Pop

Pop wasn't a lovable guy. He didn't want to be lovable. He wanted to do something better for his kids. He wanted them to have something better than he had, and he did that in the only way he knew how.

He was brought up to understand and respect his parents, and to do what they expected of him. In this way he brought joy into their lives and he brought success into his own. He felt no particular joy or happiness himself in doing this. He just knew he was expected to do the things he was expected to do, and he did them. I guess he felt a sort of satisfaction in doing that.

He married young, as his parents did, and started a family as he was expected to do. His son came in 1963, and his daughter came three years later. He went to work, earned his money and bought the things that he expected would make life whole. His parents were happy, and he was satisfied, and the early years of his children were confusing but he went to work and bought more of the things that made life whole.

Things did not turn out as they did for his parents. His wife was not of the fifties. She was of the 60s & 70s, and she wanted equality, the right to vote, zen, parties and an expanded mind. He wanted a wife to take care of his children while he worked and brought home the things that made life whole. She divorced him instead,

This was the beginning of many, many confusing & frustrating years for pop. He believed in responsibility and hard work. He believed in the things his father had told him, that these things brought their own rewards, so he worked.

The divorce was finalized, he received custody of their son, while his ex-wife retained custody of their daughter. There was no loss of love between mom and pop in divorce. His son had developed mental problems early on, during his developmental years, and pop did not understand these things at all. He believed in the ways of his father and did not know of psychiatrists or psychologists or therapists ("shrinks"). He was from a simpler time. A sink or swim time. A work was its own reward time.

He tried to instill these things into his son day after day, month after month. The boy was bullied and unable to maintain a place among his peers. Pop tried everything he knew to push, pull, tug & kick his boy up onto his own two feet, but his efforts only exacerbated his son's problems. Pop asked for help. He placed his son into a private school, and relented by sending the boy to therapists.

The boy turned to alcohol and drugs as an answer to the turmoil in his mind. This of course alienated any relationship this young man may have had with anyone, because once addiction and addictive personality took over, everybody & everything else was either in his way or a means to his own ends. Pop assumed his boy was lost and would spend some nights saddened by this fact. He took responsibility for his son's inability to function as a young man, and he continued working toward the things that make life whole.

Regardless of the behavior & frustrations his son exhibited, pop continued day after day, getting up, leaving a breakfast for his son, going to work and allowing his son to make his own way. He came to his son's soccer games at school, coached his son's little leage, and gave his son a car when he was 16, then ran to the hospital when his son crashed the car & injured himself, bailed him out of jail, as well as trouble at school; and finally made a deal with the local police to pay for his way out to California, where his mother lived, when he was arrested with a sufficient amount of drugs to warrant a felony conviction.

None of this changed the outcome of his son's life, or the fact that he went on to spend a subsequent 25 years in California's prison system. Nothing changed at all. Pop continued to work until his retirement. He moved with his second wife to North Carolina to life out his life. Pop's daughter went to work everyday, and started a family that was unfortunately cut short & broken apart when her husband died of cancer shortly after their first child, a boy, was born. Pop's son remained in prison until 2013, at which time he was released and continues to work on mental and post traumatic problems,

Somewhere over the past twenty or thirty years, the family has gone through a wide spectrum of emotions and realizations in their individual understanding of themselves & relationships to each other. One of those was the son's realization that his father was not an unreasonable man, or an enemy. He was a man who tripped somewhere over the generational gap and fell in. After he had climbed his way out he deserved all the respect & love a father is due for bringing up a son because he was always there, even if his son had to deal with many things alone.

Pop did what he did for his family, and when his family fell apart, regardless of the reasons, he continued to do what he did for his family. He did what the courts told him to do, did what he could do fo his daughter, and he provided the best he could for his son, who despite the trauma & torment he subjected himself to over the years ultimately came to realize there are superheroes, and there are those who come to the aid of others, and all along his hero was right in front of him, as was the best man he could have known: his own father.

Life doesn't always have a beginning or an ending. It doesn't always favor or disfavor anybody. It just is, and it is in the end the sum of the collection of experiences, actions & agendas. No winners or losers, but sometimes there are heroes.