Sam's Father

1992 Pacifica, California

A young Sam Swink stops, lips slightly opened, at the entrance to the Swink Family living room. Something is hanging limply from his right hand, the way that things hang from children's hands when they're paying full focus onto something else. Cute as a button, the young Sam Swink, but at the same time something is creepily adult about him, already, at four.

The something else that Sam is focusing on is Joel Swink. With the stereo volume all the way up, Joel Swink is manipulating a vacuum with one hand, all the way onto his toes in half-calf white socks. Music is simply pouring out of the room. Half a smile on his face, Joel dances the vacuum in front of him, almost playful as he teases it beneath the skirt of the recliner. Vacuuming like an all-american Dad, leaving a perfect circular track around the coffee table, very obviously relishing in the patterns of ruffled vs. unruffled carpet fiber. Wide sidewalks running from one wall of the living room to the other, little unstraight tracks where his hand might have been dancing as he sang along with Pink Floyd.

What the young Sam Swink must not realize at this point (a promisingly bright boy, undoubtedly, and especially discerning of the strange rituals of adults, but, nevetheless, still only 4 years old) is that, prior to his little bout of fancy-footed housecleaning, the older Joel Swink had stepped outside to the small potting shed in the Swink Family backyard. And surely Sam couldn't imagine that, behind large, Home-Depot size bags of peat and sphagnum, there was a single electrical outlet in the potting shed, or that in the top drawer of the grey metal filing cabinet his father kept an early-model, neutral-wood colored vaporizer. That the small black dial controlled a red digital numbers display and that before long Sam's father would reach a slightly different place indeed, and find that knee-bounding rhythm that Sam now so glazedly looked onto from the hallway's hardwood.


Vacuum dancing in front of him, Joel Swink steps lightly forwards and back. Sam, three-quarter length OshKoshB'Gosh overalls clinging loosely onto him, watches quietly, learning the rituals that he will someday make his own.

 atm1