A Salesman's Secret

          Growing up, I knew there were things that my dad was keeping from me. Some of the things were unintentional. Things like what he was like as a kid, the name of his first girlfriend, or what his first rock concert was. I wrote these things off because he’s a dad, and it’s common knowledge that a good number of dads don’t naturally give in to talking much about the past.
          But then there were things that I knew he was keeping from me on purpose, things that were inappropriate or embarrassing. Like how much of a party animal he was during college or how he sang high tenor in the high school choir and never again after that. I managed to find out some of this stuff along the way. But then, when I was twenty-four years old, the bomb dropped.

          One night, after dinner with my parents and some neighbors, and after a couple more rounds of drinks, my mom let it slip that my dad used to sell balls. Testicles. Clear silicone implants. It was his first sales job in the medical world, and apparently he ended up representing the rubber uncomfortables division, peddling these fake balls, along with silicone breast implants, from hospital to hospital.
          “Your dad used to put the fake boob samples on the dash of his car!” my mom told me. “And they would jiggle around. And,” she said “he would put the fake balls in peoples' drinks as a joke. They looked like ice cubes!”

Sitting there at twenty-four years old, I watched my dad chuckle and blush and shake his head like I had seen him do so often. And I knew then that, despite how much I probed or investigated or imagined, there would always be things I, the son of a testicle peddler, would never know about my dad.