After lunch on a Friday napping

By Bill Pearse on March 27, 2026 • ( 0 )

I drove back to my dad’s house taking the back roads from the west side of Allentown to South Whitehall Township, all the roads you know growing up. The season arm wrestling between winter and spring, this day the former. That late season look of winter, brown and gray with bits of green.

When I last lived here my mom and stepdad were living in France and I house sat for them in the country in an exotic home built in the side of a hill in what they call Pennsylvania Dutch country. That’s because the German immigrants still spoke some queer version of German, choppy and unintelligible. I lived alone in their big strange house with their dogs and cats and the Volvo and John’s wine collection, guns and ammunition, all of which I used without much care or regard. Same goes for the hot tub when I was into cigars, not even 30, not trustworthy one bit.

It’s then I met an old friend from elementary school at a bar in the city named Pete, someone I could still picture from a class photo when we were both seven or eight, and now he had a goatee and artsy glasses and a Kango hat, a pit bull named Mimi and an old Volvo too, the speakers mostly blown.

At the car rental I prepaid for a full tank of gas, and so to optimize my spend they said I should bring it back nearly empty. I watched the gauge tick down over my time visiting, a kind of metaphor like sand dropping through an hourglass. So faint you could hardly tell.

Dad telling me the story of the time we were driving on the freeway and ran out of gas and had the dog with us and we all had to walk along the highway to the gas station. They didn’t have fuel gauges in Volkswagens back then he said. I don’t know how they expected anyone to keep track. It’s a memory you’d think I’d remember but I have no knowledge of it at all. Though I can picture that small family and their mutt dog walking along the shoulder with a gas can, looking beaten down and sad. No one has that memory but dad.

With all the visiting and catching up with loved ones I sometimes needed to just get in my car and drive, to be alone or reflect and process things. I felt a kind of sickness in my gut from saying goodbye to my dad, how his face flickered from the doorway as if to cry. Remnants of his dad too.

I knew the way the distant hills sloped or in Bethlehem, the Moravian star on the top of the hill they used to light around Christmas. I knew the vibe of the town because this is where I was from, though I only went back for the occasional long weekend. And there was the treasure trove of memories from my first years in that apartment off Lehigh Street if I cared to go back and indulge in that, which I sometimes did to varying effect.

The trees hadn’t budded out yet so they looked kind of sad or needy, outstretched hands. I was about a month too early, as the season goes. There was my old school that hadn’t changed a bit, though the steel fencing around the sports court was rusted and leaning. Or the house where I raked some old woman’s leaves and the time she paid me more than I expected. Or the houses where I delivered papers with an ink-stained sling. There was only so much and then you realized, that was it. And that was part of the sick feeling in my gut. Why sometimes I just had to drive.

I didn’t mean to but I drove by my old friend Pete’s house, all the places looked the same. Row homes all stuck together with little porches. Remembering what it was like getting high for the first time and walking home the next day on a Sunday morning convinced my parents would somehow know just by looking into my eyes. How the guilt of self-abuse carried with me all my life, all the way to that last trip in Amsterdam, the same kernel of shame buried deep. Why I had to overthink things and couldn’t let go.

Late afternoon naps when you’ve forgotten what day it is and the house smells of freshly baked bread. And there is only the ticking of some clock and none of it is yours, and you’ve got no plans and nowhere to go and you’re young enough life is still sweet and spring’s around the corner and you’ve got clean socks and soft music playing somewhere. Not a care, only love. No bills to pay or calls to make, only time.

Let me rest into where I’m from with equal parts to what I remember and what I forget. To what comes next, and what is now. To where I’ve been and where I’ll be.