Dad Woulda Been 100

  Somewhere around here amidst all my stuff I have a picture of my father when he was about 5 years old.  A tow-headed kid wearing bib overalls standing by an outside water pump.

  I have kept that picture for a long time.  I keep it to remind me that my dad was once a boy like myself.  When I was a kid it was hard to imagine he had ever been a kid, he acted like he never had been one, like he had forgotten that part of his life.

  I’m thinking about my dad because this is the time of year of his birthday and this year, 2017, marks 100 years since he was born.

  Most of what I knew about my dad, and it wasn’t much, came from my grandmother, his mother.

  That he was just a year old when “The Spanish Flu” hit their town in the high mountains of western Virginia.  That my dad and the town doctor, who had a fondness for liquor, were the only people not hit by the sickness.  My grandmother attributed my father’s health to him crawling around to the coal bucket by the fireplace and teething on coal nuggets.

  Now one time my dad did tell me a story of himself, this was after me and my buddy Catfish got in some trouble, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Dad told me such things seem big at the time, like the time he and his buds ran the toll booth at a city park but were caught by the city cops.  It was one of those rare times that dad seemed to be a “real” sort of guy, admitting that he was scared that the toll booth incident would be a black mark on his life.  It wasn’t.  And in the end Catfish and I didn’t get in any trouble.

  Dad was in World War Two, Army.  There’s a part of me that thinks the war had an effect on him.  I don’t know what he saw, but after he died we opened a footlocker that had been stored away to find photos of dead Japanese soldiers, no doubt taken on Okinawa.  Before the war there were lots of photos of him in my grandmother’s collection of him smiling a rakish smile, looked like he was enjoying life.  After the war that great smile was rarely seen.

  No, I tell people I’m my mother’s son, not a momma’s boy, but my mother’s son.  Dad had left my raising to Mom.  I shouldn’t’ve taken it personally, I’m given to understand it was a way of life when I was growing up.

  The stuff that affected me most when it came to Dad was he yelled.  He yelled a lot.  I often describe it as “he could yell to peel paint off the wall.”

  Dad also drank.  He drank more and more as his career as a hotel manager spiraled downward.

  I really didn’t even know he drank as much as he did.  It wasn’t until I was 16 and my pals were over at the house.  We were playing a board game when Dad fell into the Christmas tree.

  “Your dad’s drunk,” said Lewis.

  “No,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Lewis.  “I’ve been watching him.”

  Never mind that I had watched him openly drink a bottle of blackberry brandy as he drove me and mom to the old homeplace from Baltimore the previous Christmas.  I couldn’t wrap my brain around him driving drunk and the peril we were in was lost on me, even when he nearly missed a hard curve on the interstate that could’ve sent us flying through a guardrail and on to the rocky river valley below.

  But my sister knew he had driven 300 miles drunk from an office party then fortified with the bottle of blackberry brandy.  She was waiting for us at the old homeplace and once she realized Dad was drunk she jumped in his shit and the two of them had a big row.

  I’m told Dad used to hit me when I was little.
  Clenched fist.
  To the gut.
  Couple of times lifting me right off the ground.

  Interestingly, I don’t remember him hitting me.  It was my mother and sister who told me he did.

  I remember him yelling, though.

  The best Christmas I ever had with my dad and mom was the Christmas before he died.  He had just turned 67 that December.

  No one knew it would be his last birthday.

  I was broke, had no car, I lived in a place where I slept on a foam pad on the floor and had a job that paid little.  Mom and Dad drove up to see me bearing gifts of new clothes and a bit of money.  They took me out to eat at a nice restaurant where we laughed and talked.

  The following February Dad started stumbling.  He went to the doctor’s where they found an octopus-like cancerous tumor at the base of his skull.

  The following months were like he was on a battery that was running out of a charge, he got slower, weaker.

  Then one August day I got the call from my mom:  “Come home, I don’t think he has much time left.”

  I made the 200 mile trip to the home town and went right to the hospital. 

  There was Dad in the hospital bed.

  I walked up and put my hand on his.

  “Hey Dad, I love you,” I said.

  He looked at me then looked away.

  I kept my hand on his.

  “Thanks for everything Dad.”

  Dad looked at me again and looked like he was about to cry.

  I sat down and kept my hand on his.

  He would turn and look at me then look away.  He did this a few times.

  I looked at Mom with a look like, “Why won’t he talk to me?”

  Mom gave me a look back like, “I don’t know.”

  Then it was time to go.

  When I got back to my place there was a message on my phone.

  It was Mom.

  Dad had died.

  It would be months later while visiting my mom I asked her why didn’t Dad talk to me.

  “He was very sad about you and some of the situations you’ve gotten yourself into,” she said.  “He wished he could’ve done more for you.”

  It made me kind of sad.

  I wish he would have told me that.

  Because Dad did the best he could.

  He had his life where he wrestled with his own demons and he did what he could for me, as best he knew how.

  What more could I ask for?

E P I L O G U E

    It would be years later when I had a chat with a “medium,” a close friend who had the ability to channel stuff from “the other side.”  I believed her because it came natural to her, she didn’t charge for her “service,” the channeling would just suddenly happen and she knew things about Dad that only the family would know.

  I had envisioned Dad as a new person, walking the earth somewhere as a young man.

  No, I was told.  Dad was still on “the other side” waiting.

  “Waiting for what?” I asked.

  The Medium said there was no answer.

  “He repeats he is waiting,” she said.  “He….says….the………the…..disappointment.  He was disappointed that no one was ‘there’ waiting for him when he got there.”

  That struck me as sad.

  “So he’s waiting,” I said.  “Is it like a waiting room?  Are there magazines?”

  “DON’T BE A SMARTASS, BOY!”

  “Ah,” I said as I leaned back, “I recognize THAT.”

  Mom died 3 years ago.

  I’m betting Dad’s not waiting anymore.

  I believe they’ve gone together on to the land of sunsets and rainbows.