My Dad
OK. Big stuff with this post. Sorry if this comes out more rambling than It should.
If you spend a few minutes browsing through my archives, you'll notice that a few themes pop up fairly regularly, with my Dad's death in 1997 at the age of 54 being one of them. I realized today that I don't think I've ever written about him, about my relationship with him before he died. I'm only really coming to terms and some sort of peace now with how complex it actually was.
To understand him, you have to go back about 65 years, to a lower middle-class Louisville, Kentucky. My dad, Charles, was the youngest of four children. He had three older sisters. My grandfather, who died in 1976 in his early 60s, was a very smart man, but somehow contented himself with the lowest of janitorial positions- at schools, at hospitals, those sort of places. My grandmother, 8 years his senior and about a foot taller, waited on her family hand and foot. It was all that she lived to do. Both families had been in the Louisville area for at least four generations, and there was no reason for my father not to settle down when he got older with a nice girl of Bavarian descent and do the same.
From what I can gather, the relationship between my father and grandfather was strained at the best of times. When my grandfather had his first heart attack in his mid 50s, he was essentially bedridden until the day he died. My dad was expected to take up all the chores and other manly things around the house- after all, his mother and sisters were only women and couldn't be expected to do that sort of thing. Dad was in high school and resented this a great deal, but things came to an explosive head when he was accepted to MIT to study Physics, but there was no way in Hell that he would be leaving his family. My demanding ogre of a grandfather made sure that every day of his undergraduate work was spent at the University of Louisville, a school that didn't even have a physics department at the time.
When the Vietnam War started, my father quickly enlisted into the Air Force. He became a B-52 pilot and flew hundreds of missions over Vietnam- the most horrible thing he experienced during the flights were surface-to-air missiles locked on his plane. They bore a frighteningly surreal resemblance to flying telephone poles. For a while he was based at Pease Air Force base in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and that's where he met my mother. He married her and started a family quickly- my mother would say that she knew something was amiss when none of his family came to New Hampshire for the wedding.
Fast-forward eight or nine years. I'm seven or eight years old, and I know at this point that I'm not the son my father wanted to have. I'm tall, sickly, and severely uncoordinated. Tests say there's nothing wrong with me most doctors suppose I'll "just grow out of it". By this time my grandfather's dead. I don't think twice about there not being a single photograph of him in the house- it's simply the way my family is.
Books and Culture played a huge role in my childhood. For as long as I can remember, my dad read to me every night of my childhood. It wasn't just Clifford the Big Red Dog, or Richard Scarry, mind you. It's Tolkien and Tintin and Asimov and Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Little Prince and all sorts of books that I take for granted. We went to the Museum of Science or the Boston Aquarium or the Museum of Fine Arts so often that I once threw a temper tantrum when we went to Boston and didn't get to see the dolphins or the oddly-shaped model of the Tyrannosaurus. Every eight months or so, we drive to Louisville, but on our way there we always stop for a day in Washington to visit the Smithsonian or Air and Space Museum. I have an oddly-disconnected memory of a Kabuki performance scaring the shit out of me when I was about four or five.
While we're in Louisville, we're treated like red-headed stepchildren. We're shuttled from one house to another, never really feeling welcome or part of the family. My mother, to all intents and purposes, is ostracized altogether. No one ever comes to visit us. My grandmother died in December of 1990 at the age of 90. I've never been back since.
Dad would never get mad and never raised his voice- that was my mother's job. He was the immovable object to my mother's irresistible force. He became a workaholic, while my mother was left to go insane taking care of three children and a dog. They both made a lot of mistakes while we were growing up, but I can seen now that they did the best they knew how.
From the ages of 13 to 23, Dad and I were constantly at odds. I hated that I couldn't be the Golden Son my father wanted, and he had no idea how to contain, control, or relate to a sullen and troubled teenager. My mom thought I was nuts and should see a psychiatrist, my father just laughed at me. They were two constantly opposing ideas that rarely met at the center.
Dad was fired from his job while I was in college, around the same time I was coming out. I don't know why he was fired, but he eventually found work in upstate New York. Instead of packing up the family and moving, he rented an apartment for weekdays for himself and drove the 200+ miles every weekend to New Hampshire. My mother flatly refused to move.
A few years later, he quit that job, took another job in Ohio, and was laid off six months later. He was living at home in New Hampshire when he died- he literally fell down dead at the gym one Tuesday morning. Nobody knew anything was wrong with him, but we later discovered that he had his first (very mild) heart attack in New York but conveniently neglected to tell anyone.
[The above adds an extra layer of insanity to my grandfather's suicide. My grandfather saw in intimate detail what a sudden violent death did to us. He experienced it right along with everyone and saw how much it hurt.]
A few weeks before he died, I had a chance to sit down with my father and Talk. We talked about his father, about how they never got along and how my dad didn't want to leave any barriers like that between us. We were working at the mortar, freeing the bricks that made up the wall, and for the first time in my life I saw him as a person, and not the stern arrogant know-it-all that he could so easily become.
And he got to meet Jon. He only met him twice, but they got along really well.
And he's dead. So is my grandfather. I'm the eldest male in my family now, which is kind of scary to think about. There are so many aspects of my Dad that will be forever clouded in my mind- I watched the first season of Six Feet Under with my hand covering my mouth. I've never seen anything before or since that dramatizes the sudden death of a family member so well- and he's become more of a symbolic figure in my mind that an actual person, but I'm not bitter or resentful about it. That's the surprising thing- I don't see any of this as being good or bad- it just is. We haven't experienced any more or less tragedy than any other family. The same bus comes around the corner for everyone, it's only painted a different color sometimes. I've taken what I've been given and try as hard as I can to get on with my life. Don't we all?
(The full message read "hello greg how it going")
posted by Michael at
Is it Dada? Is it Postmodern? It just is.
Skyline.
Model train at South Station. I suspect this one runs with a much smoother schedule than the full-size version.
A slightly mad miniature Vincent Price lives in this house, governing all of Model Train Land with a fey hand.
We've named them Jake and Kai. They're nine-and-a-half weeks old. Our lives have been irrevocably changed.
N is for Neville who died of ennui.
(Gosh, I look old)
My favorite piece of graffiti.
