The Old Soldier

I'm rereading my Dad's autobiography. The last time I read it, years ago, he had just finished it, and now he's been gone for quite a few years. I'd have to count up right now to remember how many--maybe I'll just ask my sister Liz what year that was. I was the only immediate family member, as far as I know, who wasn't there beside him when he died. I had gone back and forth from Ohio to California several times to see him before that--times I often recall now--and then I went back for the funeral. It was so wonderful to see my mother and sister and brothers and all their families. Dad would have been satisfied to have been the reason for the gathering.


I have always loved my father even though there was trouble between us. As the oldest boy, I took the brunt of his frustration and anger as I was growing up. Of course, my sister and brothers remember it too, but the fact that he hit me across the face or on the head a few times too many never quite went away altogether. As much as I loved him and loved to see the intelligent light in his eyes, his obvious pleasure to be among his family, there was always some part of me that felt he did not love me, in spite of the fact that he always made sure I had what I needed in this life.


Of my brothers, I think Russell had the strongest connection to my Dad. He had a great ability to understand Dad. Steve had a great ability to love Dad and the sensitivity to initiate a better relationship with him--though this came many many years later, after Dad had had to live with the fact that he really couldn't control his anger sometimes. Steve presided over Dad's funeral service at my mother's insistence. He did a wonderful job--a job I could never have approached. At the service, he said that he realized he would never again look into another grown man's eyes and see the total approval and unconditional love he saw in my father's eyes.


Liz was his daughter, and though she knew what it meant to fear Dad, I saw in a living way every day his reverence and his love for her. Of course, Liz was an amazing girl. I don't know really how David related to Dad. Once, after his own trials had begun, he told me he didn't think Dad wanted the abundant life. That's interesting to me--totally religious terms. I don't for a moment think that summed up David's relationship, it's just that I remember him saying that.


But Dad had the abundant life, it's obvious from reading this autobiography. Slowly my own feelings of isolation from my father have dwindled and gone down where they belong, into the grave of my father. Those feelings have left me, and I now am mildly angry at myself for ever having wasted a moment of our lives worrying about that, but I couldn't help it at the time. I couldn't fully talk with my Dad, though we did talk, because of the memory of his hand on my face. At thirty years old I woke up from a dream and still felt his fist on my cheek bones.


It wasn't constant; it never made me stop loving him. It troubled our avenues of communication but did not close them. In later years I know his memory of those days and times made him a little unable to talk to me. It troubled his own credibility in his own eyes. But here's why I am saying this now: reading this autobiography I hear his simple, clear voice untroubled. That's because our relationship has grown more loving and more kind. I talk to him often and none of that remains except as a memory of how sometimes in life you do things you can't seem to stop that you just wish had not been so. I know from experience. It was some damn saint or other, probably Paul, who said something like I have done things I should not have done and left undone things I should have done.


At the same time, oddly enough, the fact that he hit me impressed upon me my importance to him. Ain't that strange. And every year of my life I understand the importance to me of his life and his intelligence and his generosity--whatever he had belonged to others. He was a man who gave himself to religion because he knew he required it. I hear his voice coming off these pages and am deeply touched by his honesty and his simplicity and directness.


And I like him. I remember what it was all those years that made me admire him. I have always been proud of my father. I know all about his abilities. I know about his immense vocabulary and his personal honesty. I know about his angers and frustrations, but I am listening to the man trying to tell me--all of us in our family--how he lived and the amazing things that transpired in his life. The rest is the past, the past that instructs us in who we are and what our lives will be.


This morning, when I woke up, remembering what I had read the day before, I said Thanks, Dad. Thanks for writing this down. And then later, walking my doggie, I said Thanks for all of it. Thanks for my life. I told him I wouldn't change a thing. Then I added that I thank my mother too, because I thought she might be listening in. I generally talk to her on another frequency. A parallel development has occurred in my relationship with her. I dream of her frequently. But today was about Dad. I can't wait to get to the rest of this and read it all over again.