My father was the team physician for the Houston Oilers ever since
I could remember. He and the owner were friends from way back and we
lived in the same neighborhood, some of my older siblings going to
school with some of his children at the local high school. My parents
shared a supper club with them and some other friends. It was an
ebullient crowd who loved to have a theme for each dinner, and drinks
together at a chosen couple’s house before going out into the night,
each pair piling into their own car for the caravan over to the chosen,
untested restaurant.

One month it was my parents’ turn to select a restaurant and serve
cocktails in our living room beforehand. My father liked my mother’s
taste in interior decorating. It was simple and modern and
Scandinavian with a few pieces of Bauhaus and two Eames lounge chairs
and ottomans thrown in for swivel comfort. My oldest sister, who had
discovered polished English antiques when she moved away to
Massachusetts and married, complained that it looked like a big city
airport terminal waiting area. My personal favorite was the Mies van
der Rohe day bed that sat along the front window. It was placed in the
middle of our everyday life and it most resembled a psychoanalyst’s
couch. By my estimation, we all could have used a 50-minute hour on
it.

My father loved my mother’s zany sense of humor. He would draw his
shoulders up, roll his blue eyes, and give a low laugh at her antics,
always expressing his approval of the jokes she made, even if it got in
the way of her role as the mother of his eight children. It was more
important for her to have fun than for us to have what we might need.
Like, say, dinner. He liked her just fine as she was, rarely raising a
critical note in his voice when it came to her having a good time.

For the festivities, my mother sent out invitations with a stylized
drawing of a svelte, red-lipped woman wearing a pink lampshade lined
with little pom-poms on her head. It read: Bring Your Own Lampshade!
The printed words gave their guests a time and place for the planned
evening’s events. There wasn’t much preparation involved for my
parents. With these boisterous friends, all you needed was a
full-service bar and someone skilled enough to handle the repeated
drink orders.

At around 6:30 that evening, I heard my mother screech. It was a cry
of happiness, a yelp of gratitude that everyone had liked her
invitation and now was ready to play. My mother liked a lot of
attention. From the parked cars, out stepped stiffly coiffured women
with painted nails, some dressed in fine wool sheaths, others in sleek
silk dresses, but all wearing outlandishly fashioned lampshades on
their heads. Their husbands followed them, their crowns equally and
flamboyantly endowed. Each man was dressed in a dark suit with a
banker’s tie, their hair combed and smooth underneath. Up they filed
along the front walk to our covered porch where my mother laughed
through the circular window pane of our wooden front door.

My father chuckled at the behavior my mother’s invitation had incited.
He opened the door and greeted his friends, so glad to see them,
shaking hands warmly and kissing cheeks. “Come in, come in. Let me
get you somethin’ to drink.” His evening was full. He would not
remember me there watching the lively scene from the stairs, my knobbed
knees touching and my mosquito bites scratched to red. I was entranced
by these preening adults being sillier than any of my little friends
and I could be. I wanted to hold my father’s attention, too.

This bunch often went to Oiler games together. My mother would sit in
the owner’s sky box with them while my father was down on the team’s
sidelines working. If a player was injured, a pack of trainers would
trot out to see if they could rouse the wounded for a walk back to the
bench for further examination. If not, my dad would quickly limp out,
his left knee shattered in a through-the-windshield car accident he was
in when I was four. But he could still swing a golf club and he could
still range around our farm, fixing tractors and counting cows, so he
didn’t mind it too much.

As an older kid, I would watch a game from home on the television set
or view the plays from the Astrodome stands. Truthfully, I only
watched for father sightings, either along the benches or out on the
field. Network television cameras would scan the field and I would
clap my thigh, “There’s Dad!” Each time I saw him would be tallied in
my mind for an end of game assessment. I would laugh and tell my
mother about it later, thinking it so funny they were able to find him.
His interest in any attention was so stubborn that he purposely
avoided standing near the coaches and players as they were most likely
to be sought out for filming and close-ups. One night my brother was
listening to a game on the radio when the reporter saw my father as the
team was returning to the locker room. “Dr. Fain! Dr. Fain!” When
there was no reply, the man with the microphone, in a bemused way, but
deflated nonetheless, sighed, “And there goes Dr. Fain!”

