A warm spring sun shone through my bedroom window as I dressed my 10-month-old son for church. As he wriggled, the phone rang. In response to my “Hello,” a man’s jagged, raspy voice asked, “Is this Bunny?” When I said it was, he responded, “Well, this is your old man. I’m at the Greyhound bus station in Salinas, I’m broke and I’ve got no place to go. Can you come and get me?”
I didn’t really know this man. As he spoke, I accepted the fact that he was my father — the man who left when I was a baby. The only contact I had with him beyond his leaving was an occasional drunken phone call in the middle of the night when I was in fifth grade.
There’s a country song that says, “A phone that rings at midnight has nothing good to say.” And that was true of these contacts from my father — him, sitting on a stool in some faraway barroom, me, a little girl who was afraid of the dark and had no idea who this wild man was. He was always full of some fantasy about writing songs for Hank Williams and getting rich…