Like Father

When I was 17, on the night I was getting ready for my high school graduation ceremony, my dad came to me with that look on his face that told me I was about to have some much-dreaded fatherly wisdom bestowed on me. I was correct. I think I remember looking away to hide my eye roll.

“About tonight son: tonight is the night when girls start crying and boys start jumping over chairs to comfort them. Be smart tonight.”

That dad was warning me—in his own, subtle way—about the perils of sex, was no surprise. I had come to expect these little moral signposts, no matter how oddly timed or late to the punch they were. Later, in my twenties, he would offer career advice. In my thirties, he decided it was a good time to talk to me about the good and bad parts of marriage. In my forties he has taken to giving me financial advice, and over the entire span of my lifetime, to this very day, dad still advises me on good driving habits and on how to safely make the trip from Des Moines to Kansas City and back again.

But what dad said next was a little less expected. “Son,” he said, with his characteristically dramatic pause after, “you’ve spent the last few years wondering how I could be so dumb. Now you’re gonna wake up one day in the next few years and wonder how I got so damned smart so fast.”

At the time I dismissed what exactly dad was saying to me, or the significance of his timing. And I cannot tell you exactly when it was in my life that I realized that dad was right, or when I realized why he said it when he did. I completely failed to recognize dad’s sentimental moment and that he was saying what he felt would be his first in a series of goodbyes. He was watching his youngest son graduate from high school and knew that the first major task with the last of his sons was done. He had to be feeling both relief and loss at the same time. Being young and self-centered, and not too perceptive, I missed it.

My failure to see my father with depth, to recognize his sentimentality and pride in his sons, was something that has been too long a part of my life. In fact, I have spent too much of my life trying to distance myself from him. He was raised in a different time, when being a boy and a man was defined by things so different and foreign to me that I often wondered how in the heck I ever came from the same bloodline. I even remember remarking once, when I was very angry and confused, that we were all merely people that somehow ended up living together in the same house. For my dad, being a man meant that you smoked two packs of Camel non-filters a day and stopped at the bar on the way home for at least a six pack of beer. It meant being a racist. It meant being a sexist. It meant that emotion and caring and education and evolving were things all better left to women or boys of questionable sexual preferences.

Somehow, and I can’t explain how, other than the fact that I did not live with dad from the time I was seven until I was thirteen, those things never became a part of me. When I moved in with dad and my step family, it was at an age where I had already made decisions for myself on those kinds of things, and it was at an age where adolescent rebellion made it even easier for me to discard them. That dad did it meant that I did not want to do it. Well, all of it except for the beer drinking thing, anyway. But that was more a product of peer pressure than rebellion.

And that was how I defined and saw my dad for a very long time. He was a picture of someone I did not want to be, even though he was not, mind you, devoid of any redeeming qualities. I always remember my father as having a great sense of humor, someone that could tease and kid with the best, even though he was corny at times. My father was fun to be around, with a lot of friends that seemed to enjoy the same sense of humor and similar lifestyle. He took us fishing whenever he could, and he instilled in all three of his boys a fondness for, and skills on, the bowling alley (mine now long gone). In the summers he would take us to the lake to spend weeks at our uncle’s cabin, hanging out with all of our cousins, swimming, skiing—it was like being at camp with family.

When he and my mother divorced, he never missed his weekends with us and he diligently retrieved us from mom every Sunday afternoon, right after church, to spend the afternoon with him and our grandparents at the farm. He was a steadfast provider; we never had much, but we always had the essentials. And if anything ever happened, say something where his youngest son got drunk and stole the red lights off of a county police car, he would rise to the occasion and be right there beside us, even if he didn’t like why.

