My Dad used to leave us for long hours when we went to the beach, any beach, we could be in the States or another Caribbean island. It was as if he was forever seeking a way Back Home, the sands of Barbados on other shores. We’d be on vacation, in the sea, and his body and head would disappear. Or he’d walk away, his dark back and swim trunks growing smaller and smaller against the skyline. He looked like a superhero, a black Namor for sure, in his red and blue Speedos. Mistrustful of the sunny surface world. More at home in the murkiness of the deep.
Two or three hours later, he’d return, resurface. The prodigal submariner. He’d be holding, in both hands, like an offering, sea urchins or sand dollars or unusual coloured shells.
He loved sea egg—Tripneustes ventricosus. A Bajan delicacy, it is illegal to harvest them out of season in the island. He was allergic to lobster and shrimp. They made him vomit wretchedly. Crab apples, too; saw it once as a seven-year-old kid: filmy, bubbly, red and white chunks in a topsy my Mom, back-rubbing, held beneath his towelled neck. But those were crab apples. If it came from the sea, and he wasn’t vulnerable to it, my Dad invited intimate knowledge of it.
This time, in Wildwood—we had driven from Montreal to New Jersey, to the popular family resort on the barrier island—it was a horseshoe crab. And it was already half-dead.
The trip was a working vacation for my Dad that summer of 1984. Because the province or school board was reevaluating its grading of teachers, he had to do a makeup course at the university. Or risk losing his seniority, which meant less pay and a reduced pension. He had brought books to read and had a paper to write. Between wandering the boardwalk and learning to water ski, Mom, my sister and I gave him space to study. My Dad was pissed, though he hardly would have used that word, nor was the word then used so popularly to express a disgusted kind of anger. To his mind, they were telling him that his position as head of the Geography department and senior teacher wasn’t good enough. They were telling him his two degrees and years of service weren’t good enough. His master’s, completed a decade-plus ago, filled a large frame on the wood-panelled wall beside the TV in our basement. McGill University. Montreal. We, the Governors, Principal and Fellows. Testify that Marcus Evelyn Sandiford. Having diligently completed. Master of Education. Honours, Privileges, and Prerogatives. 8th day. June. 1973.
I always looked upon the text as if it was handwritten in Latin. For all I knew as a boy, the document may have been hung from the time of the Romans, which was part of the point of its positioning.
Dad’s outrage occupied our motel room like something ancient and relentless.
He had worked overtime as a black man, first in colonial Barbados then again as an immigrant to Canada in the late 1950s, to get ahead in his profession. Trained Back Home at Erdiston college, he started out at prep schools when he came to Montreal. He began to teach at high schools once he earned his first degree in Geography. My Dad felt he shouldn’t have been doing any makeup course. He almost surely felt a little embarrassed. How are such decisions made in the interest of our education system? Who makes them, and are the students any better served by staff at the end of the day? He couldn’t say.
What we didn’t know at the time was that there were many things my Dad would be increasingly unable to articulate. He was, at the age of 58, 59, in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. This, we later understood, would have made him untypically edgy, very unlike himself. A couple years later, home from work after taking early retirement, he sometimes wondered to us if that final course of study, the readings and the writing of papers and exams, somehow overloaded his brain. Maybe, we allowed. As we learned more about the disease, we doubted it. Whatever was coming to steal my Dad’s memories and rob us of his person was coming no matter how many all-nighters his gummed-up brain was spared.
He sat the final exam for the course twice. He passed with average marks. Surprisingly, that was good enough for him. Finishing top of his class or in one walk-through was no longer the goal. (It couldn’t be, anyway.) Like most men his age, like most old boys on vacation, he preferred to be at the beach.
Hunting horseshoe crab.
It was a clayish brown and still had parts of its guts. He found it washed up; he must have, I never asked. It stank of the Atlantic’s raw saltiness. My Dad wrapped it in newspaper and put it in a garbage bag in our trunk. We took it home. For him to paint.
He was always doing that, too: making some kind of craft, creating some kind of art, whenever there was the opportunity. Most men satisfy themselves with a T-shirt or mug made in China that says I Was Here, wherever that was. Not my Dad. He had to gut, scrape, clean, sanitize, dry, plaster, prime, and paint his own souvenir.
The horseshoe crab. Transformed in our Montreal basement at his laundry-room workbench, it was and still is a green and gold marvel, with brilliant blue eyes.
At the time, I was just impressed by my Dad’s artistry and ingenuity: that he still had it, or managed to find it in Wildwood. He had created similar marine pieces out of shell, clay, oil paint, postcards, and other castoffs. He did a floral mural for my sister’s bedroom using potato stamps of leaves, roses, poppies, and daffodils. A faux Xmas fireplace with light-up log and wallpapered bricks was his idea of a homemade decoration. All of this had been years ago, leagues from the horseshoe crab and what skills we would now have to conjure.
When Dad showed me the finished piece a week after our return home, he held it like a toy ship at its base. Smiling…all the edginess in his face smoothed and softened. The horseshoe crab’s rich greens, gold and blues made me think that how the creature looked in his hand (and still looks to this day) was how it must have looked underwater. In certain light, at certain depths. It was remarkably, impossibly, restored. Given a new wholeness. So was my Dad, for the time it took him to remake the crab.
He always reminded us we are only here for a time.
When my sister’s room was to be repainted during the expansion of the family home, nine years later, we told the workmen the flower mural was not to be touched. At all. After a brief explanation, and sympathetic comments about eccentric Italian relatives and their marbled homes, they understood. They taped it off and worked around it. The mural has never been painted over or altered. The horseshoe crab sits in my mother’s living room display cabinet along with other family trophies. On its side, in a most complimentary white script, are the words Wildwood NJ. The horseshoe crab has only one flaw: a smudged line where my father’s paintbrush must have slipped, or his hand grazed it before the paint had fully dried. He neither tried to mask the defect nor explain it away. He may not have even noticed it.