Tribute

 

How many men, like myself, have strolled through memories of their past, kicking them up like leaves in a cool autumn morning?  Do they spend time among those recollections finding moments both shameful and glorious?  How does a man reflect upon himself, wondering how others will judge him when he passes this world? More importantly, I find myself asking, “How will my children remember me?”  Sadly, it is during those moments that all my mistakes as a father shine like a million stars.  What if I had spent more time with them? Was I overly stern when I could have been affectionate?  Did I pay attention to their needs? Did I do enough?  I can only find solace in my own recollections as a child, imagining my own father wondering those same thoughts.

 

My memories carry me to so many places.  My father, having been in the military, was reassigned many times during my childhood.  As any “military brat” will attest, it is a nomadic life.  Concepts taken for granted by many were alien to me: the hometown you never outgrew; childhood friends who have become adults; the high school you saw when you were in the third grade, knowing that when you became a “big kid” one day, you would be going there; the little girl you kissed in the fifth grade who you were sure you’d marry, but didn’t. Yet my life was not without rewards, I have traveled through nearly every state in the US, visited nearly every national monument, and lived in one fourth of the states.  I have had palm-tree Christmases in California, and wallowed in two-story high snowdrifts in North Dakota.  I have seen moose and bears in the Alaskan wilds, and marveled at the Aurora Borealis as that cosmic curtain danced across the night sky.  I have endured the summer storms of Florida, watching sheets of rain relentlessly pound at our home, while jagged streaks of lightning rendered the air into ozone with a thunderclap that would make Zeus himself proud.  I have lived and breathed this place called “America” as few children could.  Every place, every accent, every ocean that touches this land is in my bones, and thus it is that my hometown is America itself.  So it is that my memories play across that vast stage, yet always with the same theme: A child in a large, lonely world, crying in the dark, and rescued from oblivion by moments with his father.

 

During many of my childhood years, my father was away from us; sent off to strange lands like “Viet Nam” and “Thailand”, tiny pink and lime-green colored blotches on a grade-school globe. Weeks appear as years to a small child, and my memories say I lived several lifetimes waiting for his return.  I could comprehend nothing more about those countries save this: They had my father and I didn’t.

 

Because we traveled so much, my comfort could never come from the company of close friends, those confidants we shared our deepest thoughts and feelings with.  Instead, my comfort came from the company of books.  Comic books regaling about Achillean heroes, mystery novels showing the pinnacle of human intuition and the depths of human greed, science fiction novels promising a world and time unheard of, and science books, helping me understand where science ended and where fiction began.  These paper friends brought me comfort while my father was away, and yielded much conversational material upon his return.  My father would ask me what I’d read lately, and I would tell him the stories of how many space pirates or bad guys were vanquished by my heroes.  And yet, I hope he saw in my eyes that each and every one of those heroes in my books held a special place in my heart: to me each one resembled my father.  While my father was gone, he merely moved into my books.  No matter where he was, he never left my side.

 

During my sixth grade year, I began to explore my interests in writing.  I had written a play that spoofed a very popular science fiction show of that time.  For a sixth-grader, it was a work of art.  For a play, it was horrid.  But my father, bless him, graciously offered to make a few “suggestions”.  The next day, I found myself with a paper that not only retained the spirit of my work, but also made it into a very workable play.  My father had given me the gift of his guidance, and the end result was my teacher offering to have this play presented to the whole school.  And so it was our entire sixth grade class banded together, studied parts, painted sets, and rehearsed until we realized that plays were boring after you’ve read through them for the one-hundredth time, and that acting was really hard work.  It paid off well though, we presented the play to the entire school, and it was an unparalleled thrill to hear the laughter of classmates as we progressed through the play.  My father was also there, as he brought his talents into helping produce the play.  At the end of the play, amid all the applause, there was a special moment for me.  I stood on the stage with pride, knowing that my father, a mere few feet behind the curtain, had helped me achieve this magical moment.  Again, even though he wasn’t right next to me, he never left my side.

 

Life, they say, is a book; each part neatly enclosed in chapters that we could only define in hindsight, ultimately leading to an ending that we can never escape.  So it was that my days as a nomadic child were entering their twilight.  In a matter of a few months, my father had remarried and retired from the military.  We moved to central California, where my father began taking classes to get his college degree.  I, in the meantime, was now in the middle of my sophomore year, and placed into a traditional suburban high school. There were no “comrades in arms” here.  None had suffered the sting of changing schools twice, sometimes even three or four times, in the same year.  Everybody had always known each other.  This time I was truly alone.