Dad has always enjoyed trying to be the hero, especially for his family, even when it resulted in a less-than-heroic moment. Once, when the neighbor’s house was burglarized, dad kept a vigil in the drive with his pistol holstered at his side, his unbuttoned shirt blowing in the night breeze like a cape. He was focused so intently on all the police activity next door that he failed to notice the tail of his shirt had blown over his cigarette and caught fire. Another time, he tore off across the lawn to grab the family cat before it dashed into oncoming traffic on the street, only to take a painful-to-watch header into the ditch and cause a passing motorist to nearly crash. The cat sat down calmly on the shoulder of the road and looked back at my dad as if he had planned the whole thing.

When I was a child I remember that dad could never drive past a damsel in automotive distress, and he never saw a traffic accident he didn’t feel he had to stop and be involved in. There may have been twenty emergency vehicles on the scene already, but dad always thought that there was certainly something he could offer in the situation.

It would be easy to dismiss my responsibility for failing to recognize the other side of my father, but it would never be fair to him when I think of him in the context of some of those memories I have related here. Why couldn’t I see dad’s Hero Complex as genuine care and compassion rather than as a caricature?

And there have been so many other signs along the way. I always knew that when my father was young he did uncharacteristically non-macho things. He was renowned in Excelsior Springs as a teenager for being a fantastic tap dancer, and even did shows at the old Elms Hotel with my uncle. Those shows stopped, however, on the day that a friend teased him that it was a “sissy” thing to be doing. Sadly, my dad never tap danced another day in his life.

Dad told me stories of how much of a ladies man he was when he was a teen, stealing the hearts of many a girl from all around the area. He used to like to brag about dating girls from Kearney and Liberty, which was a social violation unheard of at those times. You just didn’t date boys from Mosby if you were an upstanding girl from those respectable towns. One of dad’s favorite and funniest stories he liked to tell was about how the boys of Kearney tried to corner him and beat him one night after he dropped off a girl from that town after a date.

Still, for years and years, my father remained the person I did not want to be like, even though we both—and I say both but it may really have been just me—matured. The first sign, for myself, of my maturing: understanding that the advice dad gave me on graduation night was right. He was a lot smarter than I had ever given him credit for. And with this realization came others; there were many other things dad had told me along the way that later proved to be pretty sage. So one day I began to think of my dad as a little wise but quirky. He changed into being a character, someone I had a great deal of respect for but still thought of as a little odd and not necessarily someone whom I would mimic.

And my perception of dad stayed that way for much of my adult life. Our relationship changed over time; I think he came to respect me more as a man and equal somewhere during all of this, and even expressed his pride from time to time in what I had done with my life since flirting with late-adolescent mischief. We grew together, a little, with what distance that remained between us a product of my holding him at arms length in order to maintain what I thought needed to be my separate identity and character. I still didn’t want to think of myself as someone exactly like him.

Dad retired during the nineties, and not long after he began to suffer the usual health problems who someone his age that has led a rough life suffers. He had a heart attack first, I think, and that served as his wakeup call. He struggled with, and eventually gave up, his daily two-pack a day habit. He struggled even longer with giving up his daily consumption of at least a six pack of beer, but eventually won out over that as well. But still, the damage was done in the years past, and dad has continued to fight off this or that ailment of some kind. His biggest fight: a couple of years ago he beat back lung cancer. I’m still amazed at that today.

Dad’s health problems, when they present in some sort of crisis mode, typically play out in this way: I get the call, sometimes during or after the acute event, from my stepsister, because dad doesn’t want to bother his youngest son that “has enough to worry about already.” I then have to make a round of calls to my siblings to determine the reality or drama of the situation. Then, when I know everything I can, I call dad at the hospital or at home to get his side of the story, see what I can hear in his voice, and just generally visit with him to subconsciously comfort us both. The unspoken between us: a connection and understanding that all is not right, but that we both want to ignore it’s not right, along with the bigger implication of what is inevitable in the years to come.

It was during one of these crisis phone conversations, at the very moment that we were both trying to find the best way to end the call in a tactful and manly manner, that my father floored me with just four, short words I had never heard him say before:

“Son, I love you.”

