As most of my friends and family know, I’m not really the kind of person who is comfortable with one-on-one sap, sentimentality, or pretty much any situation in which sarcasm cannot be comfortably interjected. I’ve been told that I’m “not genuine” and “difficult to get to know”. I would tend to agree with these people though I admit that I am myself confounded by my own discomfort in these situations.
At any rate, this state of affairs led to a conundrum last week when my father finally lit out for the Afghan territories. I went down my emotional checklist and ticked off the following: anxiety, fear, an odd sense of homesickness for my dad. Somewhere in the miasma floated the notion that he is too old for this crap, that after nearly forty years in the service my dad should have been spared deployment and allowed to remain home with his fiancee and grandchildren. (And yes, we’ve covered this territory in the last blog, haven’t we? To bitch about his decision to make the military a career would be disrespectful. So he goes to South Asia and we wait at home and take comfort in the fact that mandatory retirement will ensure that this will be the final deployment of his career.)
All of this was complicated by the fact that just days prior to his departure my dad called me up to apologize for not being a good father. (What?!?!) Seems he’s been carrying a lot of pent-up guilt because he believes he yelled at us too much, didn’t spend enough time with us, didn’t pay for me to go to college. The apology for what he envisions as his insurmountable faults as a father were disconcerting enough without the note of finality throughout the call itself: it was as if her were saying a few final words. You know, “just in case”.
At any rate, all the weird mental crap that accompanies watching your father go off to war and having those ”just in case” phone calls is really poorly expressed in person when you are as emotionally maladjusted as I am. Finally, someone I knew gave me an idea: write a letter to him. Tell him not to open it until he is a world away, say six thousand miles. Or several time zones. Or Oklahoma.
So here’s the letter, which I’m posting on the internet for the world to see because I am emotionally inept and putting this on a public forum makes perfect sense in some odd dimension that has yet to be uncovered by science:
Dad,
The other day you apologized for yelling at us when we were kids. This is not the first time you’ve apologized for what you think are your enormous parental shortcomings.
Please stop carrying those regrets around. You were a wonderful father. You still are. For decades you did your best and all of us kids could see that as plain as day. No matter what the situation you always weighed your options and erred on the side of trying to do the “right” thing, even when the “right” thing wasn’t the “fun” thing, the “easy” thing, or the most “expedient” thing. Just in case you hadn’t noticed, having a dad who does the right thing and sets that kind of an example is a pretty big deal.
For every regret you have about yelling at us kids I remember afternoons that you would let me come running with you. Or that you built a blanket fort for us. Or took us on bike rides. Or drove us to the “big library” in Modesto and let us check out books, look at the koi and eat McDonald’s french fries on the stone tables outside. Or took us to Donnelly Park so we could feed the ducks. Do you remember taking all of us to the Steinhart Aquarium for the first time when we were still little kids, and how you were so patient that you let us ogle every flippin’ exhibit even though at some point I’m sure you wanted to scream “Alright! Get moving! It’s just another freaking fish already!” Or taking off your shoes and running away from the surf at Ocean Beach in a gaggle of your squealing offspring?
I remember you taking us to Chuck E. Cheese once and not eating the pizza. When I asked you why you weren’t eating you said you really didn’t like Chuck E. Cheese pizza. So I asked you why we were all there if you didn’t like the pizza and you said, “because you kids enjoy it here.” Do you remember bringing home all that Plexiglas and making a watertight maze for me so that I could test a goldfish’s memory for the science fair in the eighth grade? Or taking us through the hangar at Aero-Nostalgia and letting us walk through the bombay of a B-52 (or how we were the only family on Driftwood Drive who had the nose of that damned bomber in our garage for six months while you repaired it?) Or showing us the remnants of a Kamikaze fighter that had been pried out of a hillside and brought to the states for reconstruction?
Do you remember pulling the car over to the side of some mountain highway in Calaveras County and having us get out because you spotted a California hairy spider and knew we kids would get a kick out of getting a closer look? Or the numerous occasions that you would take us to the National Guard hangar and let us climb around Hueys, Chinooks, and Apaches?
