the handsome Volvo he has been separated from. I keep my hands on the wheel while he tunes his radio and adjusts the interior air, as he watches the forsythia in the yards we pass, so intrinsically beguiling. I tell him we’re headed to a garden. I tell him I’ll drop him off at the entrance circle and then we’ll walk not all that far and sit in the overlook for as long as he wishes. I say it, I have planned it. Me.The daughter. The rocking chairs are empty when we reach them. The garden hill decelerates at our feet. There is the green lean of particular blooming things, and we sit, doing nothing. If you’d look at us you might say we were perched on a low shelf of sky. The clouds puff up like white balloons.
giants. These envelopes and baskets lifted by fire and by air, directed by wind and cables. These touches of genius more than 200 years old. Like everything that’s beautiful, they’re gored with danger, too, and I guess this is the part where I confess that the balloons are my obsession, not my father’s, that it is me, not him, who has spent four years writing a novel about them, lusting (that is the word) after hot airs. I tell my father some of the history I’ve read, some balloonery stunts and heroes. I tell him what I hope we’ll see. I stand and he sits and we are side by side, squinting toward nothing, and my husband is wherever he is.
Six o’clock, andmy husband emerges from his tunnel of shade and finds us. The crowd behind us is wide, wild, festive—lounging on blow-up chaises, standing beneath big- lid brims, wearing rainbow-colored glasses. Six o’clock, and in the distance, a human cannonball is about to be shot straight from his cannon, and the crowd stands, it binoculars up, and we have no binoculars. “Can you see him?” my father asks, for he’s standing, too, leaning all his weight onto his walker in the rutted earth. “That way,” I point, and my father leans harder and squints more but cannot see him. The cannon blasts. The man flies. He is saved by the nets strung up to save him.
“How’d it go?” my father asks, over the roar of the crowd. “Well,” I say, and my father shrugs. Now, when we return our gaze to the main attraction, the launch field is being recast as a theater. The ballooners are arriving with their Avis trucks, their pick-up trucks, their stars-and-stripes painted trailers. Entire crews pile out of vehicles, clown-car style. Children run up and down the field. Tarps are snapped out,
I take instruction from the hour. When fighting on behalf of someone you love, the fight must end, the love must be the art of being present. I am slow to learn, but I am trying. Pastrami lunches. Riverbank afternoons. Conversations in the shade of village gardens. The art accelerates. I feel myself wanting more for him, more for us, more (the wanting hurts) for me. On a Saturday in July, I have a new plan, my best
plan, I am certain. My husband and I will take my father to a hot-air balloon festival. We’ll watch inflated color take the sky. Sure it’s hot. Sure it’s far. Sure it is no doctor’s order. But look at us and look (this is me, wanting to see) at the love I give my father. The crowds are thick when we arrive. The sun is cruel. The fence where we are to stand to observe the grand ascent might as well be on the far side of the moon. My husband heads off toward the clash of vendor booth and singers of songs, while I walker with my father over the ruts and provisional plank bridges of the festival grounds. We stop for minutes at a time so that he can sit and rest in his collapsible chair. It takes us an hour, maybe, to get from the car to the fence, but we arrive, we settle in, I un- collapse his chair, I stand beside him. We are four or five hours from the main event and out there, beyond the fence, there is nothing but launch-pad emptiness. They call the hot-air balloons the gentle
He texts me sometimes, speaks of shade and a cool Pepsi. When my father asks for water, I am glad to run and get it. Whenmy father remembers that he left his afternoon pills in the car, I run again, return. When I run out of balloon exempla, I have nothing more to say. The excoriating weight of the sun. The excoriating waiting. Five o’clock, and back at my father’s retirement village, dinner is being served in a well-conditioned room on clean white plates with proper silverware. Five o’clock, and the ladies on the benches might have sung today, might have even sung Sinatra, may be eating sugar-free ice cream in sugar- free cones waiting for the movie to start in the comfortable villa auditorium. “Sorry, Dad,” I say. He waves his hand, brushes away my apology. His hand, I fear, is burning. Three o’clock. Four o’clock.
bundled balloons are unbundled, baskets are given a little shine. The fancy people who will be sent aloft are gloriously fancy, while the regular sky riders fix their caps. The empty field is now a psychedelic one. A fan turns on, a single fan, and the first balloon inflates. It lies on its side stretching its long stripes out. We have front row seats. We avert our eyes from the sun on the horizon. We wait. “Do you want to sit?” I ask my father, but he can’t hear me. He’s lost the batteries, he pantomimes, on his hearing aids. He will watch the spectacle of hot-air balloons like a movie with no sound. He will watch it standing. The first balloon inflates. It bobbles. It lifts itself from its supine state and becomes a proper, upright teardrop. It tugs at its cables and the ground crew tugs back, and now into the basket its pilot climbs. I can hear the propane burner burn. My father can see the blasts of fiery breath. The ground crew gathers for one last touch of the basket, one
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