I was actually planning on posting this last Sunday, but other priorities came up. Still, the memories of writing this are so strong I had to put it up today. I hope you'll forgive the lateness of it. Frankly, a major reason I dithered with it, and didn't post it last Sunday is that it is among the most intensely personal pieces I've ever written. In fact, perhaps too personal. But I finally talked myself into it. I originally wrote this back in 2005. It's been rewritten somewhat for today.
Appropriately enough for Father’s Day, the subject is my own Dad. I hope to allow you not only to see into my mind here, but to let other fathers reading this see themselves a bit in it. And maybe, just maybe, help some kids understand Dad a bit better.
I’ve always considered it something of a cruel, ironic joke that Dad should have passed on so close, in the rolling year, to the day we’ve come to know as “Father’s Day”… a hair longer than a week before it. There seems no particular significance to the relationship between the dates, but there’s no denying their closeness has always left me vaguely uncomfortable, for reasons I’ve never fully worked out. Anyway;
I’ve come to understand quite a bit about my father in the last 25 years or so. Oddly, most of my understanding came after he’d died, and most of the revelations have been a result of my having lived life. He’s never far from my thoughts, and so as life events unfold, I always have his guidance nearby to lean on, and his guideposts to measure by. And, as I go through this process, I’m learning more about both who I am and who he was.
And, oh boy, has a lot ever happened since his death. Think about the changes in the last number of years in your own life. I suppose it could be fairly said that nothing has happened to me, though, that he hadn’t prepared me for. The funny part is I didn’t know I was being prepared for it at the time. I think he didn’t know what the future would bring either. All he could do was impart the basic values and hope I was able to apply them correctly.
What amazes me is how well I can hear his voice now, despite his having passed on so many years ago—better, in many ways, than I ever could while he was alive. Those of you who have lost a parent will understand what I’m saying here, I think. It is yet another cruel irony, I guess, that his voice seems to ring louder in my ears, in my head, since he's been gone… This is particularly true when value judgments come up. I suspect this is as it should be—those being his most important lessons—but I still marvel at it all.
I also, within the last several years, find myself dimly aware that I’ve managed to pick up some of the traits he had without trying. These are not things I’d picked up consciously. In fact, when I was 17, I think I might have made the choice to avoid these traits. Now at four times that age, I have long since begun to regard adopting these things as the natural progression… that all is as it should be.
Dad was a product of his times. This is a crucial point to me of late: it is the understanding of that one fact, because I still catch myself judging how I’ve done as a father, with my two boys, using his methods and his… (what I will call for simplicity, though I mean nothing so flippant)… style points… as guideposts… And usually, in my estimation, coming up well short of that ideal in the judgment. It’s taken me quite a while… more time than most, I tend to think… to understand that those style points are nigh on useless, given the difference between the times and situations in which we live now and the times then… that I have to look deeper than this. It’s something like allowing for inflation in an adjusted income figure over time; one adjusts the perception through for the times of each of us. There are more traits we share than we don’t.
I was reminded of this on a Father’s Day years ago, more than most days, as my two boys spent their day trying to make me feel special. I could see myself doing this at their age, and I marveled at how history repeats itself. Still do, really. They told me, “Happy Father’s Day!” and meant it, and other than “thank you” (and a hug), I found myself unsure how to respond.
If you really want to know the truth, I’ve never been fully comfortable in the role of “father,” because I’m never sure, even to this day, I can fill the role I knew as father… being, inside, the same scared-to-death twelve-year-old kid I was all those years ago. In thinking on this, I guess we none of us ever really grow up to the point where that small scared child is ever completely silent. We’d better hope not, anyway… that twelve-year-old kid is needed to keep us from falling into the Scrooge-like insanity I wrote about last Christmas. Still, we try to balance that twelve-year-old inside us with reality… a hellish task I don’t wish on anyone, but one we all face, I think.
An old Moody Blues tune comes into my mind, unbidden. It seems to speak to this situation rather clearly.
All my life, I
Never really knew me
’till today
Now, I know why;
I’m just another step
Along the way
…
I don’t know what I’m searching for
I never have opened the door,
Tomorrow might find me at last,
Turning my back on the past,
But, time will tell, of stars that fell,
A million years ago.
Memories can never take you back, home, sweet home.
You can never go home anymore.
That’s the reality that the twelve-year-old inside us doesn’t want to hear. But—I don’t care if you’re 105 years old—that twelve-year-old is still inside us. and still of a mindset that he’s waiting for his adult life to begin, and that mindset dims our vision to the reality that our adult life has already long since begun.
In many ways, I finally see this is a conflict we play out internally all our lives. Implicit in that understanding, however, is the recognition that, for all that I held him to be when I was a child, Dad still had that twelve-year-old in him, too. Like the milestone of years gone… like waking up in the morning through the aches and pains and understanding that the grey-bearded guy in the bathroom mirror really is me… it’s a startling discovery.
It’s amazing, if you think on it for very long… all our childhood, we champ at the bit like racehorses spoiling for a race to get started. Even at the very young ages, we yearn for adulthood… (“I’ll do it myself, Daddy…”) When we finally do get to adulthood, we end up spending a lot of our young adult lives in this in-between stage, not fully understanding that the green flag has dropped, the race is on, and the turtle’s already got a 30-length lead, mister rabbit… And some of us never do make it beyond this stage at all, on any level.
It’s what Justin Hayward of the Moodies was talking about in that same song I quoted before;
I lie awake for hours, I’m just waiting for the sign
When the journey we are making has begun,
Don’t deny the feeling that is stealing through your heart,
Every happy ending needs to have a start.
I can remember in my mid-40s hearing that song in my head and thinking I had finally found a working definition of a mid-life crisis: the feeling that I needed to get going on things because I was running out of time.
Such memories were in my thoughts this most recent Father’s Day. They are what I wanted to share with you today. I hope my thoughts have touched you in some way.
Happy belated Father’s Day, Dad. This is me saying, “I get it now… at least part of it… better than I did. We were more alike than I knew.” It’s my Father’s Day gift. More of you survives than either of us knew… and is with me every day.
And yet, I miss you.
