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Happy birthday Dad
May. 3rd, 2024 06:04 pmIf Dad were still alive, he'd be 90 today. For the longest time I was convinced he would see this birthday and glide past it, but he left us two years ago.
I'm sitting in my favorite cafe on College Ave in Berkeley. I come here often, usually to work. 70 years ago, my father went to college one mile from here at UC Berkeley. It was the 1950's, in the relatively quiet interval between two peaks of campus upheaval in the 40's and 60's. He got in because of his excellent high-school grades, but he had trouble thriving at Cal. "Back home, I was a big fish in a little pond," he told me. "At Cal, I couldn't keep up." He eventually left Cal and his academic path squiggled for a bit, and he graduated from Sacramento State. But the Cal experience humbled him, and awakened him to a much wider world as well.
He was lucky to attend, for several reasons: Many kids his age had been drafted to fight in the Korean War right out of high school. Years later he looked up his academic advisor at Live Oak High School and asked, "Why wasn't I drafted?" The answer was, "Actually you were. The notice came to us, and we didn't tell you. We had a list of students who were top academics and we asked the government to exclude them. They accepted the list, and we tore up the notice."
Small decisions can change lives. Including decisions made by other people. This is rolling through my head as I contemplate the birthday he is missing, and the long shadow he cast. A minute ago I saw a little kid, about six years old, gather up the leftover dishes on the table he was sharing with his parents, and then stack them carefully in the bin for the waitress. "Nicely done!" I said. He smiled at me, then trotted back to his chair and sat down. With the picture of my father hanging in my head, I suddenly realized that I was giving out the same sort of random encouragement that he used to give when I was small. I had internalized something on the receiving end, and was now automatically recreating it on the giving end. That was nifty. I idly wondered what impression I made as the kid saw my face and posture, and how that folded into the exchange. Did a compliment matter more to a boy when it came unprompted from a big serious-looking man? Was it more likely to result in him modeling the same thing later? That seemed plausible. "How interesting," I thought. "In a way, my Dad just talked to that kid."
And quite suddenly I was struck by a rogue wave of grief, washing up through my body, and I had to close my eyes and sit quietly to keep it from spilling out. It was for something I couldn't have; something specific: I missed the man I had known when I was six years old, and I wanted him here, in this cafe. Not so I could be six years old in front of him again, but so I could meet him as a peer.
We would be the same age.
How fun would it be, to compare notes! To ask him a hundred curious questions about his life at Cal, his early relationships, and his impressions of the weird world I find myself in today. I only have the most basic sketch of decades of his life. How amazing to get answers, to answer his questions. To sing along to the same songs again! He would be as lively and hale as six-year-old me remembers, before financial troubles forced him to move hundreds of miles away and dementia ransacked his mind.
I can't have that of course. And it was fun to contemplate but also a direct path to more intense grief, so I sat with the idea and sipped my mocha, then gently detoured and began thinking of something less painful on a tangent: The impression I had when I was six.
It's so funny how much of that memory is based on how he presented physically. Yes, his behavior and words mattered, more than anything really, but the combination of them with his presence was something else. He was built like a truck, in those days, before another 40 years would crumble him. As a kid I had the sense that if someone crashed a car into him, the car would be wrecked and he would get up - assuming he was even knocked down - and dust himself off and start checking on the driver of the car.
As I visualized this I realized I could almost hear it. The car would hit him and he would go "OOF," and then get up and walk over to the wreck and say, "That was a helluva crash! Are you alright in there?"
And if they were, then he’d go, "Next time LOOK WHERE YOU'RE GOING!" and probably call them a "meathead," and leave them to clean up their car. But if he discovered that they were injured, he'd find first aid, and follow them to the hospital personally. And then he'd show up at their bedside a few days later, and give them a lecture on paying attention while driving. Not in a threatening way. I doubt he would loom over them. He'd be too aware of looking like a threat, and probably sit down in a chair instead. He wouldn't want to mess up an opportunity for teaching.
This fanciful scenario has some memories backing it. One time, when I was an idiot teenager, I fishtailed the Mercury Tracer into a fence on the way home from school. And the fuel pump shutoff switch tripped and the car wouldn’t start, and I didn’t know what was wrong at the time, so I had to ask a random person for help. I had a friend in the car with me, and we were both stuck by the side of the road for hours until a tow truck came, and with it my Dad in his own car. He spoke with the owner of the fence and oversaw the attachment of the truck. When we got home, much later, after we'd dropped my friend off, he sat down with me and calmly talked about it all. I do believe his first words were:
"So. What have you learned?"
