My Astronaut Father

In the summers of my childhood, when riding up and down the driveway on my bike had gotten old, I’d tumble through the house in search of my father. Of our brood, he was the hardest to locate. Mom could usually be found in the closet doing paperwork or in the kitchen painting glassware for her cottage industry. My sisters were most likely in their rooms listening to CDs or, if not, Corinne would be in the garage jumping on the mini-trampoline and Graham would be at the family computer playing a long-winded build-your-own-rollercoaster game. We all had our perches.

Everyone but Dad. The only space in the house that was truly his was a cubby above a dresser. He kept spare change there, a book or two. I know that he loved the golf channel and the shelf of cereal boxes in the pantry, the dog and us and the big glasses of ice water he drank with his dinner. But he never really nested in that house the way the rest of us did. When my parents divorced, all he took with him was his clothing, tied up in big black leaf bags with the wire hangers poking out.

It’s been 18 years since the migration of the leaf bags, and now my father is preparing to move once more, this time from his condo into a house-house. My stepmother loves the house-house. She’s spent nearly a year talking to contractors and electricians. Moving walls, examining granite. She has never had a garage before and is relishing it. Dad, on the other hand, still seems baffled that one abode might be better than another, that one shade of granite might compliment the cupboards more splendidly than the existing hue, and that he must brandish rolls of bubble wrap to protect things that have been called precious.

“You know what Gramma Liz used to say…” He flashes me an expectant look over the lip of his coffee cup.

Please, Dad, I know the line. “Moving is right up there with death and taxes.”

“Exactly.”

There’s a reason we go to the same lunch spot every time. The pair of us, we like routine. That I choose the buffalo chicken sandwich and he chooses the Cobb salad says less about our personalities than does the decision to keep choosing them, lunch after lunch, while the world around us changes. Recently, my stepmother urged us to try someplace new.

“Don’t you get bored of the same old thing?” she asked.

Dad and I shared a look. Not really, we were thinking, but we let her ferry us to a different restaurant anyway. I got the turkey sandwich; Dad followed my lead. Val, who did not, frowned when she took her delicious, borrowed bite.

“I should have ordered that,” she said.

We did our best not to rub it in.

With the move two weeks away, I’m trying to imagine a single object of my father’s that does not dangle from a wire hanger or nap in a dresser drawer. Some men have a treasured watch — my stepfather has at least three — while others smile up at their collection of signed hockey jerseys. Golf clubs, fishing poles, baseball bats, goofy socks. Alas, the bread and butter of Father’s Day cards does not apply to mine. He exists outside of “stuff,” an astronaut floating on Earth rather than moon, tied to nothing, moored by nothing, distracted by neither window display nor sentimental trinket. As we drive to our regular lunch spot, I wonder what I would take from his house-house if he died.

“Check it out,” he says, pointing to the cupholder. “New hairbrush.”

“No way.”

“Yeah, way. Dollar Tree.”

“Wait, what happened to the old one?” I ask, panicked. Suddenly I remember this is exactly what I’d poach post-funeral. How could I forget about the hairbrush? A blue plastic outlaster, it has inexplicably survived 40 years of use on his coarse, black hair. It’s a blue they don’t make anymore — out of style — but I’d know it anywhere. After all these years, is it really in a landfill? Sure, my childhood bike is long gone, as is the clunky home computer and the rollercoasters my sister built on it, but for some reason I thought the hairbrush would exist in perpetuity. Dad, too. It’s only fair.

Once, on a trip to the beach, my favorite hat floated out to sea. It was nothing special — pink with white polka dots, a Gap-issued canvas cap that a thousand other little girls were wearing on their spring break trips — but I mourned it nevertheless. My sister called me a baby; Dad understood. And of course, he did. His favorite bedtime story was Felix’s Hat, wherein a frog loses his beloved hat and spends the rest of the story trying to get it back. Never mind that Dad did not care one iota for headwear. He felt for Felix and he felt for me. As soon as I stopped crying, he took me into town and bought me a new hat.

Maybe the hairbrush is somewhere out to sea, I think as we drive to lunch. Maybe it’s time to let it bob and sink. I’m an adult after all, a tax-paying grocery buyer with my own condo full of stuff. Who cares if my father’s hairbrush, which he probably bought for two dollars on a whim, no longer tames his hair?

Dad catches my eye at a stoplight.

“The old one is still in the bathroom,” he assures me. “This one’s just for the car.”

As we turn into our usual restaurant, I heave a sigh of relief. For at least one more afternoon, one more Cobb salad and one more buffalo chicken sandwich, we have deferred death. And change.

And moving boxes.

 

Copyright © 2026 by Mary Liza Hartong. All rights reserved.