo is working, so he’s got a couple more months, and then we’ll see. A couple months to learn who I am.

“The Whole of the Moon” by The Travelin’ McCourys comes on the radio. I turn it up as he lights another stogie. Tears fall out my eyes streaking through my beard and pooling around my lips. The tears fall because of the song. Yep, Mike Scott wrote a kick ass ditty and a bluegrass cover makes it better. But in this scenario, I am the one who wandered. Dad stayed in his room and watched Brigadoon. Dad was proud of me when I got my masters degree. But dammit, he was proud when I just went to college. He was proud I got the job at UPS. He was proud when I enlisted. He was proud when I simply graduated high school. Everyone was afraid I wouldn’t.

The tears fall because of the song, but also maybe because we don’t know each other. Maybe it takes a lifetime to know someone. Maybe that’s the blessing of cancer. Now we’re forced to really get to know each other.

Out of nowhere, Dad says, “You like Greek food?”

I raise an eyebrow because if it’s one thing he knows about me it’s that I make my own fila from scratch. That’s one thing he knows for sure.

“There’s some baklava I want your opinion on.”

Are we Mediterranean? No. But I know that mediocrity as a path to enlightenment is about forcing us to live in the moment instead of in resentment. Without a stable identity, I can only live in moments. I can only be who I am at any given time of day at a given situation. I have no measure of how to do things according to script. And right now, this moment excludes cancer or death or burst pipes or drugs or prison. My central concern involves walnuts, honey, and clove, which at this very second makes me feel like the luckiest person in the world.