What’s 76 minus 35 to an 8th grader whose dad is dying?

Or more importantly, what does it mean that every year I have to confirm that January 14th is indeed my father’s birthday? Yesterday I was sitting in a music hall where four Black women and an incredible band surrounded the room in the sounds of home. From a soprano “Misty” that felt like we were on a trip around the galaxy to the kind of keys and bass that make you go away and listen to nothing but Stevie for weeks, it was all so good. One moment in the evening’s line up transported me back to a memory with my dad. As a singer sailed through a perfectly toned rendition of “People Make the World Go Round,” I thought of my dad’s surprise when he heard me practicing the song for a middle school winter concert. He told me three things: 1-the music teacher had good taste, 2-as a father he needed to help me practice, and 3-this was one of his favorite songs. Somewhere between the haze of his cigarette smoke and the sound of his massive hands hitting his one tumbadora covered in iridescent dollar bill stickers, I must have sounded alright enough for this practicing to stop.

He would be 76 today. I have had to live 35 years without him. My eighth grade science teacher was just as gifted as the music one, I think. The math one tried her best though through no fault of either of them, I still have trouble understanding how and when my father died. That is to say I don’t get why I couldn’t come up with a way to save him and I prefer using a calculator to figure out how old my father was when he died. I was supposed to have been so so smart. I read about AIDS as it was killing my father in the late 80s and I thought for sure I had figured it out. I ran to my science teacher and told him I had the solution that as the virus could not live in oxygen we would simply inject that into the veins and everyone would be cured. I do believe his eyes went completely soft when he told me in a hush that this too would kill a person. I kept trying to think of solutions while my dad kept dying. 41. He would have been 41 I guess. I think it was more important for him that I be familiar with the concepts in this Stylistics song than it was that I concern myself with his birthday or even the ins and outs of how much longer he would live. But I can’t help but wonder what 35 additional years of my father would have been like.

It would mean he would have met his grandchildren. Would he be sitting here with the youngest one making him drum and sing or listen to Tito Puente? Would he have offered to make the trip with me to drive my daughter back to college earlier today so he could check out her dorm room? Would he watch football anymore? What would his prayer rugs and beads be like? Would his beard be completely white? What would be his favorite tv show? There are so many things I just don’t know. So much calculating I can’t do. But don’t get me wrong…I’m not the little girl I used to be. So, I think about the things I believe we would do. We would read poetry. That man loved him some Khalil Gibran. We would watch movies. I guess I better get myself to the theater to check out American Fiction. We would read books and re-read books. I think about this every time I pick up Virology by Joseph Osmundson. I think that book might have been one that opened a path for my dad to talk about things we never got to discuss. He would probably scold me about masking and taking care of myself. But would he have quit smoking cigarettes? I think so. I hope so. He would be selling miswak and incense and books and oils in a little store somewhere. I think. Or telling jokes for a living. He might have gone to see The Color Purple musical with me. Not necessarily because he thought he would have enjoyed it but because when he and my mom went to see the first film adaptation in the movies, she cried so much he had to hold her together. She told me she never watched it again. Celie’s story and my mother’s had many intersections. My father was her hero that day but he played villain on others. I think he would have felt like he needed to be by my side as I watched this latest iteration of Walker’s work come to life. And then he would re-read the book with me.

Of course there is no calculator I can ask these questions. This is just what 8th grade me wants to hope for as growth in a man who didn’t survive a pandemic where there were no jolly commercials of people with medication to solve the problem and live to dance another day. No regard for how he may have made my world go round. 76 minus 35 to that little girl is many questions unanswered. It’s many cell deaths and many nights like last night when a tiny sliver of the door to the past opens time and lets the man’s light slip through to me. It is 5 times longer than my mother has been gone and the realization that her survival was a miracle. It is knowing my dad must have been delighted that she survived somehow. It is knowing that in the midst of days and a life where sadness has offered me companionship more often than people, faith has somehow come too. And in that knowledge, 76 minus 35 becomes a simpler calculation. A prayer. More time, please. More imagining. More surviving.