Difficulty With Dad

I wasn't there that morning

When my Father passed away

I didn't get to tell him

All the things I had to say

I think I caught his spirit

Later that same year

I'm sure I heard his echo

In my baby's newborn tears

I just wish I could have told him in the living years.  

(From the album The Living Years {1988} by Mike and the Mechanics) 

When I first heard this song, it hit me hard.  Dad passed away ten years before this song came out on the radio when members of the rock band Genesis had taken a hiatus to do some side projects such as Mike and the Mechanics which featured Mike Ruthford from Genesis and Paul Carrack on lead vocals.  It was about a father and son not seeing eye to eye.  Did these guys watch me grow up?  Did these guys get the fact my father and I had a falling out just a few days short of when mom called to let me know my father had passed away.  I was selling life insurance in Concord, North Carolina at the time.  Syracuse, New York, had nothing to offer me when I graduated from high school, so my wife and I decided to move down there where she had an uncle.  I did it because I had a problem with my father and we had fought for what seemed like over five years.  He had three heart attacks and after one of them, I whispered, “I wish that heart attack would have killed you.”

My mom heard me and let me have both barrels.  She didn’t need to, because as soon as the words came out of my mouth, I knew I’d regret it and I did. I was right on that account.  Just because I had a difficult time with dad, did not mean I hated him and in fact I loved him.  I loved him very much, but it just seemed I could not live with him.  Now as I look back, I realize how much I have grown to miss him.  He never had the chance to meet his grandson or granddaughter

Mom paid for the trip home, so his three sons could be at his funeral.  Now when I say mom, keep in mind, Carole married my dad when I was five years old, because the mother God gave me had passed away when I was three years old.  Dad never forgave my mom for taking all of her antidepressant pills with a couple bottles of whiskey until her heart stopped.  I was told that she was trying to stop the pain in the only way anyone knew how at the time and she did not expect to pass away since no one had told her what could happen.  I found her on the stairs and tried to wake her up and could not understand why she wouldn’t even when her eyes were open, but when you are only three, the world does not make sense all the time. 

So now dad, a Certified Public Accountant, was stuck with a three year old and was not prepared to handle my behavior and being the precocious child I was, I gave him a lot of unexpected episodes. So when he started dating Carole, it was only a matter of time before he married her and then I got two half brothers out of the deal.  I remember repeating to Carole over and over, “I love my daddy’s cooking.”  But then she asked if I wanted to go out to eat and I put on my coat without further prompting. This was a man who had grown up during the Great Depression and wasting food was a major sin with him.  So one night when I would not eat my peas, he put them in the refrigerator and then served them to me for breakfast with milk on them as if the peas were cereal.  Carole was outraged with him and that’s when I decided I really liked her, a lot. 

While we were trying to be a happy, Leave it to Beaver family, things were starting to change, not just in me, but in the world as well. First of all my brothers were a lot younger than me and doing things I had done alone without a mom.  I did not want to do them all over again.  I had other interests  .

It wasn’t until the hormones kicked in and every day on the news Walter Cronkite brought us images of American boys dying in Vietnam followed by stories of protesting at major universities.  

“Damn kids should be grateful they have the freedom to protest.” He would grumble since he was a veteran of the Korean War.  I found a storage unit in the basement where there was an army uniform hanging and on the pocket were two Purple Hearts.  I removed them and put them on my shirt, but when he saw me, he became very angry and told me to leave that stuff alone, but I don’t think he said “stuff.” 

In sixth grade, I began attending St. Matthews which was a parochial school with Franciscan nuns teaching the elementary classes.  I decided to become an altar boy and I joined the Boy Scouts.  In becoming active, I developed other interests so that when I went to Bishop Grimes, I wanted to join the football team.  I had the size, but lacked both any sort of speed or “killer instinct.”  Because the rest of the team was half my physical size, the other team would double team me and I’d spend the rest of the game buried under a human pile forced to eat dirt.

