SQUIRREL NUTKIN
“It was so out of character to hear Dad’s whimsical sing-song version of a squeaky English squirrel….”
When I was six or seven years old, still young enough to get away with it, my dad would lie on his back in front of the fireplace, eyes closed, and let my little sister and me braid his hair—which was coarse and black and long for the 1950s, past his ear lobes. It felt like we were doing something very naughty, making him look silly while he slept (or more likely, pretended to sleep, the flickering hint of a smile on his firelit skin), as pokey little braids sprouted all over his head. Every few minutes Mom would peer through the kitchen door to make sure we hadn’t roused the slumbering dragon.
We lived in San Francisco. Dad was a middle-school art teacher. With the Chronicle under his arm and a sack lunch in hand, he took the L car up Taraval to his school in the Mission every morning. After work he shut himself in the basement, tinkering, painting—or stood out front gazing into the middle distance while he watered our postage stamp–sized lawn. When I grew old enough to have homework and had finished it for the day, I’d follow him as he puttered, heeding Mom’s warnings not to get too close or ask him questions. I expect he found my silent skulking more irritating than a normal child’s pestering would have been.
Dad wasn’t really a dragon, but there was something unapproachable, unpredictable about him. What we didn’t understand as kids was that our parents’ marriage was a trainwreck. Mother was an unrequited romantic. She had serial affairs with our friends’ fathers and on her solo travels, and there were long spells when Dad joined the family only for supper. I was the moody, broody daughter, the one who most reminded him of her, a resemblance he tended to note with a dramatic sour-lemon expression. He called me Desdemona, emphasis on the moan. Though I didn’t know where the name came from, I understood what he meant.
But everything changed when it was time for bedtime reading. It was Dad who read to us, never her. Well after I aged out of braiding his hair, he remained the official bedtime storyteller at our house.
The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin is the only book that has survived from my childhood. Reading it aloud, my father was transformed. The magic began with the very first lines: “This is a tale about a tail—a tail that belonged to a little red squirrel….” It was so out of character to hear Dad’s whimsical sing-song version of a squeaky English squirrel who “bobbed up and down like a little red cherry …”
He took great pleasure in narrating Nutkin’s persistent bad behavior as he tormented Old Brown, the story’s inscrutable owl. In a white T-shirt, khakis and stocking feet, his black hair flopped across his forehead like a beatnik, Dad would chortle and snort. And because he loved naughty Nutkin, I did too. Perhaps I didn’t fully understand the appeal as a child, but I believe I do now. My father’s days were predictable, regimented and constrained. For someone who would never think of behaving badly or breaking the house rules, Nutkin’s unmitigated badness must have been pure comic relief.
Given the chance to live life over, I imagine Dad might have chosen very differently—a tropical island perhaps, minus the obligations of a wife and children, a la Gauguin. But in those shared storytelling moments, I didn’t feel like an obligation. I could believe that I wasn’t my father’s dreary Desdemona daughter—that I could be funny and fun, someone he could let his guard down with, someone he could show a side of himself he usually kept safely hidden away. I have Squirrel Nutkin to thank for that.
—Dorothy Rice
Dorothy Rice grew up in a row house in San Francisco near the zoo and Ocean Beach. A writer, editor and the managing editor of the nonfiction and arts journal Under the Gum Tree, she also maintains a website of her father's art.