THE DREAMS OF MIKE SANTINO

I’m kind of the family weirdo. The purple sheep of the family, if you will. That isn’t to say that my family doesn’t have its share of oddballs. For sure, they do. But they’re kind of weird in an everyday, journeyman sense. I’m “probably going to end up on the news one day” weird.

There’s a gap between me and the people I love. They love me. They just don’t understand me.

Maybe the biggest gap has always been between me and my old man. Don’t get me wrong, my Dad is weird in his own way. He’s a bit of a character. Those who know me best have heard more than a few hilarious stories about my Pop. A couple of them are legendary. Yet he’s always been a pretty normal, blue collar guy.

When I was young, he was a mechanic. After school, I would sometimes get dropped off at his work and have to wait in the tiny waiting room with only four old, worn out chairs, a gumball machine and an antenna television that only seemed to play soap operas. Every once in a while one of the other mechanics would walk through, look at me and say “What’s happening, Little Eskimo?”

My father is a first generation American. My grandfather came from the Philippines around World War II. I assume the men that worked there didn’t know what a Filipino was, so they called him Eskimo. Which made me Little Eskimo. Yes, my first nickname was kind of racist, but I liked being Little Eskimo. It implied a similarity between me and my Pop that I never really felt. Even at that very young age, I knew I wasn’t anything like him.

Pop was a guy who worked with his hands. I was a little boy who just wanted to be one of the Dukes of Hazzard. He watched the Saints and loved to fish. To this day, I hate both of those things.

Once, he actually tried to bribe me into enjoying fishing. I was probably 7 or 8 years old. He told me that if I went fishing with him and caught the biggest fish, he would give me five dollars. This was a king’s ransom for a little boy in those days. The weird part? I won the bet. I caught a giant redfish! He got like five filets off this one catch. True to his word, Pop paid me my five bucks and we had fried redfish for dinner. While we were eating, he looked at me and asked “you ready to go fishing again next weekend??”

I didn’t even pause. “Nope.”

And I never went fishing again. I got the five bucks and I basically caught Jaws. There was nothing left to conquer.

Now that I’m much older, I often wonder if my old man hadn’t pulled a fast one and somehow tricked me into thinking I’d caught the fish so I would be excited about fishing. If he did, it’s a much better story.

No, we never had much in common, except a love for motorcycles. It’s the only thing of his that I took to, though he did cheat a bit. He had me on the back of his old Yamaha bike from the time I could walk.

In every other notable way, we were opposites. But over the years, I’ve come to understand him better. At least I thought so.

One day, not so long ago, he was over at the house working on something or other. Maybe the washing machine? Whatever. It was something I wasn’t wired to do. Somewhere during his chatting, he said something strange.

“Ever since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to go to Yellowstone Park.”

I know that might sound mundane to most. But in my forty plus years, I had never heard him talk like that. Eskimo Senior was not the sort of man you would expect to have dreams. The man doesn’t like going around the corner, much less across the country. But as dreams go, this one was pretty achievable.

Or so I thought. When I questioned him further, he declared that he would not fly there. The man wants to drive from New Orleans to Jackson, Wyoming. “Well Dad, I guess some dreams don’t come true.”

That was a few years ago. His mother— my grandmother —had died not long before then, at the age of 92. One of my regrets was not asking Grandma more questions. I asked things occasionally when I would visit. But I didn’t write them down, or heaven forbid, record them. For instance, when I found out that my Uncle Danny was actually Uncle Maurice. I asked her why he was called Danny. I don’t remember what the answer was… but it was ridiculous. And I wish I had recorded it, because no one else remembers. They all just continue to call him Danny as if it were a perfectly normal nickname.

I didn’t ask enough questions with the time we had. But it was far more than I’d ever had the chance to ask my Grandfather. He had dementia when I was little and died when I was ten. I’ve long suspected this was a man whose story deserved to be told. He was a little Asian guy who came to America in the 1940s and married a white woman. I have to imagine his life was wild. And unfortunately he didn’t like talking to his kids about the old country. Those stories may be lost forever.

All of this makes me think about my Pop. Like maybe I should take that road trip with him. Not just for him. Maybe I need to do it for me as well. So that one day I’m not asking myself why I didn’t ask some question or another.

And in the end, I’m a storyteller. And I think this is a story that needs to be told.