And you can imagine that being delivered in a sarcastic way, or with a scowl, like, "explain yourself, you dummy!" But somewhere along the way he had figured out how to keep those nuances out of his voice. It was as though his communication style had been rebuilt, like a car taken to a mechanic, with the shaming and the sarcasm unbolted from their usual place and then surrounded by pipes, so they weren't automatic. It turned out to be very helpful for the very sensitive child that I was. Words he used would be words I would internalize and use on myself, after all. He must have known that. At the same time, it's not like shaming and sarcasm were completely missing. He would still use them when he wanted.
Another time, also while I was an idiot teenager, I was driving back from a camping trip with several friends in the car. My Dad was in the minivan ahead of me, and another friend of mine was driving his own vehicle. The three of us were sticking together on the road. Except I wanted to play some stupid highway game with my friend. He kept trying to pull up and stick his car between me and Dad, and I kept pulling up to Dad's bumper to block him. I don't really remember what I was thinking. I suppose the point is, being a teenager, I wasn't thinking in general. But after a few rounds of this my Dad pulled off at a gas station.
When we all piled out of our cars, my Dad came over to me and waved his arm, indicating that I should walk with him. He walked me over to the group that my friends were gathered in, and once I was among them, he turned to me and gave me a stern lecture about how I was being very dangerous by riding his bumper, and how I should hang back according to the three second rule and if my friend wanted to merge in between us I should just drop back instead of trying to show off, because someone could get killed. Furthermore he knew I could find my own way back to the house from here because I'd done the drive a bunch of times, so he was going to fuel up his car and get on the road because he didn't need to be around such dangerous driving. Then he walked into the gas station.
There had been anger in his voice, and I felt proper shamed in front of my friends. The driver of the other car called me a dumbass and said he was going to find his own way home as well. In the evening, when I finally rolled up to the house and unloaded the car, I met Dad in the dining room and apologized to him. He accepted the apology and then made an apology of his own: "I deliberately made sure you got that lecture in front of your friends. Partly because your friend was driving badly too, but partly because I knew it would stick better."
Nowadays I wonder, what do you have to go through, to get to the point where you can so deliberately use or not use anger and aggression, and so often choose to hold it in reserve, or sweep it aside entirely because you know it's harmful? Well, I know an answer to that, since it's how I tend to operate, and same with my siblings. It was modeled for us, and it was also hammered into us by stress and life. We measure it as part of being a real adult. But I think there's an extra layer of influence happening, when you're a boy and you have to eventually turn into a man, because in male culture at large, anger is so ubiquitous it's practically a food group. It takes a harder push to make you turn away from something so expected, and so useful. Perhaps you get sick internally of the wreckage and the stress, and if you're lucky, you find another way to get by.
This is why I wonder so often what happened to my Dad during the years of his life that he talked the least about, centered around when he was a young adult, divorced from his first wife and running away from his own kid, riding a motorcycle around, wearing a leather jacket, smoking cigars, and getting into fights. When did he finally stop worrying about asserting himself as a man, and turn back towards being a human being and then a father? It must have been some time before I was born. An evolution that finished somewhere in his mid-30's.
The gaps in his history are immutable at this point. He stopped being able to tell his own story many years before he actually died because of the dementia. But if I had to guess, I would say that the change happened slowly, and was heavily influenced by his career as a high-school teacher, which kept him engaged in developing a persona for teaching young people. You spend that much time around them, perhaps you get a really solid idea of how to stand apart from them as well, and move on from their concerns.
That was all in place by the time I met him. I know he caused his share of damage along the way, just from the few basic sketches I have. I suspect that 16-year-old me and 16-year-old him would not get along at all. Funny how much the timing matters. I must admit, I have generally good memories of him only because I met the older version: The version that was a lot better at controlling his temper, and a lot better with kids, and a lot more motivated to be a father. Perhaps the only reason I would enjoy his company as a 40-something is because he treated me well as a young person, which convinced me to accept him as a role model.
And now he is gone -- but replaced by a new version, walking around in the present day.
Anyway, the cafe is starting to close. I suppose that's enough ruminating on this anniversary. Thanks for still being there in my head, ya big cannonball of a guy. Oh hey, did I mention that your grandson is graduating from Cal in a few weeks?