I would be home in the off-seasons and nothing happened between us. He
was busy with his medical practice during the day or he was hanging
around the house with my mother in the evening, watching “The
McNeil-Lehrer Report,” then going to bed early as he always had a seven
o’clock surgery scheduled in the morning. My father and I didn’t
interact.

I didn’t really like the game of football and could never understand
the crashing skulls or bending bones of the sport, but I wanted to see
my dad walk out across the field, limping slightly as he did, in his
suit and an overcoat I never knew he had until he started attending
away games in northern, blustery cities.

One year my mother bought him a pair of battery-operated, heated socks
in an effort to keep his feet warm during a game in Green Bay. I don’t
remember if they worked or not, but it was the first time I had seen my
father’s new pair of cowboy boots he planned to travel in. When he
pulled his trouser pant leg up, there was an XF embossed in the leather
indicating his cattle brand. Roman numeral X for 10 and F for his last
name initial. There were ten of us and he was proud of that. I was
one of those ten and I realized I felt proud of that, too. He chuckled
as he shook the pant leg back over the boot top, as if no one would
notice the pointy toe of the ostrich skin shoe.

Through the years I kept track of my father through televised Oiler
games. When I left home and went away to school when I was fifteen, I
would watch the games in my dorm parents’ apartments, always searching
for my father’s figure, eager to point him out. He never wrote to me
or got on the phone for long when I called home. He’d usually pass by
when I was talking to my mother. She with a smoking cigarette in hand,
a half-filled wine glass in the other, and he would take the receiver
for a moment. “We love ya!” he’d shout into the mouthpiece, and then
hand the phone just as quickly back to my mother without another word.
I could hear his footsteps in the background clacking loudly against
the kitchen floor as he made his way out of the room and into the den
for something more interesting to do. Something like the Op-Ed page of
the Wall Street Journal.

When I would visit home on holidays and summer vacations, I was too
busy “keeping the streets warm,” as my father used to say, visiting all
my friends and classmates who were home from school, too. We were
teen-agers and the last place we wanted to be was in the living room,
sitting around on the furniture with our weary parents, feeling bored
and quietly annoyed. It was night and I wanted to be out in it.

Eventually I went on into the wider world for college. It took two
flights from Houston to get to the small town in the western mountains
where I went to school. Where I went to backpack and do art and ride
my bike. Where I got caught in the gray ash of Mt. St. Helen’s and had
to pedal my sky blue 10 speed home the thirty miles I had ventured from
town alone. I got to my apartment past the pedestrians with bandanas
strapped over their mouths, their worried eyes peering out onto the
thickly dusted landscape. They were trying to get home to safer air,
too. This is where my first adventures began, where I knew no one from
Houston and no one knew me.

One overcast Sunday, with the valley clogged and the clouds ready to
let more snow loose, I sat at a local bar drinking and eating. I
looked up. On the television I saw a full-screen image of my father’s
face, his eyebrows stern with concentration, leaning over the body of a
football player down on a playing field. It was brief, but it was my
father. I grabbed my friend’s arm, squeezed, and said
conspiratorially, “That’s my dad!” My friend laughed. “It must be
good to see him after so long.”

This was the beauty of the television set and these Sunday afternoon
football games. I could see my father, all groomed and handsome and
doing what he loved and was good at. I could see him being his Texan
self wherever the team took him. Standing tall in his custom-made
cowboy boots, a fine Stetson keeping his balding head warm, a crooked
smile taking in another joke. I could sit up and watch, however brief
the image. There’s my dad.

But when the game was over, I walked out into the late, gray afternoon,
the snow flying, the ground covered in new white. There had been my
dad with his jaunty cowboy boots on, spitting tobacco with the rest of
the men on the sideline, a thin line of brown juice around his lips he
had not yet wiped away. I was no closer to Texas. I was no closer to
him.