Personally, I consider the most generous instance of your magnanimity as a father to be the time that you didn’t shoot me dead when I wrecked in the driver’s side door of your truck and then tried to concoct a story about light poles jumping out at me. I thank you for that because I’ll tell you what; if my kids do half the things to me that I did to you I’m going to need to step up my drinking habit and probably throw a few recreational drugs into the mix. For many kids the conclusion to that little fiasco with the truck would have involved an early grave. You let me off with a stern lecture and a body shop bill that only made me wish I had been introduced to an early grave.
Sometimes when you get to feeling bad about what you imagine your faults as a parent were maybe you should think about all the stuff you did right. Like all the times you drove several hours to retrieve your oldest daughter’s car because it went kaput. Again. For the umpteenth time. (Are you feeling the automobile-related theme here?) Or scratched up the money to let me visit relatives in Oregon as a kid because you wanted me to know my aunts, uncles and cousins up there. Or tolerated a veritable zoo in my bedroom even when the parakeets, doves, aquarium pumps and hamster wheels kept you up all night.
Or how, when I was a kid and you took me to airshows you encouraged me to try anything once, including skydiving. And then as an adult – after a local woman had been killed skydiving the day before I was scheduled to go - you called to talk me out of it and only hung up when I promised to call you as soon as I was safely back on the ground after the jump.
Or how about all the stuff you did that had nothing to do with us kids, but went a long way toward setting a good example for us? Like pulling the car over to help all those people stranded on the side of the road over the years? Or picking up the tab for a young family at a restaurant because the father was a low-ranking Airman and you knew he didn’t make crap for pay? Or helping put together and refurbish bicycles for kids whose parents couldn’t afford to give them Christmas gifts? Or when you rescued a car from the wrecking ball so that you could sling load it and drop it in front of a crowd at an air show because it was an amusing thing to do?
Whenever you get around to getting down on yourself about your faults I hope you think about all the stuff you did right. I hope you think about reading The Princess and the Pea to me on the first night we spent in the house on Driftwood and wiping fire ants off Matthew’s feet when he toddled on their hill in pursuit of fresh peaches on Faith Home Road. I hope you remember welding us lovely bunches of wire-framed daisies and showing us how to change a flat. Oh, and how you didn’t kill us when we were all teenagers; an act of restraint which deserves a medal in and of itself.
I hope you remember telling us silly stories about your first deployment – like when you and your buddies were bored and decided to set your boots on fire to amuse the locals in Korea. Or the family stories such as the time Aunt Carol chased you out of the house with a butcher knife because you shut the power off while she was listening to Elvis. Or the story about Grandpa Armstrong accepting far less than he could afford for a truck he was selling because the man who wanted to buy it couldn’t afford the asking price yet needed the truck to support his family.
I hope you realize that it was only because you were such a good father that I was able to recognize an equally good man and marry him. I hope you know that my initial career path – to be a high school English teacher – was inspired by the example you set for me and when I realized that I would be a disaster as a high school teacher I started down the road to becoming a mortician for the same reason I wanted to be a teacher; because like you, I want to live a useful life in service to others. I hope you know that because you were such a good dad I want to repay the favor to my own kids and be a good mom. I hope you know that my husband’s and my decision to sell our big house and buy a smaller one was made because we both wanted me to be home with our kids so they might know the same kind of love and dedication that my husband and I knew growing up.
You always get so down on yourself for not being able to afford to put me through college but you forget that you raised me to be the kind of person who could spend sixty hours a week waiting tables and still carry a full academic load. (And you know what? It wasn’t always easy or fun, but there was a lot of great experience packed into those years and enough fun times to make it go quickly. I wouldn’t change the ways things happend for the world. Besides, perpetual comfort and aversion to risk never results in a very interesting or worthwhile person.)
At any rate, I had only intended to write a quick note and here I am going on seven pages. Sorry. It’s just that I don’t want you to go one more day dwelling on your faults. You weren’t a perfect parent. I wasn’t the perfect daughter. But you were and still are a wonderful father and a terrific grandfather. I hope this deployment goes quickly for you and you hurry home to us so that you can get married and enjoy a well-deserved happy ending with Suzanne and become a fabulous step-father.
Love,
Your oldest daughter who is named after you so that should earn me a few bonus points in the last will and testament department, no?