You did good. We did good. He did good.
I'm sitting in my favorite cafe on College Ave in Berkeley. I come here often, usually to work. 70 years ago, my father went to college one mile from here at UC Berkeley. It was the 1950's, in the relatively quiet interval between two peaks of campus upheaval in the 40's and 60's. He got in because of his excellent high-school grades, but he had trouble thriving at Cal. "Back home, I was a big fish in a little pond," he told me. "At Cal, I couldn't keep up." He eventually left Cal and his academic path squiggled for a bit, and he graduated from Sacramento State. But the Cal experience humbled him, and awakened him to a much wider world as well.
He was lucky to attend, for several reasons: Many kids his age had been drafted to fight in the Korean War right out of high school. Years later he looked up his academic advisor at Live Oak High School and asked, "Why wasn't I drafted?" The answer was, "Actually you were. The notice came to us, and we didn't tell you. We had a list of students who were top academics and we asked the government to exclude them. They accepted the list, and we tore up the notice."
Small decisions can change lives. Including decisions made by other people. This is rolling through my head as I contemplate the birthday he is missing, and the long shadow he cast. A minute ago I saw a little kid, about six years old, gather up the leftover dishes on the table he was sharing with his parents, and then stack them carefully in the bin for the waitress. "Nicely done!" I said. He smiled at me, then trotted back to his chair and sat down. With the picture of my father hanging in my head, I suddenly realized that I was giving out the same sort of random encouragement that he used to give when I was small. I had internalized something on the receiving end, and was now automatically recreating it on the giving end. That was nifty. I idly wondered what impression I made as the kid saw my face and posture, and how that folded into the exchange. Did a compliment matter more to a boy when it came unprompted from a big serious-looking man? Was it more likely to result in him modeling the same thing later? That seemed plausible. "How interesting," I thought. "In a way, my Dad just talked to that kid."And quite suddenly I was struck by a rogue wave of grief, washing up through my body, and I had to close my eyes and sit quietly to keep it from spilling out. It was for something I couldn't have; something specific: I missed the man I had known when I was six years old, and I wanted him here, in this cafe. Not so I could be six years old in front of him again, but so I could meet him as a peer.
We would be the same age.
How fun would it be, to compare notes! To ask him a hundred curious questions about his life at Cal, his early relationships, and his impressions of the weird world I find myself in today. I only have the most basic sketch of decades of his life. How amazing to get answers, to answer his questions. To sing along to the same songs again! He would be as lively and hale as six-year-old me remembers, before financial troubles forced him to move hundreds of miles away and dementia ransacked his mind.
I can't have that of course. And it was fun to contemplate but also a direct path to more intense grief, so I sat with the idea and sipped my mocha, then gently detoured and began thinking of something less painful on a tangent: The impression I had when I was six.
It's so funny how much of that memory is based on how he presented physically. Yes, his behavior and words mattered, more than anything really, but the combination of them with his presence was something else. He was built like a truck, in those days, before another 40 years would crumble him. As a kid I had the sense that if someone crashed a car into him, the car would be wrecked and he would get up - assuming he was even knocked down - and dust himself off and start checking on the driver of the car.
As I visualized this I realized I could almost hear it. The car would hit him and he would go "OOF," and then get up and walk over to the wreck and say, "That was a helluva crash! Are you alright in there?"
And if they were, then he’d go, "Next time LOOK WHERE YOU'RE GOING!" and probably call them a "meathead," and leave them to clean up their car. But if he discovered that they were injured, he'd find first aid, and follow them to the hospital personally. And then he'd show up at their bedside a few days later, and give them a lecture on paying attention while driving. Not in a threatening way. I doubt he would loom over them. He'd be too aware of looking like a threat, and probably sit down in a chair instead. He wouldn't want to mess up an opportunity for teaching.
This fanciful scenario has some memories backing it. One time, when I was an idiot teenager, I fishtailed the Mercury Tracer into a fence on the way home from school. And the fuel pump shutoff switch tripped and the car wouldn’t start, and I didn’t know what was wrong at the time, so I had to ask a random person for help. I had a friend in the car with me, and we were both stuck by the side of the road for hours until a tow truck came, and with it my Dad in his own car. He spoke with the owner of the fence and oversaw the attachment of the truck. When we got home, much later, after we'd dropped my friend off, he sat down with me and calmly talked about it all. I do believe his first words were:
"So. What have you learned?"
