Fathers & Sons

“My old man had a round soul/He’d hear a freight train, then he’d have to go.” So sang the late John Denver on one of his early albums. So too could I sing of my father, as my own children could sing of me. My old man was a wanderer. He drifted through life, drifted in and out of careers, drifted in an out of my life. When I was growing up, he was conspicuous mostly by his absence. He was seldom home. During his tenure in the Air Force, he was away on remote tours in Turkey or extended TDYs (temporary duty assignments); as a truck driver, he was gone more and more often for longer and longer periods of time. Eventually, he stopped coming home altogether.

As I write this, I haven’t seen my old man for over twenty years. This fact always shocks people. “How can that be?” they ask. I have no answer. More correctly, the answers are too long and complicated for people who tend to see life in stark black-and-white terms. You see, my old man and I, we have no grudge against each other. We don’t dislike each other. In fact, we talk on the phone regularly, almost monthly. And while our politics differ considerably, we find we agree on many other topics. We get along. Our relationship is friendly, albeit not all that filial. Somewhere along the way, we simply drifted onto divergent paths, and the farther down those paths we’ve wandered, the greater the distance between us has become. Now, he has his life and I have mine. And as the years pile up in the spaces between us, the will to do anything about it grows less and less.

My old man first went away shortly after I was born. Sometime before I was six months old – the dates are shaky in my mind – he was sent on a remote tour of duty to Turkey. He didn’t return until I was two. During his absence, my mother, older brother and I lived on my grandparents’ farm in southwestern New York State. I was raised by my grandparents, uncles and aunts. My grandfather died during this time. Emphysema. I have no memories of him. The earliest memory I do have is from this time period though; it’s of my father yelling at me. It must have been right after he returned from Turkey. My brother and I were lying in bed early in the morning. We were goofing off the way little kids do. From the other side of the door to our room, a loud voice came telling us to stop making so much racket. The unseen voice of authority. Dad was home.

My old man was tall and thin and – I guess – handsome. All angles and edges, there was nothing soft about him. He was a stern man, a disciplinarian, a man who lived by rules and regimen. He was fastidious in his grooming. His uniforms were always clean and crisp; he eschewed fatigues in favor of dress blues, preferred the more formal “saucer” hat to the more casual flight cap. He demanded obedience; there was no talking back or negotiating. He laid down the rules and we followed them. Period. Nor was he very affectionate; although, I always felt that he was concerned. If I was sick or injured, it seemed that he was always the first one on the scene, always the one who took me to the emergency room. I think he loved us, but I think he didn’t know what to do with that love, like a man who suddenly finds himself in possession of something very valuable and doesn’t quite know what he’s supposed to do with it.

He was a likeable person, was my dad. He was outgoing and amiable, so he had lots of friends. He had no trouble walking up to strangers and introducing himself, and he was never at a loss for words. He had the gift of gab, something for which I – a painfully shy person – have always envied him. An old family friend once said, “That Dusty, he can sure lay down some words!” And he could too. I remember as a boy, sitting on the patio in the dusky light, listening to my old man and his friends talking about everything under the sun, mesmerized by the low murmur of their voices. They would talk and talk until it grew so dark that all you could see were the cherries on their cigarettes and cigars swinging in languid arcs from the arms of their lawn chairs to their mouths and back again.

He left again eight years later, on another remote tour in Turkey. By this time I was old enough to understand that there was a great deal of discord between my parents over this forced separation. It seems that – having a family – he could have requested an overseas assignment – even in Turkey – that would have allowed him to bring us along. Instead, he chose a remote tour that required us to stay in the states. He was gone for a year and a half. We returned to rural New York to be near my mom’s family. My grandmother died then, cancer of the liver. We felt very alone. When my father returned, there was a difference. Nothing had changed to the outward eye, yet there was a palpable difference in him, in my mother, in the atmosphere of the entire house. We didn’t laugh very much any more. I began finding other places to be, avoiding “the chronic angers of that house,” to quote Robert Hayden.

When he retired from the military, my old man became a long-haul truck driver. Now he was gone more than he was home. He’d be away for six months at a stretch, come home long enough to lay down laws and deal out punishments, and then he’d be off again for another six months. Most of my friends didn’t think that I had a father. One time when he was actually there, some friends came by to pick me up, and they were shocked. “We thought your dad was dead or something,” they told me. I didn’t explain to them that sometimes I thought he was too. This was usually followed by something like, “And why does your dad have an accent?” I hadn’t been aware that he did; he just talked like my dad. “Yeah,” my friends explained, “your dad talks with a Southern accent. How come you don’t?”

Well, I didn’t speak with a Southern accent, because I had been born and raised in the North. And my old man had a Southern accent because he had been born and raised around Baton Rouge, LA. Born, actually, just across the Mississippi line near the town of Magnolia, where his dad was a share cropper. The second of five children, he was – according to him – born in a log cabin “with chinks between the logs wide enough to throw a baseball through.” Grew up in the country, but he wasn’t a country boy. He was too intelligent for his own good, and too sensitive, with a blood phobia that precluded him from activities like hunting. But he did well in school, and when the time came, he went into the Air Force and became a Russian linguist working for the National Security Agency. But that Southern accent stuck with him throughout all of his travels, and it’s still there today when I talk to him on the phone. I hear it now that I haven’t seen him in so many years. I suppose in the end it’s the one thing I’ll remember about him when everything else is gone. The sound of his voice will be my first memory of him and my last.

He went to college for a while. Studied political science and history. He came pretty close to getting a degree too, but in the end I guess he decided it just wasn’t worth it. After all, what does a truck driver need with a degree in political science? But he did inspire me to go to school myself. I became the first person in our immediate family to earn a Bachelors degree, and one of only three in our extended family to earn a graduate degree (the other two being my half-sister Cindy and my cousin James). And it was all due to his going to college – that and his love of books, which he passed on to me.

I never really understood my old man while I was growing up. Even now, I’m not altogether sure that I do. He was always so distant, so unapproachable, one of those people you follow merely because circumstances have placed you in the position of having to follow them. For a long time I didn’t like him, because I guess that’s one of those things young men have to go through – that independent, rebellious stage when you don’t need anybody telling you how do to anything. In time, though, I came to see that he wasn’t such a bad sort after all, just confused like all the rest of us and struggling to get on with life while at the same time figuring out what this thing called life is – just like all the rest of us. And eventually, I came to see that I was a lot like him, much more so than I would have wanted to admit twenty years ago. He’s smart and he’s been around the block quite a few times, and there’s a bit of wisdom in his voice, and I find comfort in that as I get older myself.

And when I look at my own children, I think they must see me much the way I once saw my old man. I’m sure they’re angry at me because I wasn’t there for them. I’m sure they really dislike me on some level. I’m sure they look at me and see an irresponsible, immature, selfish man who thought more of himself than he did of them. And, they’re probably right on every count. I only hope that some day, when they’re older and wiser, they’ll begin to see me the way I see my old man now. Because I inherited an awful lot from my old man, not the least was my utter bewilderment at finding myself a father. Because even now, when I talk with my children, I feel like a man who suddenly finds himself in possession of a precious gift that he doesn’t quite know what he’s supposed to do with. Unlike my old man, though, I am always, always lost for words in the presence of such wonder.