Dad was a classically trained toilet paper tosser. A disciple of Auburn University, where fans celebrated home football victories by plastering the college’s trees in white tissue. He used to say that over there in east Alabama, everyone was a pro like him, that even the toddlers and the elderly rocketed rolls into the highest leaves, that it must have been some kind of anomalous athletic gift akin to the flexibility of Russian gymnasts or the jaw muscle stamina of hotdog eating contest winners—in the case of Auburn’s toilet paper lofters, some genetic advantage in the wrist tendons maybe, or perhaps the forearm.
Though we lived two thousand miles west of that bottomless talent pool, in a California suburb none of us liked—Mom because she missed real seasons, me because the local channels only carried Stanford and Cal games, and Dad because of the sorry state of west coast barbecue—every Saturday after an Auburn win, he’d take me to a park with a fresh box of toilet paper and coach me on how to celebrate the right way. How to position my feet so that I generated the most power from my hips. How to hold my follow-through to achieve that perfect arc. I was six years old the first time I got one to stay in the tree—I know I was six, because it was the year Mom spent fall in Vermont taking care of Grandma, the year Auburn lost a heartbreaker to an undefeated Arkansas, and two years before Mom divorced Dad because she said he never grew up—and maybe it was just the wind or the November afternoon mist, but I swear I saw my dad’s eyes water with proudness, which was really something because he never cried, not when Auburn lost to LSU on a last second field goal, not when they blew a coverage in the fourth quarter of the SEC Championship, not even when he found out Grandpa died in his sleep, when he instead just sat on the couch and stared a long time at the T.V., which featured a blowout between two no-name teams, and said again and again in a low voice, “Of all days, a Saturday.”
By the time I turned seven, we’d nearly run out of parks that hadn’t banned us. We went to different ones in different parts of town, sometimes even to the next county, but we’d still get caught eventually, often by a jogger who would stop and stare for a minute and then, with an angry expression, confront Dad about what he was doing teepee-ing in a public space. He had some pretty good excuses lined up. That it was low-impact physical therapy for my carpal tunnel. That we were timing the paper’s descent for my math homework. That we were honoring his late father. Even though, as Dad revealed one night while we were looking through an old photo album, Grandpa had attended Bama. When I asked him why his father would do such a thing he said that Grandpa grew up poor and that back then Bama professors used to go door to door offering scholarships to anyone who could read aloud the numbers on a clock. According to Dad, nail one through nine and you got free room and board, ace the double digits and you became a dean, and do all that plus spit in the air and catch it in your mouth and they’d plaster your name on a humanities building.
Anyway, if those jogger dorks had been patient, they would’ve seen that Dad always removed the rolls after we finished, jabbing at them with his rake while I waited beneath the tree with my arms curved into a basket like a punt returner. Usually, there were only about four or five up there, because we focused on technique and practiced tossing toward the clouds, but one rainy evening when I was eight, after a shutout Iron Bowl victory, there were at least a dozen stuck in a gigantic oak, and Mom had to drive over Dad’s big ladder in his truck just so he could reach them all, especially the one way up high that I’d challenged him to fasten to a branch with red and gold colored leaves—the kind Mom used to brag about stomping on every autumn as a kid on the east coast. The kind she said I’d stomped on too, a few years before I started remembering things.
As Mom and I sat inside the truck with the heat on and listened to a quivering jazz channel the truck’s crooked antenna couldn’t quite reach and watched Dad knock the soggy cylinders off the branches from atop the metal ladder, she shook her head and told me that if one day she lost her memory the way Grandma had, that she wanted me to remind her of this image over and over again.
“Don’t show me wedding pictures,” she said, with a quiet laugh. “Show me this.” And so I wouldn’t forget it like I did the crunch and color of the Vermont leaves, I did my best to remember how Dad raised his arms in victory each time a roll dropped to the ground. How after he was done knocking them all down, he scooped the clumps of mushy mess into a trash bag and slung it over his shoulder and trundled toward us through the mud like a vagabond mall Santa.
How he insisted on sitting in the back while I, for the first time, stayed in the passenger seat next to Mom, and how my father looked so funny back there in his oversized raincoat, smiling to himself as he hummed the Auburn fight song and traced the Iron Bowl score in the window condensation and nodded off to the rhythmic pounding of the rain, his head leaned against his bag of victory slush, while Mom said not a word, glancing at Dad through the rearview mirror now and then and ignoring my whispers about our secret plans for his birthday, perhaps unable to hear me over the rain and the saxophone static, or perhaps busy daydreaming about how for a few moments, before soaking into transparency, the fallen, unraveled white paper in the grass had looked a bit like snow.
