If you had asked me, not long ago, if I was at all like my father, I would have
said, emphatically, “No, we are dissimilar in every way!”
When I was growing up, it was often said that I resembled my mother, and I always thought that a compliment. I mean, why would I want to look like my father? I didn’t consider him particularly attractive, and though he was perennially nudging me—about my ideas, my grammar, my attitude—I didn’t think we shared much of a bond.
The fact that my father was and always would be there, within me, was something I could never accept, then. Thus I was inwardly pleased that no one suggested I was like him in any way. It’s not that I was trying to deny his paternity, only his impact and also,
I guess, his importance in my life.
Thus it was distressing for me when, in adolescence and my voice deepened, people who phoned invariably mistook me for my father. And, decades later, when my teenage daughter traveled alone to California, connecting with her paternal grandparents for the first time since childhood, she recognized them immediately at the airport.
“Grandpa walks just like you do,” she reported. I’d never known that.
My mother’s influence had always been strong. No matter what the issue, I invariably took her side and—there was never a doubt—consciously strived to reflect her values.
It was only later that I realized how often she had been wrong and that my father’s view of the world and of life itself was always aptly focused, based on viable realities rather than fantasies or any might-have-been notions.
I think of my dad often now. If I find myself walking with an old friend or a colleague who, for whatever reason, bends forward a bit as he moves, I find I need to restrain myself. My impulse would be to do what Dad repeatedly did: provide a firm poke in the solar plexus, until I straightened up. God, how that used to annoy me! But oh, how I’ve come to appreciate it now. I guess I walk like a straight-up tin soldier!
We used to ride horseback together, sometimes once a week. For a while, that was a total family sport. We were part of a cluster of regulars at a rental stable in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park. But as the years passed and Mom grew less interested in this activity, it was Dad and I who rode together on Sundays. We did so mostly in silence;
we rarely had much to share with one other.
I shudder as I recall how keen he was to read the essays I wrote, particularly when I was a high school student who harbored the vague notion of maybe becoming a writer. I also remember that I was unalterably determined to deny the value of whatever critique he shared, even if I knew in my heart that he might be right.
Ultimately we did begin to bond—that was when Mom’s mounting dementia had virtually upended his life. We exchanged letters more often and talked on the phone routinely—me from the Northeast, him from the Far West.
At last we had something significant to focus on, a matter of concern that engaged us both.
Dad was passionately devoted to Mom and, as her illness advanced, it was clear he rarely left her side. If he and I were on the phone together, he’d often excuse himself and call out to her, if he didn’t hear her moving about or was unable to see her nearby, sitting in a chair or watching TV—for her, by then, a mindless distraction. During one of my visits, I realized she was clueless about whatever it was she was seeing, though seemingly glued to the flickering screen action.
“I pray that she predeceases me,” he later confided, and I guess that rather shocked me, though I certainly knew what he meant, and why. Where Mom was concerned, he was selfless, a fully devoted spouse. She would outlive him by a couple of years, and what shred of reality remained of her awareness vanished completely when he was gone.
Perhaps what he felt for her was stronger than anything else in his makeup—so strong, in fact, that it made any kind of bonding with his only son unlikely. I’ll never know, I guess. And looking back, I wouldn’t have to dig very deep to recognize that I was hardly a model son.
Mom was always an excellent typist. She’d been a secretary at a local car dealership before marrying Dad. Whether I was at camp or college or in the service, I could always count on receiving crisply typewritten letters from her. In them, she told me only and exactly what she wanted me to know.
Dad would also write, but he couldn’t type and had terrible penmanship. I disparaged his handwriting whenever I received a letter from him. But, late in our relationship—and in his life as well—I began to realize what I’d been reading, through all the years, and wished I had saved most or all of his scribbled outpourings.
Why? Because they were perfect.
Yes, the lines of his poor penmanship kind of dipped as they moved down the page of whatever scrap paper he’d found to write on. But his sentences were perfectly formed—grammatically correct—and one paragraph logically flowed out of the one preceding it. He wrote in ink, but there were no crossed-out or inserted words; he wrote flawless first-draft copy.
At some point in that later period, I pointed this out to him—I, whose hurried messaging was always cluttered with messy afterthoughts, as I’d come to type about as fast as my mom. I remember telling him, finally, “Whatever I am as a writer—whatever my skills are, Dad, and whatever success I achieve—I’ve obviously inherited my gifts from you.”
He dismissed that notion decisively—”Oh, don’t be silly!”–as I was sure he would. But I was also certain that I had made a strong point and that, deep in his heart, he would ultimately be unable to deny it. And, maybe, he would feel just a little bit proud.
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