The Good Seed

Memoir

May 30, 2023

The Good Seed

My earliest memory, so early that it might be from later stories, more than actual remembrance, is of dancing and spinning. The white skin of my arms, the rhythm of southern rock pulsing in my ears. A blonde and curly-haired toddler in nothing but a diaper and smile, who circled through the middle of a small audience of onlookers. The rug under my feet, burnt orange in the light of a sun-soaked living room, protected me as I fell and grasped for purchase.

I walked the room, moving from person to person. There were many supplicants there, bearded men with ribbed tank tops or no shirts at all, most wearing cutoff jeans and flip-flops as they sat in a wide circle of couches, well-worn chairs, and floor space. A few long-haired women with big smiles snuggled close to one man or another. There were rarely single women in my family’s world, but always single men.

I even remember a dog, some bastard German Shepard, never purebred, always with some mutt mixed in. This one comes to mind as I picture myself starting to fall and reaching out to steady my small frame by grabbing an ear or a nose. A dog that saw itself as my protector and companion. It was one of the kind and intelligent dogs of my early childhood, not the later ones, that would turn me into a staunch cat lover for most of my early adult life.

In my memory, the kind faces of these gathered few were always smiling and laughing as I performed for their amusement. My show involved one skill, staying upright. This is a feat that would trouble any toddler, but there was an added factor to this little performance.

As southern rock played on the turntable and the crowd clapped and cooed me along, a fog of smoke hung in the room. The year was 1975 or 76, and my parents and their friends were sitting around getting high on what was probably my dad’s homegrown.

I, of course, was getting high with them. Not that they would ever pass a joint to a two-year-old or even blow smoke in my face. Yet, the show of the moment fully hinged on the fact that all of them were stoned out of their minds, and so was the little man in the diaper.

Added to my secondhand buzz were the snacks that my father would feed me each time I passed by him in the circle. I see him now in an old yellow rocking lounger. I have no real idea if this is what he sat in on this occasion, but it is what he sat in for most of my childhood. The lounger was an odd throne that he probably got in a trade for weed or picked up alongside the road on one of his many travels around the county. One of my main memories of my father as a young man is of him lifting up the front of his chair and pulling out a metal tray with a box of dried-out pot and a pack of rolling papers. It was always there, and I never remember one of us kids ever messing with it. It was a part of our lives and our landscape every day. He never hid it from us.

My parents were married at twenty-one and had me a year later. So, my father was around 24 when this little show was occurring. I remember him that day, metal tray on his lap, separating the seeds from his weed. He looked nothing like me, dark-skinned and black-headed, sleek where I was round. He has always claimed Native blood, but I have never looked that deep into his ancestry. His biggest story for his dark skin was that he spent his childhood outside in nothing but his underwear. Since he grew up on the 80-acre farm that housed the living room we sat in that day. It was hard not to believe that he just had the best tan nature could provide.

Most people I introduced to my father have told me, quietly and far out of his earshot, that there is no way I could be his son. They see my 4’11’’ white-skinned and curly-haired mother in me. They see the features of her blonde and red-headed brothers in my face and broad shoulders, but they all whisper that one day I will find out that the milkman or some random guy at a Zeppelin show was really my progenitor.

I just smile. I have always known that I am his. The truth is that the blood of my mother’s Irish ancestors is too strong. It recoded any DNA that was passed from my father’s staunch Germanic forebearers.

My sisters look and act more like him, at least on the outside. There are times when I know that I am his son more because of my view of the world, the inner blemishes on my moral compass, and my dirty mind, more than the face I see in the mirror. A laugh or a quip. Motions that are learned more than inherited, yet I still claim them as focused biology.

I have rarely seen my father without long, straight black hair. For most of my youth, it grew down his back to his waistline, and he would wear it in a ponytail or braid. His hair would have been long, but probably not quite that length that day when I was two. He had only been back from Vietnam and out of the Army for a year--A time in his life I have rarely caught glimpses of, and that has always made him dark and miserable.

He was far from the long hauls through rice paddies and killer orangutans of Vietnam that day. He was in his element, sitting in a room of friends and smoking weed. This is where I always saw him most comfortable. This is where he always wanted to be. He told me years later, after a stint in prison for meth, that “I’ve tried every fucking drug you can think of, but pot and family are all I have ever really wanted.” With this, he was telling me that I could stop worrying. He was done with hard drugs. He was just going to be a lovable pothead until the day he died.

That loving stoner is how I remember him that day as I trotted around the room, falling and working my way back to standing, barreling into laughing onlookers who were kind enough to keep me afloat as I passed. I see him with that huge smile that can brighten a room and make you worry at the same time. As he watched my show, my father leaned forward and separated the seeds from his pot, pushing them to the side of the tray.

At the end of each circuit, I would walk back to his feet. This is where the show would start anew. The crowd would cheer as I opened up like a patient in a mental ward, and my dad would drop a seed in. The group clapped as I closed my mouth over the small green dot and chewed. I would turn and raise my hands up to the cheers. Then, as good showmen always do, I continued my circuit around the room, staggering all the way.

I don’t remember how the show finally ended; the record needed to be flipped, smoking became more important than watching, some other amusement distracted my toddler brain or the stoned members of the gathered few.

In my mind, the circle has never stopped. I always move through the world as a showman, playing songs, teaching classes, and writing stories for the amusement of others. And, I always move back to my father.

It's the Devil!

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