Father for A Year
The Father's Day Blues
Early Spring always brings it on. It starts around the end of May... May being a good month, holiday-wise. It contains Mother's Day and my mother's birthday. Both happy occasions. My mother loves May! But, after May comes June, and with June comes Father's Day.
I was well into my twenties when I met my father. My mother had left him in Ohio when I was just two weeks old and we'd flown out to Southern California, where her brother had already relocated. Apparently, my father was OK with this as he'd never tried to contact her or me in any way, not once during all those years. I simply grew up without a father. It was the only way I'd ever known. I knew he was alive and if I'd ask about him my questions were answered with unbiased honesty. He was never bad-mouthed... at least not in front of me.
Then, one day, I knew it was time to meet him. My mother knew how to reach his family, and she told me, later, the look in my eyes when I told her I needed to see him was a look she couldn't deny. So she found him.
He was in an Ohio prison, serving time for some white-collar crime - something to do with securities, I think. The Ohio prison officials agreed to release him early - to my custody - provided he flew here immediately upon release and stayed. And, my mother was willing to give him another chance. Many years had passed. People change, grow, mature.
How many red flags have you spotted so far? Yeah, me too. But, a young man about to meet his father for the first time doesn't care about red flags. He just wants a dad.
The reunion was great and all went well for a few months. But, my father was still in his hey-day in the 1950s, ...and this was the 1980s. He dressed, talked, walked and acted like a 50s teenager, with the same mentality. I knew, way before the big argument and he moved out, that it wasn't going to work between him and mom. Although he'd been remarried, had 3 children (I have two brothers and a sister I've never met, and most likely never will) and been divorced, he was still a child. While my mother had raised three children, mostly on her own.
He wound up a couple miles away, in a one-bedroom apartment. He had no job, but had taken full advantage of every social and welfare system Lane County Oregon had to offer. He negotiated his through these systems with well-rehearsed expertise.
My blood-brother, Dan, and I would go visit him now and then. There was always a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 in his fridge, so we'd drink and talk. During this time I remember wanting to go see him more often, but I was also disappointed in him. He didn't seem to be interested in getting to know who I was, and I knew the only reason he was there, in the same city as me, was because I'd gotten him out of prison. But, he did come to see me play a couple of times, when my road band was working at one of the local clubs. The last time, he got up on-stage and, with a cracking voice said, "That's my son."
A few months after that, when I got home from fishing the Willamette river on a Summer's day, there was a police officer waiting for me. My father had suffered a massive heart attack and was dying.
Once at the hospital, my mother and I were lead to a big emergency room containing several tables. On one of these tables was my father. As I stood looking down at this man I barely knew, this man who was about to leave me forever before I'd gotten the chance to get to know who he was, I broke down and backed away from the table. I stood in the middle of that busy emergency room crying hard as my mother held me. I could hear the doctors and nurses around us, going about their business, seemingly unconcerned that my father was about to die. They must have been so used to this. Just another day.
We sat in the chapel across the hall til he died. I couldn't watch. But, in contrast, had it been my mother in there, I wouldn't have left her side. I didn't love this man as a son should love his father. I'd never gotten the chance.
Dan spoke at his viewing. I had nothing to say. Just emptiness.
I know I must have felt something for this man, because over twenty years later I'm still affected by the Father's Day Blues.
