Free My Father's Footprints by Colin McEnroe Page B

Change!”—suffered a little bit from a
Playboy’s Party Jokes
sensibility, but some of the pies were memorable. The pies that I mention at the start of each chapter are his ideas.
    Col. Ellwood’s Sensible Peach for Young Christian Women
    Glutton’s Pie with Oscillating Bottom and Crispy Handles
    Hamlet Pie with Egglet and Toastlet
    Mango Mango Bang
    There were dozens more. I used to look at the lists of imaginary pies and half-wonder whether he shouldn’t be spending a little
     more time trying to earn a living.
    The Court of Pie Powder would be a place for dismissing exactly that kind of a charge in a milky, dreamy, Sendak Night Kitchen
     setting. When I catch myself feeling bitter or resentful of my dad these days, I picture us both in the floury haze of the
     Court of Pie Powder, acquitting ourselves.
    We acquit ourselves pretty well.

    Through the comforting white fog of pie powder, I look back to that time of infertility and his devastating hatchet remark
     and see Bob McEnroe in a different light.
    He is frightened. He is sad. “I have made every mistake that a man can possibly make.” He cannot persuade the spark of his
     writing to jump its gap. With each new day, he is more memorable as a peculiar man—full of intellectual quirks—who works in
     a real estate office, and less persuasive as a young lion of Broadway, the man who went out to Hollywood and fended off stars
     who hoped he would write a play for them. He doesn’t even tell those stories. Patricia Neal, Kirk Douglas, Elizabeth Taylor
     rapping on his door, asking to meet with him. Who would believe it?
    And now his son has a problem. He can’t help. And he’s not exactly untouched by all this. Here in his early seventies, he
     is thinking about what remains behind and what goes forward,after he dies. The McEnroe DNA double helix isn’t whirring like an eggbeater, burrowing into the future. It’s bunched in a
     knot, tumbling across the floor, getting kicked around with the dust bunnies. In fear and frustration, he lashes out with
     a weird remark whose meaning he himself barely grasps.
    Case dismissed.

    For the last forty years of his life, he sits in a series of real estate offices, dreaming of pies, often selling very little
     real estate but engaging in other, feverish activities. He wears a jacket and tie every day and looks, alternatingly, down
     at the floor and off into the ether. This habit of not looking at people is one I have, alas, inherited. He cannot remember
     anybody’s name, ever. I can remember names with almost archival precision but have no idea whom they belong to—I cannot recognize
     faces. There is even a name for this: prosopagnosia or “face-blindness.” (Imagine the size of the name tags at the Prosopagnosia
     National Convention.)
    He requires “personal space” at least as big as a Major League on-deck circle, and the women who work with him make a little
     game of backing him in skittering arcs around the room simply by taking one step closer every time he steps back.
    The older he gets, the more his feverish mental activities interfere with the selling of real estate. He is almost incapable
     of dealing with customers whose interests are, in his view, limited—that is, people who seem mainly interested in either
     buying or selling a house.
    If people are willing to discourse with him about the Hundred Years’ War or the fact that hippo jaws can easily crush a boat
     or how many of the twelve billion neurons in the human brain are firing at any given moment—if they are any fun to talk to
     during those long stretches of driving around in his car—he might be able to help them buy or sell a house.
    Mostly, though, he is doing a different kind of work—assembling some kind of Grand McEnroe Unified Theory of Everything.
    When he dies I inherit a series of late-in-life appointment books, in which startlingly few appointments are recorded but
     whose every page is crammed to the margins with