Today my father would have turned seventy-nine (born on this date in 1947, died in 2011). I have a very hard time thinking of him as old, and in a way, I’m glad he’s not here to see what the world has become. I think about him and my mother every day even though they have been gone for so many years now (my mom died in 2002).
If my father had somehow made it to seventy-nine, which would have been an absolute miracle considering his health, I would probably be writing something like this from a seaside town in Mexico or Costa Rica. Why? Because he had said that if things got really bad in the US, he’d want to go south. And my father spoke Spanish fluently so he would have done just fine down there. And I would have learned Spanish and I think we would have spent a lot of time fishing and watching sunrises and sunsets, and the news back in the US. We would have said to the folks back in the US in the middle of winter, “Wish you were here.”
But alas, that wasn’t meant to me. Both my mother and father always said they didn’t think they’d live to a grand old age, or live past sixty (my dad made it to sixty-four and my mom only made it to fifty-three). And their last years were almost constant pain and misery, which is not how it should have been. But as my father would say, “That’s would have, could have, should have, kid.”
Yes, I inherited my father’s cynicism and a lot of his sayings. And that’s how I remember him most days, and I think he’s my guardian angel on the road, the voice or the tap on the shoulder that tells me to move over or watch out. After all, he was my primary driving instructor and taught me to expect every driver to do something stupid and react accordingly, which is how I still drive after all these years on the road.
Now, before I go any further, I will always say my relationship with my father was complicated because on one hand, he could be the most inspiring person I’ve ever known. He could make me believe I could do anything. But then something would misfire in his brain and he’d get so over-protective of me it was almost suffocating. And after his stroke, there were times when he said things to me that I still won’t talk about, but in the morning he had no memory of it so I refused to tell him what he’d said because that was just fried circuitry in his brain. But it was also a reminder of the dual, almost split personality he had to due to untreated mental health issues.
But he was my first teacher, and that’s how I choose to remember him now. He had a very willing student in his eldest daughter here- music, movies, tv shows, books, airplanes, the space program, time travel, and history. And with history, he never tried to shield me from the hard stuff. When I was in junior high, I read ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ in school and he talked to me about the Holocaust. He let me watch the miniseries ‘War and Remembrance’ and the episode where they showed Jews rounded up and sent to the gas chambers, then buried in mass graves. It was something I have never forgotten and we talked about that for the rest of his life.
He also was an avowed hater of Richard Nixon, and he always said Nixon wanted to set up the Fourth Reich. If my father were alive today, he’d be saying that about Trump and company, along with, “I told you so.” I would have said in reply, “Every accusation is a confession.”
And as I’ve written about before (link here), one of the few times in my life I put my foot down with him was when I told him I would do everything in my power to keep him from Fox News and right-wing bullshit. I think my father knew that if I took a stand like that, I meant it. It was my toned-down version of how my mother would threaten to go nuclear on anyone because she’d reached her limits of tolerance. For me, I wasn’t going to have my father turn against everything he’d raised me to believe.
Because right now, I think he would be telling me that the ship always rights itself. And he’s right because people are not backing down, and they’re working through fear and pain to make a statement, and most of all, do the right thing. But if my father was alive, he’d be up in a redwood tree and I would be right beside him. We’d come down slowly, and like many elders are saying, things will get better in time. Or as my father would say, “Sometimes we all just got to take a walk through the shit. That’s just the way the world works.”
So in memory of my father, my teacher, and my guardian angel on the road, thanks for being my dad. As the old song goes, “May you always be forever young.”
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