Get me a nurse

For years, I had smelled My Fathers “other life”, with a question mark that burned an ever peaked curiosity to know this salty mystery of his soul… This piece of him, that weathered everything that he was, as a Father to me.

He would come through the door of the house…a tired light in his smile…I would run to him, and accuse “ Dad, you smell like fish.”
This was my way of taking out on him, the mild and painful anger of him leaving me. But I adored him just as much every time he would walk through the door, in the same breath.
“ Hey kid…” He’d ruffle my hair, thick rough hands that softened everything inside of me the way he could,
and to acknowledge my feelings…both of them…then eagerly wave it in to the wonder of his clever humor…to “make light” with saying:

“No, I smell like money…”

Sometimes the lack of sleep, mixed with the delirium of his watery soul descending back upon land, after yet another hard- fun and soul-trying adventure owed to his love affair with the sea… He would return to his life and equally undying love for his family back at home---
Completely Fu#k’ng exhausted…I remember the look on his face, trying to seep back in to the homestead, while the gears were still turning on sea time in his head…Two very different times…I would later find out..
He would grab the old steak ( My Mother often broiled and left out) with his bare hands…eat it…then pass out on the couch. This was when I would tend to him. I would carefully bead up and roll “bandages” on to anything on his exposed skin that I perceived to be a wound…There were so many!! Tiny cuts, gashes, anything I perceived to be wound…)…a lot of the “bruises” were actually diesel stains…but I couldn’t tell the difference …. This was my sense of daughterly purpose and pride to bandage his boat- beaten up body.
And in the middle of the night…well after I had already gone upstairs to fall asleep, myself…
He would wake up, on the couch…with delicately placed, tiny bits and pieces of
toilette paper covering his body…
And so this is a story of my endearing, and not so much adept attempt at being a nurse…thus the reason that, unless you want The soft touch of Charms stuck in to your gaping wounds, which I think possibly might actually stifle the scabbing and healing process…don’t come and ask me to bandage you up physically…the same is said of any emotionally bandaging as well…
I like to use toilette paper…either way.