And you can imagine that being delivered in a sarcastic way, or with a scowl, like, "explain yourself, you dummy!" But somewhere along the way he had figured out how to keep those nuances out of his voice. It was as though his communication style had been rebuilt, like a car taken to a mechanic, with the shaming and the sarcasm unbolted from their usual place and then surrounded by pipes, so they weren't automatic. It turned out to be very helpful for the very sensitive child that I was. Words he used would be words I would internalize and use on myself, after all. He must have known that. At the same time, it's not like shaming and sarcasm were completely missing. He would still use them when he wanted.
Another time, also while I was an idiot teenager, I was driving back from a camping trip with several friends in the car. My Dad was in the minivan ahead of me, and another friend of mine was driving his own vehicle. The three of us were sticking together on the road. Except I wanted to play some stupid highway game with my friend. He kept trying to pull up and stick his car between me and Dad, and I kept pulling up to Dad's bumper to block him. I don't really remember what I was thinking. I suppose the point is, being a teenager, I wasn't thinking in general. But after a few rounds of this my Dad pulled off at a gas station.
When we all piled out of our cars, my Dad came over to me and waved his arm, indicating that I should walk with him. He walked me over to the group that my friends were gathered in, and once I was among them, he turned to me and gave me a stern lecture about how I was being very dangerous by riding his bumper, and how I should hang back according to the three second rule and if my friend wanted to merge in between us I should just drop back instead of trying to show off, because someone could get killed. Furthermore he knew I could find my own way back to the house from here because I'd done the drive a bunch of times, so he was going to fuel up his car and get on the road because he didn't need to be around such dangerous driving. Then he walked into the gas station.
There had been anger in his voice, and I felt proper shamed in front of my friends. The driver of the other car called me a dumbass and said he was going to find his own way home as well. In the evening, when I finally rolled up to the house and unloaded the car, I met Dad in the dining room and apologized to him. He accepted the apology and then made an apology of his own: "I deliberately made sure you got that lecture in front of your friends. Partly because your friend was driving badly too, but partly because I knew it would stick better."
Nowadays I wonder, what do you have to go through, to get to the point where you can so deliberately use or not use anger and aggression, and so often choose to hold it in reserve, or sweep it aside entirely because you know it's harmful? Well, I know an answer to that, since it's how I tend to operate, and same with my siblings. It was modeled for us, and it was also hammered into us by stress and life. We measure it as part of being a real adult. But I think there's an extra layer of influence happening, when you're a boy and you have to eventually turn into a man, because in male culture at large, anger is so ubiquitous it's practically a food group. It takes a harder push to make you turn away from something so expected, and so useful. Perhaps you get sick internally of the wreckage and the stress, and if you're lucky, you find another way to get by.
This is why I wonder so often what happened to my Dad during the years of his life that he talked the least about, centered around when he was a young adult, divorced from his first wife and running away from his own kid, riding a motorcycle around, wearing a leather jacket, smoking cigars, and getting into fights. When did he finally stop worrying about asserting himself as a man, and turn back towards being a human being and then a father? It must have been some time before I was born. An evolution that finished somewhere in his mid-30's.
The gaps in his history are immutable at this point. He stopped being able to tell his own story many years before he actually died because of the dementia. But if I had to guess, I would say that the change happened slowly, and was heavily influenced by his career as a high-school teacher, which kept him engaged in developing a persona for teaching young people. You spend that much time around them, perhaps you get a really solid idea of how to stand apart from them as well, and move on from their concerns.
That was all in place by the time I met him. I know he caused his share of damage along the way, just from the few basic sketches I have. I suspect that 16-year-old me and 16-year-old him would not get along at all. Funny how much the timing matters. I must admit, I have generally good memories of him only because I met the older version: The version that was a lot better at controlling his temper, and a lot better with kids, and a lot more motivated to be a father. Perhaps the only reason I would enjoy his company as a 40-something is because he treated me well as a young person, which convinced me to accept him as a role model.
And now he is gone -- but replaced by a new version, walking around in the present day.
Anyway, the cafe is starting to close. I suppose that's enough ruminating on this anniversary. Thanks for still being there in my head, ya big cannonball of a guy. Oh hey, did I mention that your grandson is graduating from Cal in a few weeks?
You did good. We did good. He did good.
