Waiting by a window for Dad – Heartbreak, 1955

My dad was an alcoholic. He couldn’t hold down a job for long so one winter, when I was in second grade, he took a seasonal job selling toys during the Christmas Season. We didn’t have much. Dad, mom, my little sister and I lived on the second floor of a battered apartment building in Lancaster, New York, a suburb of Buffalo. In the 1950’s, Lancaster was a small blue-collar town where men toiled for the railroad and steel mills to put food on their tables, heat their modest homes and hunker down with their families for the long winters. In the dark evenings, I liked to press my face against my frosted bedroom window to breathe clouds on the glass and feel the icy puffs of wind seeping through the chapped wooden sill.

Before school let out for the Christmas Holiday, I camped in front of the radio every weekday morning, like hundreds of other kids, hoping to hear the announcement that the latest bitter storm blowing in from Lake Erie would clog the streets with snow, ground the busses and shut down the school. You could hear the cheers all the way from West Main Street when the joyous news came that we were paroled from our classes for the day. My friends and I bounded out into the swirling blizzard in our heavily-padded snowsuits, tackled each other in the shifting drifts and flung barrages of icy snowballs at slow-moving snowplows. The irritated drivers probably wished we would play in the street.

Dad came home one day with a toy fort. It wasn’t for me but he figured he’d try it out on me, a sort of test-marketing scheme so he could fine tune his sales pitch and sell a pile of them to parents who could afford to buy them for their kids. It was a Fort Apache Stockade play set with small plastic figures of Indians and soldiers fighting over a nifty fort. I sat on the cracked tile floor and hollered commands at the fighters as I slid them around so they could inflict gruesome deaths on each other. They always recovered in time to engage in the next battle, though. I discovered that I had a genius for tactics that would have had Napoleon wetting his pantaloons.

When Dad decided he had done all the testing he needed, he tried to take the game away from me. I must not have heard the words “try out” because once the magnitude of this disaster sank in I flopped to the floor, screamed, sobbed and flailed my feet in the air as if I’d stuck my tongue in a light socket. It was a tantrum for the ages. He tried every possible bribe to pry my hands off the prize but I wouldn’t let go. When the noise threatened to damage his hearing, he surrendered and stalked out the door, probably grumbling over the commission he’d just lost.

We didn’t know it at the time, but my mom, sister and I would spend future Christmases on our own. For a while, I looked through my ice-painted bedroom window into the dark street below as snowflakes raced around in circles under the glow of a single streetlamp. I wondered when Dad would come home. I missed him. But I wouldn’t see him again for 30 years.

I was glad I didn’t outgrow my Fort Apache Stockade for a while. I fantasized how fun it would be to shrink myself to the size of one of the plastic figures. Even though I’d be small, I would still be powerful and able to disappear behind the safety of my fort walls anytime I wanted to.

This is the first of three stories in the series entitled “Waiting by a window for Dad.”