FOR FATHERS, FAUX AND TRUE
A few years after we started the Azalea City News, we branched out by starting another newspaper in Pensacola. A friend ran it. He stayed at my house in Fairhope and I stayed at the office in Mobile. One night he called me. It was near midnight and I was asleep. It was one of those inane conversations; "Hi. How are you doing?" I was brusque and I said "John what do you want?"
He hemmed and dodged the topic. He said he needed to talk to me. "Can it wait till tomorrow?" He said “no” and so an hour later he came over. He was real hesitant about the real purpose of his visit but finally blurted out "Your dad's dead."
I asked him who had called and from what he told me I could tell it was my stepdad. I said “good, I hated that son of a bitch.” He was stunned. He's a middle-class kid and didn’t come from a dysfunctional family and, of course, he had just made an hour trip to come tell me this. I told him I appreciated his kindness but that the old man and I didn’t exactly have a Leave it to Beaver relationship.
Eight or nine years later, I was in my nearly-completed first semester of my first year of law school when they called me out to the office. Dad had died. That was a Friday. I was on my way back to Mobile and I remember crying all the back and being very upset; like my father had just died.
I had actually seen my father twice as a little boy. The first time I was probably five or six years old. My mom and I had been walking around in New York somewhere. My mother, who was given to hysterics anyway, jumped back as we passed in front of a barbershop. “Oh my gosh. There he is.” We skulked around and left hurriedly as she was deathly afraid of him.
The only other time I saw him as a young child was when he was in a courtroom. It had something to do with divorce, protection from abuse or child custody or something. I was too young in both instances to get anything out of those encounters. He was a missing link for most of my life.
I finally met him for real when I was 16 and living in Puerto Rico. I even moved in with him for a short period of time. It didn’t work out. I went into the service and never really reconnected with him. My stepfather had died in 1975, the same year my son Zack was born. That was the year I discovered true love. I have never loved anything more, except for my other son.
In those intervening eight to nine years between their deaths, I had managed to put a few wrinkles into my own life story; I got a divorce, my wife and Zack moved away and my karma, which wasn’t always the epitome of parental selflessness, came home to haunt me. I lay awake in my uncomfortable bed.
And it was this change in my life - knowing true love and understanding that even for the people you love most in life one can be a failure, the transition from complainant to petitioner - that helped me make peace with my fathers. It was when I was making excuses for myself that I realized that parents have their own set of problems and their own ways of dealing with things. Moments pass, situations change, and humans move on.
My father had moved on. He had changed his ways, had returned to Puerto Rico, embraced evangelical Christianity, raised a large family and had even tried to do right by me. (I did end up with a great relationship with my brothers and sisters and spent a wonderful year discovering the rural Puerto Rican culture.) I understand why I had been upset about my father dying. He had been my Holy Grail, a fantasy model for a different childhood, and then, he was gone.
My epiphany was when I happened on a peace with my stepfather and It was like stepping on a landmine. He had tried to make amends with me after I came back from the service. He told everybody how proud he was of me, his "son". He probably meant it. He tried, he really did. But I could never forgive him for all the pettiness and cruelty that he had shown me while I was growing up, something I try to keep in mind when I deal with children, whether they’re my own or just on my watch.
But, inexplicably, I came to appreciate how much he had done for me: How he would get up in the wee hours of the morning and trudge off to work, never missing a day because someone had to pay the bills for his uber large family; That I had shared all of the important moments in my life with him; That he had been there in my emergencies, for my Christmases, proms, etc. So, this Father’s Day I salute the ones who have donated something more important than consanguinity, the ones who have earned the sweat equity of respect.
