Racing Dad

I tell Dad, “I bet I can beat you.” He looks older, bigger, slower. 

How old am I? Around a time when I am too short to reach the mailbox. A time I play 52-card pickup (child-me eagerly agrees to his question: yes I want to play)! A time when I am his Kimmy Jo from Kokomo. A time when, riding in a car, watching the road pass beneath the window, I believe I can jump out and run. A conceivable feat. Easy. Just like this race.

Dad agrees to my challenge. We line up on an imaginary line at the edge of our property and our neighbor’s backyard. Marshy-damp fresh-cut blades of grass squish between my toes. He gives me half a field advantage, which I don’t think I’ll need. I imagine myself an Olympic runner. Definitely fast. And my poor Dad: I’m going to beat him. Left foot forward, arms at my sides, poised to explode across this flat earth.

“On your mark. Get set. Go!”

I run at breakneck speed. Wind tousles my hair.

This race will freeze in time—like other times—before I know of Dad as a famous, record-setting, Ring-of-Honor-inducted Minnesota Viking. Times when I’ll fly my open palm over the flat terrain of Dad’s crew cut like a glider on a breeze and I’ll delightedly say, It’s so soft, and his gruff reply, You’re a turkey!, his nickname to tease everyone. Times he’ll brush my hand away, acting brashly annoyed but his big grin gives him away, his cheeks rosy compared with the fairer skin of his head and neck. Times when he’ll say, “You’re such a bully” and I’ll giggle, since, from a distance, his crew cut looks sharp—tough like him. But to touch is a different experience… fine like a baby’s. Times when I rub and he lets me.

I am winning the race when I feel a presence. Dad gains on me. I don’t have to look. He wins easily. Aw, jeez. Chuckling and grinning, he pretend-socks me in the arm. He says, “Thought you could beat the old man, huh?” Dad scoops me up and I ride his arm toward the house. Did I wrap my arms around his neck? Surely his scratchy chin mussed my cheek. Surely something holier than simple memory conjures such sweetness.

KIMBERLY J. BROWN is the author of The I-35W Bridge Collapse: A Survivor’s Account of America’s Crumbling Infrastructure (Potomac Books, 2018)—a finalist for the 2019 Minnesota Book Award in Memoir & Creative Nonfiction. She is a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant and a past award-winner of a Loft Mentor Series fellowship in creative nonfiction. Brown’s work has appeared in Puerto Del Sol, Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose, Pride!, Sleet Magazine, A View from the Loft, and elsewhere. Brown holds an MFA from Hamline University.