I responded the same, but I remember that at the time what I said what was not so much on my mind as having heard him say it, or what it meant. “Why would he say that?” I was thinking as I hung up the phone, and immediately feared the biggest reason why. But I was wrong about dad yet again. He wasn’t saying it because of something he and I both feared; he was saying it because he honestly wanted to. Still, underneath the desire to tell me that, lingering way, way back there beneath multiple layers of the unspoken between dad and me, was his fear—and my fear—of his future and mortality.

That moment, unfortunately, marked another phase in the relationship between dad and me, because it brought to the surface that fear. We still don’t speak of it, but it tempers our every moment together on the phone or in person. We both try harder to understand and appreciate each other, and respect each other’s differences, and we find it much easier now, more than ever, to be honest with each other and to say we love each other.

For some reason dad has been on my mind lately, and I got a chance to see him the last time I was in Kansas City. That doesn’t always happen because I stay with my sister Debbie in Parkville when I visit and dad still thinks of everything inside of I-435 as a crime–ridden, war zone. In addition to that, I am usually juggling being with the girls and letting them visit former in-laws, as well as trying to see friends. Dad is also busy with the heroic effort he makes daily—even with his health problems—of taking care of Margaret, his wife of 30 years, who daily fights Alzheimer’s.

When I was visiting with dad he was going on and on about the break-in they had recently had at their place. He was upset and angry and blamed everyone in the town and the police and the world in general. I tried to talk to him about moving, about getting an alarm system, or a dog, or something that would make them less vulnerable way out there in the country. Dad was having none of that logic and was being, I thought, very stubborn, and displaying a great deal of misplaced anger. I found myself getting angrier with him the longer I listened to him rant, and those old feelings of detachment returned. I felt like the teenage son again, wondering how my father could be so stubborn, so dumb, so uneducated and angry, and I resented him for resisting my advice and for making me feel the way I was feeling at the moment.

It wasn’t until the drive home later that weekend that I had time to think about that difficult afternoon with dad. It intrigued me that I was so upset by it, by him. I kept asking myself why I let it bother me, what business it was of mine—other than concern over his heart condition—how dad felt. It made me think about all of the history between dad and me, the good times and the bad, and all of the different ways I have felt about him and thought about him over the years. Eventually I came to ask myself why my dad and I were such a paradox, such a mixture of differences and distancing and, at the same time, deep respect and love. Why would I always feel such a need to be so independent from him yet so protected by him?

That last question finally reminded me of something I had read once in one of the many books I have read to do the best I can for Megan and Kylee. In short, it said that part of growing up is establishing our own identity while knowing the security of the safety net our parents provide, and that that net is what gives us the courage to venture out there on the edge a little and discover ourselves. So I began to understand: my life was a product of that very same dynamic, and I owe a great deal more to my dad than I ever have known. In essence, he has defined me, and he has done so in a far greater way than I ever credited him.

And the more I thought about it, the more I recognized my father in me. I can recognize it in the reflection offered in the relationship between Megan and me. I see it in the way the girls see me as more a comical caricature than any authority figure. I see it in my desire to be a superhero to my daughters. It’s there in my work ethic and my frugality and my sense of humor. It is funny how I never saw all that before.

Seeing myself as very much my dad, or at least the best parts of him, made me smile, but also made me a little sad, because I also I recognized a selfish fear in what I witnessed that afternoon. It is likely that part of my anger, part of my frustration of that afternoon with dad was because I had already internally noted that I was very much like him, and that my time as him—the “him” I saw that day—was someday coming. I saw my aging and my mortality reflected in his behavior, and it frightened me. I was reminded by my father that, as Bill once aptly put it, the “conveyor belt” just keeps on moving, and as no one or only one person stands between us and the end of it, we begin to watch that end with a little more interest and fear.

But I can put that away for now. It’s easy. I have a whole host of memories I am now remembering about times with my dad, all prompted by trying to write this and trying to define him as best I could. And I think dad would like it best if I dwelled on that instead. He’s kind of protective that way. It’s a superhero thing.

Originally published 12/11/09.

© 2009 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.