The year my father died, or was it the year after, a family friend raised a toast: to those who are not here with us. I do not remember my father’s last Christmas. I think we spent it in hospital. Or was that the year before. I don’t remember. I think of my father during Christmas. We spent Christmas with his parents. It was one of the few times a year we saw them. Once he completed his dream house—I always think of it as his house—we spent Christmas there. Now, I wonder what happened to move away from celebrating with the extended family to celebrating as a fairly nuclear unit.
After his death, I remember a series of Christmas lunches with my mother’s brother-cousin and his family at a restaurant. It was a break from going to any rural space. Perhaps it was difficult to return to a life that had been planned, a life that was now truncated and diverted and had to be reimagined. My father had always wanted to retire to the rural home he built. My mother was too Nairobi to do that. That conversation never had to happen. There might have been a few Christmas days we spent with my mother’s family, but I don’t remember.
If I have Christmas rituals—or holiday rituals—I really don’t, with the exception of listening to Handel’s Messiah—they are shaped by my father’s example. To make the rituals that fit around your shape, that move in and through your dreams.
I wish I could say the details of that final Christmas with my father mattered. I wish I could remember what he said. I don't need to. Perhaps that would add nothing. I mean to say it was the last Christmas I was surrounded by my parents' combined love. A love so capacious and generative that even now it continues to nurture me.
I mean to say: that Christmas, about which I remember nothing, lingers as something in my blood and bones, as a feeling across my skin. As forms that slide in and around my prose, providing shape and movement and stillness.
Perhaps there's something about my father's improvisations, how he moved from space to space, carrying holidays with him. The sounds of Handel's Messiah and Dolly Parton. The sounds of those he loved, the silences of those he loathed.
It's not that he told me stories to pass time. I have no anthology from my father. Mostly, I have his smile. The memory of it. His laughter, still vibrating through my bones. His taste for solitude, a desire to listen to and for. And, if now, I am obsessed with repair, that, too, comes from his example.
What is sacred about holidays is all this: the wash of memory, the touch of time, the sweetness that lingers. Perhaps this is what we call loss.
My father was an artist. The more confined he was, the more he painted. Mostly realist work, though saturated with desire. Angles appear improper. Colours fade. Figures appear nowhere, but someone is always there.
The painting seemed to come out of nowhere. There had been quick sketches before, though I can’t find any. Memory is that kind of ache. And then, one day, he asked for paint brushes and paper. His younger brother brought them. And he painted. There were, I think, 11 paintings. I don’t recall. I think we have prints of most of them, though I have no clue where the originals are. He painted from memory and imagination. Not the view from his hospital room. The views were always elsewhere. Sometimes lush. Sometimes spare. Across all of them, movement. Not a static tree or bush. But a sense that the wind or some other force is moving through and with nature. I am not very good at describing the motion I sense in his work. Something restless. There are shapes and smudges and interruptions and splotches and tender dots. There is intention. And desire. Though I cannot name what is desired. The paintings ache. Or, I want them to.
I cannot draw a straight line with a ruler.
The paintings are signed “By Bob.”
The name Bob appears most frequently in the cards he sent my mother—for her birthday, for their anniversary, for Christmas. Bob was the student who met and fell in love with Flo, sometimes known as Flora. These names were never used by relatives. Let me amend that. These were not names used by their parents and aunts and uncles. These were names used by friends and intimates, names that moved them from familial obligations to other kinds of networks. Flora was a pretty nursing student who fell in love with Bob, a handsome medical student. Bob was a name from the past, an invention, a play name. The name Robert appears on official documents, but Robert is not Bob.
Bob painted browns and oranges and greens and blues and yellows, clouds that dot and mutter, land that shifts as you look at it, land that is alive. In some paintings, buildings appear, all the way from mud huts to stone houses, from buildings made by collaboration—a hut is a structure infused with the bodies and energies of friends and relatives who assemble to help construct one. A hut is never built alone. To other buildings made by different types of collaboration, my father’s dream house, designed by his brother, outfitted by friends, made with love, infused with a passion that kept drawing my father there. He spent many weekends there alone. And many others with me.
With me, he was Bob. I do not mean that I ever called him that. He was alive and silly and playful. Perhaps I see those things in his paintings. Perhaps I simply need to. I miss Bob.
My father gave me words, not painting.
I read the books that lived by his bed. Stephen King. Sidney Sheldon. I learned to love the pace of such books, the place of story. Only later would I learn to love the shape of sentences. What also lingers: a habit of curiosity. My father bought encyclopedias. When I asked a question, he’d tell me to look it up. I learned to look up things. To pursue knowledge. To refuse to accept that what I knew was enough and that I could not learn from others. This gift continues to carry me. And then, also, a certain lucidity. If style can be inherited, I inherited some from my father. His thesis, which has the exciting title Obstetrical & Gynaecological Case Records & Commentaries, has a spare clarity that I aspire to. Not a single word is wasted. I confess I have not read all of it. What I have read is elegant.
Perhaps what I mean to say is that Christmas makes me think of gifts, and I have been thinking about my father’s gifts to me, of all the ways I can map myself along and through his tracks. His birthday: three days before mine. I do not have the facility to think through stars and their relations. And I have wondered if my path would have been different if he had lived, if I would have pursued his dreams for me before finding my own. And if it would have mattered. I do not believe in unchanging destiny. Paths are multiple. I do not mourn who I could have been.
Holidays extend: the gift of time. The fictions of years. The promise of what lingers. My father planted a garden—it’s more accurate to say he made a farm. One of his friends tells me he made it with my name in his mouth. The farm he made—the plants he put in with his hands—no longer exists, not in the form he created. It exists as a story one of his friends told me many years after his death. Even that was a gift.
I do not have any of my father’s popular books. And that is okay. He gave me words and they made paths and channels where something could move and flow. I have forgotten so much, and that is okay. An ache, sometimes. Not a pain. I think, now, of what lingers: sensations from then flavor my days, stories from then continue to move into my life. The worlds he imagined continue to model how I might imagine: movement and stasis, blur and blot, from enclosed rooms to the expanse of imagination.
May your holidays be filled with the abundance of what lingers.
Keguro, thank your gifting us your beautiful writing, thinking, and play with words. I continue to learn how to write by reading your pieces. A friend introduced me to "On Being Area-Studied: A Litany of Complaint" in 2019 while in grad school and I have remained hooked to your work since then. Happy holidays!