Fathers and sons

I’ve debated and struggled with the topic of this entry for several weeks now. I need to write it and yet I can’t seem to start writing it. I’ve written out portions of it in my mind; I’ve tossed out ideas. It’s very hard because it’s a very sensitive subject: my late father who passed away in 1992, and my lifelong troubled relationship with him.

To sum things up very succinctly, I was the first-born child, we never got along, we argued a lot, he sought to diminish and denigrate me when I was growing up because I didn’t turn out the way he wanted, and he felt threatened from my earliest childhood because my mother’s attention necessarily turned to me instead of being focused on him all the time. I was always a good student but never the athlete he wished I could have been. This was born out time and again in failed attempts following his coercive “suggestions” for me to join this Little League baseball team or that basketball team, or yet again a competitive country club swim team. For three summers competing on that team I lost every race I was in and suffered terrible humiliation and loss of self-esteem because although I tried hard, I was just no good at that. And so it went. I retreated into myself and had few friends.

I think all children want to please their parents, but I never could. I don’t recall any positive response or encouragement from my father for all my hard work and good grades in school. This is rather ironic because my father was quite an intelligent and well-read man. He became a very successful attorney and practiced law, mostly as a trial lawyer, for almost 40 years. Always an inquisitive child and intellectually curious from an early age (I joined the Doubleday Dollar Book club when I was 11 and remember purchasing H.G. Wells’ “An Outline of History,” which I still have today). I admired my father’s bookshelves full of books and the many magazines he subscribed to including Harper’s,The Atlantic, New Republic, Newsweek, Life and others. I’ve subscribed and read all of those over the decades since I was first exposed to them in my youth. But we never discussed anything because discussions always devolved into arguments. He was never wrong. It’s almost humorous now when I look back and realize, even as I approach the age at which he died, that I was mostly right in my positions when I defended them as a teenager. I was conscientious and had a strong moral sense and an understanding of what constituted injustice. I guess you could say I was one of those “old souls.” I never related that well to kids my own age. I certainly never had a “ normal “ adolescence at all.

The best times with my father were always when we drove to South Carolina for summer and Christmas vacations in the 1950s and 1960s. Dad was more relaxed and not as eaten up by stress and tension from his work as a trial lawyer. He used to take my brother and I on side trips to Myrtle Beach which was so much fun. He’d also take us to a state park where we could swim in the lake there and also to an old mill pond where we loved to swim and dive on hot summer days before heading back to my aunt’s house for a huge Southern midday dinner. My father could also be very funny. On trips to the beach he would honk the horn on our ’56 Chevy Bel-Air and wave to strangers sitting on the porches or working in their yards or fields . One lady was so surprised she dropped a basket of beans she was picking. Invariably they’d wave back at us figuring it must be someone they knew. My brother and I, 9 and 11 years old, found this quite hilarious and laughed until tears rolled down our cheeks. Or at least I did. I thought it was very funny. So he could definitely make us laugh. And, he loved to tell corny jokes from the comedian Henny Youngman over and over.

In adulthood there was one, and only one thing, that we truly could relate to and laugh about, and it was a saving grace, in a sense. I’m referring to the comic strip, “Drabble,” which I’m sure a lot of people don’t even know about. It is drawn by Kevin Fagan. In a caricatured way, of course, the characters resembled me, my father, my younger brother and mother. We could see our family in that strip in a very humorous way. Dad would sometimes mail me a batch of Drabble strips he’d clipped out of the newspaper. I’d ask him if he’d read the latest Drabble, and we’d laugh. That simple cartoon always seemed to temporarily dissolve our differences in the humor of situations that are universal in family life. That’s what made the strip so special. About 20 years ago, long after my father had died, I emailed Kevin Fagan thanking him for Drabble and explaining how much it meant to me and my father and why. I received a very gracious reply from him.

So, we had times when relations were more normal between father and son. But as I got older the happy summer memories began to seem quite distant. I attended a commuter college in New Orleans but lived in the dorm. It was unthinkable that I would live at home after I graduated from high school. All during my adult years my visits were tolerated but never welcomed or enjoyed. Imagine how difficult this was for my mother who loved us children dearly but saw me only infrequently. The one exception was when I was recovering from a major episode of depression and had lost my job because of it and returned home to recover. He was good to me then, to his credit, and I made a remarkable recovery in that Spring of 1979, nearly 40 years ago.. But when I was in my 30s and 40s, the old antagonisms returned. However, one thing he didn’t want me to be was unemployed, so whenever he could he’d use his connections and get me temporary jobs.

