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My father is a generous man. Sacrifice beyond telling. I see the bags around his eyes and wonder if I’ll look the same 20 years from now when I’m 49. But I’ve not worked as hard as he, and when he was my age, he already had a 9-year-old me whining, sulking, demanding, and fighting between two sisters. So no, I will not need Noxzema. My father is compassionate, decent, and quietly discerning. He never complains, preferring quiet suffering instead; he cares too much to burden others with his grief. My father is a beautiful man. What my father is not is a violent man. From the first time I recognized him as my father, he has always been and not been these things.
1979 was a bad year for being me in public. I lit a couch on fire in the Haverty’s Fine Furniture show room. I stood on top of a lunch table at the Assembly of God school I attended and threw my clothes off. All of them. Apparently I landed a pencil to the right eye of Ronnie Greenwood, the charismatic child-drummer prodigy, future hope of pentecostal rhythm. I was warming up for the early 80’s, when I would disrupt weddings, purposely miss school buses so I could, against Altruria Elementary’s purple ditto-carboned policies, walk the train tracks home, rip curb-set, grass-full garbage bags with the back pegs of my GT Dyno, and, as I’ve mentioned, defecate in a neighbor’s pool.
My father didn’t have the heart to hit me. When he either witnessed or heard word of my misdeeds, he’d sit me on the couch and begin asking questions. He knew what I’d done, and he could easily have coaxed a confession out of me, but he was modeling for me what he tried to teach me: “Always give people the benefit of the doubt.” So he did, and though he knew I was in the wrong, still he’d ask me to tell him what happened. I would, and then, in the place of belt or hand, he’d finish me with a lecture. Regardless of what I’d done, and regardless of the length of the lecture, he’d always end with the same rhetorical admonition: “Now, do you want to be a special person, or do you want to be like everyone else?”
“I want to be a special person,” I’d say.
“Good. You know that I love you,” he’d say, and give me a hug. I always started crying when he hugged me, but I hid it, so he’d let go and walk upstairs, leaving me to consider the love that lets go of a crying son.
Like my father...calm, respectable.
I was flogged many a time. For similar incidents. Can't say I dumped in a pool, let alone a neighbor's.
Dad would ask me, "How are people going to know you're different?", in response to me fulfilling some greviously selfish and unrepentant act. And it would always knock the queer smirk off my face.
Not because of the warmness it meant to be special, but because Dad would be urgent about it. He was aware of what was going on inside me. And that intimacy we shared, even if we didn't spend hours in heart-to-heart chats, was enough to tear me apart.
Posted by: kammer at February 27, 2004 04:33 AMMy lectures always ended with "who loves you?" He never told me the right answer to that question, so I would tentatively say "you" even though I felt very uncomfortable about the fact that the list was a bit incomplete. But it was as if the fact that my father loved me was something that I was responsible for correctly inferring, and failing to feel loved by my father was my fault for not fully grasping the fact that I was able to correctly answer his question. And the fact that I was able to pass the pop quiz every time let him know that he was doing his job--his son knew that his dad loved him. If I had known what was good for me, I would have asked him to tell me.
Posted by: Matthew at February 27, 2004 10:22 AM