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Just like Santa Claus
2004-12-11 - 10:39 a.m. I didn't know my father when I was growing up. My parents divorced when I was 18 months old, and my mom packed up our stuff and drove from VA back to OH to rear me in her hometown along the Ohio River. My dad stayed in VA, then apparently migrated back to Boston at some point, where he lived for the rest of his life. There was no child support, no visitation, no telephone calls, and only a very occasional card or letter with the obligatory ten spot, arriving late for my birthday or Christmas. I didn't know whether to believe in my father or not. He fell somewhere in between Santa Claus and Jesus Christ on the childhood believability scale. I'd seen pictures and heard that he existed, but I couldn't remember ever seeing him, so I wasn't sure. I can't say that I missed him, as I never knew him, but I certainly missed the idea of him. Almost all of my friends had daddies who lived with them. Divorce was still a virtually unknown social phenomenon known only to the very lower class. There always was that hovering sense of loss, that wanting to connect with a part of myself that just was no longer there, like the phantom pain of an amputated limb. My mother tried to answer my childish questions, but generally thought that it was best to avoid the complicated subjects of adult interpersonal relationships. My father was a handsome man, black irish, with jet black hair and dark eyes, a long, aquiline nose. He could have passed for a Spanish aristocrat in the portrait of him as a young man. There was a twinkle of amusement in his eyes, as if the photographer had just passed a private joke between them before he snapped the photo, and he was trying to suppress a laugh. I got his eyes, but not, unfortunately, his nose. When I was about 14, my mom sat me down one night and told me some things she thought I should know about him. I had probably been peppering her with questions in the rapid-fire way I had when I wanted to know something important. She told me that my father was an alcoholic and a manic-depressive who had been arrested for drunken driving and gotten fired from his job as an engineer at Raytheon. Not being able to depend on him to remain either employed or sober, she had divorced him and fled with me to OH to prevent me from growing up amidst the instability inherent amongst alcoholic home environments. She found a teaching job in nearby WV, and did a decent job of raising me as a single parent in a time and place where that was still rare. I cannot blame or fault her or the decision she made almost 40 years ago, yet the chasm within me still yearned for its missing piece that fit. When I was in my 30s, I got a call from my father's sister. She told me that my father was dying in a locked ward in an inner-city hospital on the bad side of Boston. He'd had a leg amputated below the knee due to circulatory problems, and was suffering from alcoholic dementia. They estimated his time in weeks, not months. I hopped a plane to Boston with my then-fiancee, who had agreed to come with me more for the travel experience than out of any sense of moral support. He was horrified when I cried, quietly and briefly, on the plane, and got up to use the restroom instead of attempting to comfort me. When I met my father for the first time, he had no idea who I was. I brought him pictures of me as a child to jog his memory, and it worked. He faded in and out, was able to have short moments of lucidity before lapsing into the haze of his alcohol-soaked brain. From its fog, he roused himself once to ask about my mother, then to my surprise, about my own young daughter. I showed him photos of her, he smiled, and fell asleep. There were really no meaningful exchanges on my short trip north. While he slept, I visited with the aunt and uncle I had never met, getting glimpses of familial history denied. They treated my fiancee and I to a lobster dinner at Legal Seafood and we left the next day. My dad died a few short months later, and was buried in a pauper's funeral with just my aunt and uncle and a priest in attendance. When she went through his meager possessions a month later, she sent me back the photos of my daughter and me that he had carried in his wallet and a hundred dollar bill. We went to the beach in Gulfport for New Years Eve and stayed at a casino hotel with the money. My fiancee sprained his ankle and my daughter caught the flu. There were no more tears for my father, the daddy I never knew, who wasn't. Just like Santa Claus, he no longer existed to me at all. �
still here - 2009-12-18
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