The Choreography of a Faded Father

So my buddy Onion had a pretty rough childhood. After his father went to prison, Onion lived with his mother for a spell, but as she was a drug addict, the household was still not a good one.

When Onion, freed from the yoke of his father, began to act out, he was sent to a crazy uncle’s house. After a terrible few months there, his aunt practically kidnapped him and gave him a great place to live. A few months after Onion arrived at his aunt’s house, however, his father called from prison. His aunt received the call, and tremulously handed Onion the phone when his father asked to speak with his son.

As his aunt watched with wide eyes from across the foyer, Onion, puffed up with the invigoration of a new life, at one point after his father demanded that he take his (expletive) behind back home, responded with a pert, “Dad, if you can’t talk to me without cussing at me, you may as well not talk to me at all!”

After a brief but probably eternal silence, his dad did hang up the phone. In discussing these events, Onion conjectured a choreograph of what his dad did, post ultimatum. The image that took hold was one of his dad, with a look of utter incredulousness, moving the phone from his ear to in front of his gaze for a moment, and then, as though moved by forces more powerful than himself, hanging up the phone in a slow swoop and with another pause toward the end, in its cradle. And the fixed gaze of emotional consideration never once falters.

This plausible choreograph stuck because it also served to distill the essence of Onion and his father’s relationship at that hectic time. And when a fundamentally similar situation recently occurred here between another buddy and his mother, what did we do? You got it, the previous choreograph! Such, as the distilled essence of both of the instances in question, speaks volumes when acted out as regards to the latter; more in fact than mere words describing the underlying situation, because of the choreograph’s aesthetic nature.

And now, whenever any social situation or dynamic resembles that of Onion and his father’s, we jocularly stare into a hand contorted into the shape of a phone, and pause once before hanging it up. And though the circumstances that surround that essence are unfortunate, identifying it as an essence, and in such a manner, is very funny!