At this point, dad had his first heart attack and life changed.  Nobody told me about degenerative heart failure.  Our family never spoke of bad news and for years I believed my mother had committed suicide due to her depression.  When I asked dad about the purple hearts, he laughed and told me he was a desk jockey.  He was at Pusan where the North Koreans had boxed in the allied forces. I can’t imagine now, some Radar O’Riley sitting at a desk while enemy ordinance was falling all around.  There were stories that he just did not want to tell.  And this malfunction of his heart was something that would go on the list of things we never talked about.  Sure talk about my football team or one of my classes, but anything that caused emotional distress was not for family discussion, because my brothers were too young to deal with it.

I will say my dad, George, Senior was a very complex man with a very interesting backstory, but that will be for another time.  In retrospect, I think that the problem that developed after I turned fourteen developed from my discovery of John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band after the Beatles broke up listening to “Working Class Hero” in his get back song against Paul McCartney...listen to it and you will see and the second thing was I began to grow my hair long.  We did have rules, but I developed an attitude as a rule breaker.  Keep in mind this was in the final years of the Vietnam War when Richard Nixon was president and people were wearing bell bottoms and wide collars.  To my father, these new fads were ridiculous.  Having grown up in rural upstate New York, he was a pragmatic man who had based his whole life in facts and figures, because he did not have time for frivolity.  Me, my whole life was built on imagination and frivolity.  In his effort to shield me from the harsh realities of life, he was partially to blame for my lackadaisical attitude.  I find it’s always easier to blame others for your shortcomings. 

In my junior year, I began to fail geometry and by the end of the quarter, my dad became furious when I brought home my first F on my report card.  I was taken off the football team which was no big deal since the season was one game from being over and I was not a starter on the team anyway.  There was something about Geometry I was not good at, let me rephrase that, I was not good at math as years later, I would discover I had a problem with inverting numbers known as dysgraphia.  No one caught this until I was in the military and my subordinate told me that I copied all the phone numbers down wrong.  I wished I had known this when I was in school.  But I digress…

After getting at D in Geometry at the end of the year, my father removed me from Bishop Grimes and put me at East Syracuse-Minoa for my senior year.  This I thought was the worst thing that could ever happen, but as it turned out it was when my life turned around.  It started when I went into open auditions with the theater group and walked away with the male lead for the play, I Remember Mama.”  As it turned out I became a valued member of this group and redid my shattered ego from not becoming the next football star.  As the year went on, I did more and more stuff with the theater group, but one night we had a late rehearsal of Thurber Carnival where the director needed all hands on deck and my father came marching in at 10:30 pm to “collect me” and take me home.  I had never been so vilified in my life and even to this day, I still think about that moment.  If you have ever seen Dead Poets Society, the part where Neil’s father comes in to remove him from the school after he defies his father by acting in the theater production as Puck in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream that’s a close as I can come to describing it except I did not take my father’s gun and shoot myself (spoiler alert).  

The topper was when one of my friends from the group got himself a Studebaker and fixed it up so it could run again.  This was after graduation and we were cruising Syracuse like a couple of cool dudes, when he looked at me and said, “Hey you want to go to Canada?”  

He had a friend up there who bought a case of Molson's and he had a pound of good weed.  His friend’s father had a cabin on a beautiful lake, as most lakes in Canada are and I looked back at him and said, “Sure.” 

Off we went, a four hour drive that got us there at two in the morning.  So he pulled over at this closed service station and I slept in the back while he dealt with the steering wheel in the front.  It was not a very comfortable night’s sleep, but in less than ten minutes we were at the cabin.  I would not even refer to the weekend as a Roman Holiday since it was nothing but smoking and drinking and using the rope swing to dive into the lake in mid-October when the week before it had been close to freezing, but when you are as numb as we were, you don’t notice the cold until you walk out of the water into hypothermia.  What a great weekend this was.  Over forty years later I still remember it or most of it.  

What I also remember was when I got home.  My father would not let me in the house.  His lecture was hard to hear since it involved my mother calling in a missing person’s report.  My brother, who would get his doctorate in biology before his bipolar ruined his life, vividly remembers the lecture which most of the neighborhood was able to hear as well. Memory quick dissipates from there, but I wound up having to get my own place as I had just turned eighteen.  