Looking back now and writing this just before Christmas 2018, I understand more then ever how complicated our relationship was. Basically I didn’t live up to his expectations, whatever those were, but I think in an unspoken way he respected the fact that I majored in English in college, became a newspaper writer and editor, and taught school for a while. I’ve had some varied and very interesting jobs and careers.

But there was always some caveat when it came to any type of praise or recognition from him. I remember so well our last visit together at the homestead in New Orleans. It was the Autumn of 1991, and he had less than a year to live after his long struggle with cancer. I had just left South Carolina after serving for a very brief time as the editor of a small weekly newspaper and was unemployed and planning to travel west to seek new opportunities. No plans at all to stay in New Orleans. I could write a book about my tenure in that small town — many good and enjoyable experiences, but underlying those were the bad, frightening, and just very strange and bizarre experiences and people. In some respects it was the quintessential small town, but in orber aspects the place was like some bad Southern gothic dream. A very long story, as I say. But as a one-person news and editorial team, I was proud that I managed to put out a paper every week with the help of some truly outsranding people. I wrote a weekly column that was my forum for the type of essay writing on any subject I wanted to delve into that particular week. There wasn’t anything controversial in those columns. The writing didn’t push any boundaries. But for better or worse, it was me — my thoughts and opinions on a variety of topics. One day I gave my father a zeroxed copy of a compilation of my favorite columns. A couple of days later I asked him what he thought of them. He replied with only these words: “Some were better than others.”

I’ve been corresponding with an old friend from high school the past couple of years, and we’ve written at lot to each other about our parents. This has been very therapeutic for me. As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, it’s a very personal and private subject, and of course, I’m leaving a lot out. But in this correspondence I’ve been blunt and have tried to be quite candid in my feelings about my father, 26 years after he died.

In 1989 Dad was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, and lived three years after that. I happened to be in the kitchen the day he got the news on a rare visit to our house, and heard the phone call between he and my mother. She sounded devastated. I was stunned and a bit numb. Here is some of what I wrote in a recent letter to my friend about that time period:

…even today, 26 years after he died, I haven’t quite come to terms with our very troubled and even toxic relationship. When he was dying of multiple myeloma, I was in Seattle and had very little contact with him. When I came home to visit him in the hospital in New Orleans near the end, I told him I loved him and tried to gain some kind of closure, but he never apologized for all the grief he put me through. However, I think, and want to hope, that there was some unspoken attempt to reach out to me in that regard. I never missed him when he was gone, and don’t to this day. I try not to ever discuss him or criticize him. What I try to do is figure it out and be forgiving of him and of myself. I certainly was not blemish-free in that relationship…”

One of the very hardest things to do in life is to forgive when we feel we’ve been terribly hurt. So it is with my father, but I’m finally starting to get some real closure and to realize that forgiveness is the only way out.

I recall vividly the day he died, and I heard the news from my mother by phone from where I was living near Seattle. Later that afternoon I was driving toward the waterfront to walk and try to collect my thought and emotions. I remember looking up at the unusual clouds, and felt a warm glow of hope and comfort surround me as sunbeams descended from the sky. Since then I always look at sunbeams, miraculous as they are, in a different light.

So what prompted me to think about this subject and at last write this entry? I read “The Upper Room” devotional for November 27, my father’s birthday, and encountered these remarkable words from writer Darlene S. Mackey:

When I was a child, I thought that God was actually in the streams of light that sometimes break through the clouds in the sky. It seemed to me that God was trying to reach down from Heaven to earth to comfort and reassure us, even on those cloudy and overcast days. In the time since those naïve childhood days, I’ve learned that those rays of light are just the sunbeams breaking through, [but] as I’ve matured in my faith, I’ve returned to some elements of my childhood wonder. I’ve come to believe that God is present in all things —even in the streams of light that sometimes break through the clouds…”

When I feel that bitterness creeping back and I want to blame my father for the ways I’ve failed to be what I wanted to be, and for just failing in so many areas, I know a sunbeam will appear again in the sky for me to see and photograph. I will be reminded that we are called to forgive, even if we don’t understand fully why, and that we can truly view the past with more enlightened eyes

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