A father's legacy

I don't seem to be able to think of my father at the socially prescribed times, like his birthday or the anniversary of his death, but Father's Day is coming up and that has me thinking about my own legacy as a father, and that makes me think of his as well. As the kids say, it's complicated.

He was a good man, and not a terribly good one. He was generous to a fault, and wasted much of his life in bars. He knew how to build things but lacked patience. He was inarticulate, uneducated, and embarrassed about it, and he was massively proud that I turned out differently. He's been gone longer than I knew him, but even at the time he died I felt like I had an incomplete picture of him, and not nearly enough memories.

What was expected of fathers started to change in the '60s and '70s, when I was growing up, and so it's fair to say that the transition was confusing for many men. For a long time I just accepted that that was how it was, and he definitely did come from a different time. He was one of ten kids in a family where the father, 50 years old when my dad was born, was often working in a distant city. There wasn't a lot of father-son bonding. Or any, as far as I know. So to my father, the amount of time we spent together probably felt extravagant. But for the most part, it wasn't time together; it was time when he needed to go somewhere, and I'd come along. Mostly where he needed to go was bars, the old dank neighborhood bars that barely exist anymore. Sometimes there were other places: auto repair shops, the lumber yard, the barber shop. We fished together a couple of times, and two or three times he drove us on my scout troop's annual trip to Lake Placid, but otherwise he wasn't there. It was up to someone else's father to perfect my Frisbee throw or to give me my first good fishing reel.

It seemed perfectly normal to me then, something any kid might do, to accompany my father into bars and wait while he drank. These were all places that knew him, where he knew everyone, and he was welcomed and greeted. I learned later that a barfly's welcome isn't worth much: when he died, people I thought were his friends couldn't rouse themselves to come to the funeral, but instead waved at the procession as we drove past the tavern. But to him, these were his favorite places, and he probably felt sharing it with me was a good thing. I'd get dimes or quarters to play the jukebox and the bowling machine, I'd get the tiny glass of soda mixed with grenadine embarrassingly and unfailingly called a Shirley Temple, and a bag of Wise potato chips or Slim Jims. And then I'd just sit and wait and watch him leaning against the bar, chatting with the other drunk men about nothing whatsoever. And somehow I believed it was perfectly normal, despite the fact that I rarely, if ever, saw another boy in those places.

My strongest memories of him are the smells: the powerful mix of diesel and cigarettes that clung to his work clothes, the whiskey and beer on his breath at the end of absolutely every single day, the pungent cool smell of stale beer soaked into the floorboards of ancient taverns. Images of him are harder to find (and actual photographs, in a family that viewed film as an exotic and unjustifiable expense, harder still), but to this day if I smell rotting lettuce, which he often reeked of after a day of hauling produce for Central Markets, I instantly think of my father.

He was sweet in many ways. He tried to be interested in the things that interested me, and was always polite and kind to my friends. He adored my wife and insisted she would have a wedding ring even though we were too progressive to believe in such things. He was supremely willing to help when help was needed.

He was stupidly young when he died, 48, and he died because he drank and smoked, especially smoked, despite very bad asthma and a lot of signs from his body that maybe it was time to straighten up. He didn't. A few years ago I found myself at his grave in rageful tears, so angry that he wasn't here to see his grand-daughters, and it was entirely his doing.

And so I think about the legacy, the memories my girls will have of me. I lived nearly 18 years with my father, he died when I was almost 25, and as I said, even then my memories were scant. I have tried, not always with success, to be present, to be there when I'm there, and not to be distracted by the electronics and things that make it easy to divert our attention. We have done a tremendous amount of things together, close to home, around the state and even a bit beyond, and each one seems to elicit a very specific memory for them, and I just hope those memories remain. I was blessed with a period of time when I was home nearly every day, and we learned to cook and bake together, to dance around the kitchen, and to just enjoy each other. I'm touched beyond belief when my older daughter texts me with a question she could easily have Googled, and when she thanks me for teaching her to solder and how to wash dishes. I'm touched beyond belief when my younger daughter squees with excitement that we'll be returning to a campground we visited many times when she was young and fell out of using, because I know her experience of that place, and our being there together will always be with her.