Keith Muse, my father, telling jokes on his front porch along Brookside Avenue. Indianapolis, Indiana. Circa 1995. Photo: Jeff Darren Muse
A Reluctant Longing
Featured in Dear Park Ranger: Essays on Manhood, Restlessness, and the Geography of Hope
The essay “Waiting for Rain” grew from a 2010 road trip to Dubre, Kentucky, the birthplace of my father, Wendell “Keith” Muse. Dad was born into poverty and alcoholism during World War II, and passed away in Indiana in 1998, at the age of 54. Suffice to say, this was the most challenging relationship of my life, one I continue sustain through deliberation. An excerpt:
“It’s difficult to sort out these feelings I have for my father, the way cigarette smoke or someone’s beer-soured breath can conjure him in my senses, in my heart, in unpredictably complicated ways. On one hand, such moments lead to nostalgia, but on the other, confusion, a reluctant longing. I’ll remember the times he leaned over to kiss me goodbye, his black mustache scraping my forehead like tiny bristles, a fleshy sensation that lingered in the long minutes after he was gone, after he had crossed the door’s threshold and driven away. Or I’ll remember years later when I was becoming a man myself, much bigger and taller than him, when he was sitting in his own living room or on his front porch in Indianapolis, drinking from that sweaty glass of rum and coke, its bottom dripping onto a glass end table flecked with ashes and tree pollen and the dust of city streets, and again I’d feel his mustache against my skin—grayer now, thinner, but still prickly, still leaving a mark that lingered as I drove away.”
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