Father's Day

RUSH: Spirit of the Radio well this was my first choice.... then I was reminded of this Peter Gabriel: Father, Son they are both great songs, one is happy, the other pensive... so pick your poison... Happy Father's Day

Father’s Day.  Of what shall I sing?

Of my own father?  The first memory: a frantic search by the side of a creek.  My father had told me not to take off my shoes and socks.  I said I had understood.  I distractedly said they would stay on my feet.  I took them off anyway.  The beckoning call of the lush green grass proved too tempting.  My feet had to feel .  They had to be alive.  I was probably about two-and-a-half-years-old. 

Well, actually, that part was not remembered too well.  No, what is remembered is was the terror filled heart of a barefoot boy.  I don’t even remember seeing my father.  My eyes were focused on a mad search of the banks of the creek.  My father’s lumbering shadow was approaching.  Fear and anguish filled my heart; I had to find my socks and shoes.  I don’t remember if I found them.  I do however remember the panic at the feel of my father’s lumbering shadow.

As I matured, so did my relationship with my father.  Until the age of about ten, he was a demi-god.  A diety capable of love and fear.  In moments of benevolence, you would laugh together as he taught you the tools of the trade in making a pizza.  He always pressed for  introduction to new worlds, ideas, and experiences.  These trips might range from the threadbare museum of Natural History at Fair Park, to the hidden mysteries of the orient revealed at an eatery near White Rock Lake: Antone’s.  Late nights of challenges and strategy were provided by the borthers Parker.  Millions were ready to be won or lost in Atlantic City, or the fate of the world was decided in games of Risk.  In this arena provided a safe refuge to challenge where young bucks could challenge.

Though there are things I would never know, I was given sight to my own fathers battle to maintain his separate shadow.  I remember call’s he would receive from his own father.  His father seemingly had a knack to call when my father was preoccupied.  Be it a football game, or the weekly holy-half-hour of M*A*S*H... my father would grudgingly accept the interruption by his father.  It was his dad after all.  From the minds eye of a child, I remember most of these conversations consisted of my father’s introduction of “Hello Dad (pause), yes sir, (pause)” then to be followed by seemingly fifteen minuites of “Uh huh,… uh huh… uh huh….”  The occasioned interrupted attempt to get his own voice in which sometimes was only sometimes allowed.  Sadly, these interruptions became more allowed the older my grandfather became.  The more his own shadow began to diminish.  Although now my grandfather has passed I know that my Dad would do anything to hear that voice again, that is merely the gift of bitterness that usually accompanies nostalgia.  To recapture a piece, even if it is only the shadow.  Or, one might say it is merely the part of relations between the son and his father. 

By fourteen my shadow was frustrated.  Longing to run in the sun to grow to become a majestic oak, the god that was my father was made man.   While the majority of my time was spent in the light, it was a place where his shadow continued to exist.  So with age, steps into the darkness were taken.  In the darkness there is no shadow.  Conversely however, there is also no light.  A fumbling stumbling search for tools had to be made.  Tools were found and a was fire was prepared.  In the dancing orange reflections on the wall of my cave I realized that it was my father who had prepared me the whole time to create my own fire as he had remembered his own vision quest he made in the darkness.  His own ramshackle search for tools his father had left in the darkness.

Well, then it happened.  The moment when I carried my own child in my arms.  The cacophony of feelings confronted me from such a seemingly small weight in my hands.  I knew that I would be responsible to keep that tender light in his eyes.  I knew that it would be up to me to strengthen the clutch of the tiny fist that blindly grabbed at my finger.  His wailing desperate cry would have to be filled with words that cried his own song.  As his mother had given him life, I would have to call the tiny child to life.  If I did my job correctly, as I hoped I would, I would make my job as a parent obsolete.  A weight that was as light as a feather, but as heavy as a mountain began to fill me.  That’s what the Japanese would say.  I will leave off the part that this was the oath taken by Kamakazie pilots.  That’s not the important thing.

The important thing is what happened next.  As I stood, tenderly clutching the newly born in my hands on the tiled floor of the hospital a new shadow was created; that of me and my child.  I knew that it would be my job to help my son be able to stand on his own, to create his own shadow.