Some Notes on Neck Ties
Reproduction of Randy’s Half Hitch by the talented Athena Ruiz. You can find my essay here if you haven’t read it or shared it with the people in your networks. Also, a huge debt of gratitude on my part to Cara and Erin at Empty House Press for the care and sharp editing they gave my piece.
A quick set of thoughts on my latest essay, “Randy’s Half Hitch.” I mentioned on socials the day it came out that it was the first thing I found myself capable of writing after my dad passed away. That’s both true and technically incorrect.
It’s more correct to describe it as the first piece I could write to completion, though completion is my mark for writing so maybe I’m splitting (my own) hairs. But it is completely accurate to say this is the piece that brought me back to the keyboard first.
“Even now, when I read it, I can feel the pull of the months before I finished that piece. But inertia can either pull toward entropy or expansion.”
In basic form, I just wanted to spend some time with the guy. But writing about him in more general terms felt, I don’t know, false. Not the stories I would tell about him in their own right (and there are plenty to tell given the kind of man he was).
What I wanted was proximity when all I could think of was the new distance between us and it stifled my ability to tell them without explaining him. It made him a subject rather than the man who’d helped form me.
If I’m being transparent, I just wanted a moment like the one I describe in the essay: him standing over my shoulder, helping me do something he thought I’d need to know how to do in his imperfectly perfect way.
Being a realist, though, this piece had to include his absence. Honesty we’d rather not employ, above all else, forms the truth contract in our stories.
So I compressed the difference and distance between the two, for myself mostly: the day of his burial and that morning learning to knot a tie and the decades between them flattened out to hold both in the tension I felt. Still feel.
After the essay was published, one reader reached out to say he appreciated my use of short, punctuated sentences. I told him the honest truth: I couldn’t write much further into any of those lines without falling apart. And falling apart leads a writer to distance themselves from the subject at hand, the exact opposite of what I was looking for in the writing of this piece in the first place.
“Randy’s Half Hitch” was my grudging step into a world without my dad. A step back toward myself and the things I do. The lessons I teach my own kids (who really aren’t so much kids anymore). Even now, when I read it, I can feel the pull of the months before I finished that piece. But inertia can either pull toward entropy or expansion.
I chose the latter.
A final note: I had my students read this essay in a class full of non-English majors leading into their writing a personal narrative of their own. One of those students, a first-year nursing major named Athena, stopped by my office with a gift just before Thanksgiving—a sketch of my tie’s knot that I described at the end of the essay. She found the picture of it on my author Instagram account that I posted on the day of his memorial and reproduced it in pencil. I was very touched.
What I didn’t realize was that it was a study rather than the final artwork itself. After break, she handed me a beautiful oil portrait of the same image. She also told me that the hours she spent painting it for me had confirmed her growing feeling that, even as she studies to become a nurse, she needs to continue making art, something my class helped her see. I could barely contained the tears that brought until she left my office.
Somehow, Dad’s still teaching lessons, to and through me.