Diana Darby ** "I V" ** Intravenous

23 Acres

He tells me not to worry
over thirty or forty thousand
one way or the other.
“It’s just money,” he says.
If I want to move
I should move.
“What difference does it make?” he says.
And he’s right.
I know he’s right.
This is a man who was cutting deals for millions
while I was running around in diapers.
A man who had sixteen different partners.
A man who never worried about a dime.
He was bold
on paper.
I know.
A few weeks ago I flew to Houston to go through a storage unit
I didn’t know we had.
Inside I found my father’s file cabinets.
His entire business life
was in those two black file cabinets.
Every deal he ever made.
Every piece of property he ever owned.
Brazosport,
the Village shopping Center,
La Porte,
Pasadena,
and the 23 acres Charter bank took from him.
There was his letter to his partners in Bluebonnet productions
railing against them for their deceit,
his discharge papers from the army,
and his citizenship documents.
There were photos of his mother and father from the twenties
and postcards I wrote to him
from camp.
There was even a letter he submitted to the L.A. Times for publication about justice
and how justice is only for the rich.
Unfortunately, The Times rejected it.
Everything I never knew about my father was in those papers.
Papers that I was now dumping in trash bins all over Houston
while security guards weren’t looking.
I wanted to save them,
to box them up and bring them back on the plane,
to make sense of his life,
like I was Columbo putting together a puzzle
that would help me understand who he was.
But there were too many files
and no one to talk with about them now.
My father’s partners are dead
and my father doesn’t remember much.
I called him from the hotel
just to make sure he didn’t want any of his business records,
and to make sure that he hadn’t forgotten about some piece of property he still might own.
He said it was all gone,
all of it.
All those millions gone.
A life’s work just numbers on aging paper.
I asked him about his letter to his partners in Bluebonnet.
I asked him what happened and what they did to him
that left him feeling betrayed.
All he would say is, ‘the past is the past. What does it matter now?”
Yes,
what does it matter?