Life would get interesting when I fell in love for the first time in my life.  I wound up getting a job at Friendly’s, but without a car, I had to ride the bus with people who weren’t exactly on the same planet I was at times.  Reality came crashing down on me, but I was free to do what I wanted, but the only problem was, I did not have the money to do what I wanted.  

Being in love meant that I had a little more freedom, because my girlfriend had a car and so nowhere was out of reach. In June, I announced that we planned on getting married.  Her father, an immigrant from Sicily, had quite a temper and on Easter, threw the ham across the table and then hit his wife.  I had to leave, feeling like I was going to throw up.

“This is what it’s like to live here.” She said with tears in her eyes.

We got married in June on the centennial of the Battle of Little Bighorn, which should have sent a red flag up the pole. We were married in St. Matthew’s Catholic Church where I had served mass as an altar boy.  My brother, who was an usher, passed out before the end of the ceremony, a full face plant on the altar.   My father-in-law yanked my mother-in-law right out of the pew when he was ready to go.  

Two months later, we packed the car and drove down to Kannapolis, North Carolina where we both would get jobs in Cannon Mills. I lasted there about a year before moving on to other things like selling insurance door to door.  It was a few months in when I got a phone call from my mother, “Your father passed away last night.”

I had no warning that he was having difficulties, but he was just forty seven years old and did not smoke, which by the way, I was smoking.  I started when the boss kicked me in the boot.

“Whacha doin?” He asked.

“Reading.” I answered looking up at him.

“You can’t read.” He squawked.

“Why not?  Everyone on the crew is on a smoke break.” I jerked my thumb toward the smoke break area where they had gathered and were laughing.

“Smoke break means you go and smoke.” He shook his head walking away.

A pack of cigarettes were twenty five cents a pack in North Carolina and thus began my smoking habit.

We flew back to Syracuse, hundreds of people filed into his wake.  I had worked a summer at Edward Joy Lighting and some of the warehouse crew pulled me aside and the foreman said, choking back his tears, “Your old man was the best.  He treated us like we were human which is a lot more than I could say about the rest of the suits.”

We had a swig of some whiskey he had, “To your dad.” 

“To dad.” The stuff burned every inch of the way down, but I was beginning to understand something I had missed about him, because I was so close to him. He was a decent man and did what he said he was going to do without hesitation. He had earned the respect of blue and white collared people he had worked for and with.  Our family tradition has been a history of big confrontations with our fathers that went back at least three generations to which I blame on my stubborn Scottish heritage and no it does not skip a generation either.  Dad told his father that he was going to college and when he woke up from the blow his father delivered him, he attended Syracuse University where he graduated Valedictorian and met my mother.  She was from a very prestigious family who had come crashing down to earth after the Depression.  She would go on to become an elementary school teacher. I was only three years old when she passed away, so I do not remember that much about her.

A month later, I was sitting in a church in Charlotte when I heard his voice as plain as any, “I’m alright.  No more pain.  Don’t worry about me.”

I started to cry.  My wife asked me what was wrong and I told her that dad was happy.  She held my hand for the rest of mass.  

I wish that this story has a happy ever after ending, but that would be a lie as I enlisted in the United States Air Force the following year where after working hard, I achieved honor graduate.

“Your dad would be so proud of you.  I wish he could hear.” Mom said when I told her the news.

“I’m sure he already knows.” I acknowledged when I hung up the phone.  

Full circle is how we travel in life.  We may think we are walking a straight path, but I know it’s a circle just like Harry Chapin used to sing, “All my life’s a circle…” 

My wife enlisted in the Air Force the following year and got orders to George Air Force Base, California, but we wound up divorcing the following year. Dad was right, we got married too young.  We hadn’t finished growing into the people we were supposed to be. 

I left George, Air Force Base behind and moved onto KI Sawyer in Upper Michigan.  After that it was on to Korea where my father had served his country during the war. There were some places I could hear him speaking to me about his time over there. It never ceases to amaze how our life goes full circle.