 

My father’s workload had increased now.  Not only was he going to school full-time, but he was also trying to work whenever he could to help us make ends meet.  If he wasn’t at work or at school, he was busy at home working on his homework.  Sometimes I would watch him in his den, hunched over the desk, studying non-stop, his brow furrowed in concentration.  The drafter’s lamp casting its sharp light on the papers spread over his large desk.  It was impossible to count the number of times I would go to sleep, hearing the faint clack-clack of his electric typewriter as he churned out another term paper.  In spite of the numerous years I had grown up with him away from our family, it now seemed he was even more removed, even though I could see him in that room.

 

I began to resent that typewriter.  The faint purring of its electric motor, the sound of the platen responding to the “Return” key.  Every sound it uttered screamed to me, “I have your father and you don’t.”  I began to think that typewriter should be named “Thailand.”

 

And yet, the pain wasn’t as intense.  I was in high school.  I was more mature now.  I knew everything.  I still had my books to keep me company, and a relatively new invention had just poked its head into our stodgy school: The Computer.  I quickly discovered, almost by accident, that computers and I got along very well.  Alas, I neglected my other studies, and before I realized it, I was woefully behind in assignments in every class.  It was possible I might even fail a few classes if I didn’t get certain writing assignments turned in. 

 

There was a twisted irony in all this – I still liked writing.  There were days when I felt that the paper was my canvas, and I had unlimited power to bend words to my will.  Before the computer appeared, I was going to make my career as a writer, aspiring to equal the greatness of prolific science-fiction authors such as Bradbury, Asimov, or Heinlein.  My father, too, was a writer.  I would sometimes gaze in wonder at the articles he wrote in our local paper, laughing as I read his humorous stories again and again.  So it simply didn’t seem possible that I, a lover of writing, was missing not one, but several deadlines.  I have since learned that this is a perfectly normal thing for writers.

 

At the desk in our living room, I sweated over finishing a paper on anthropology.  The teacher’s assignment was a playground for my mind: Create a society and describe aspects of its culture.  She had handed me the canvas, and I was failing to answer its call.  I wish I could blame writer’s block, but I had instead chosen to explore the nooks and crannies of the silicon world while neglecting this assignment.  I barely had anything started.  Some scrawled notes, nothing more.  It was midnight, and I was at my wit’s end.  Frustrated and tired, I buried my head in my hands and tried to breathe deeply, to clear my mind.

 

A hand touched my shoulder; my father had come in from the den and saw me sitting there.  I sheepishly explained what I was doing, or rather, not doing.  He looked at me, smiled, and suggested he could help.  I handed him my notes, and we went into his den.  The typewriter was humming, taking a rest from the incessant pounding my father had been giving it.  Its quiet whirring and occasional slight chatter from deep within it made it seem as if it were something alive.

 

I sat in the recliner in his den, answering each question he asked me.  “What are these people like?”, “Where do they live?”, and so forth.  He quietly scribbled away for a few moments, and then smartly fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter.  His fingers danced across the keyboard, the chatter of the metal hammers against the platen became almost rhythmic. 

 

I felt the tension wash away from me as I listened, knowing my fleeting thoughts and random ideas were coming alive by his good grace.  That typewriter that had tormented me was now wrapping me in an auditory embrace.  It was a siren’s song to the man-boy that I was, and I fell into a trance.  Sleep enveloped me as I laid there in that recliner, and I drifted away, listening to that typewriter and my father dance.

 

The sharp ray of the morning sun crossed my forehead and over my eyelids, waking me.  The room was empty.  The typewriter was cold and silent.  My father had already left for his morning classes.  On top of the typewriter were four crisp, white sheets of double-spaced type.  My assignment was done, and I felt a simultaneous sense of guilt and relief as I read it.  I didn’t even get a chance to thank my father for his help, and I knew I wouldn’t see him again until late in the day, when he returned home from his evening job.

 

It is somewhat anticlimactic to say I received a good grade for that paper.  Somehow I managed to finish my other writing assignments too, perhaps spurred by the guilt at needing his help for that first one.  It doesn’t matter.  What mattered is that he was there when I needed him, even when I thought he wasn’t.  He had again shown me that he hadn’t left my side.

 

So I sit here now, trying to understand what tribute I can give to my father.  What monument could I construct that would summarize the scope of his efforts?  What mighty work of art could describe how he made me who I am, and how he helped me make my children who they are?  I stare again at a paper canvas, and call upon the sum of my writing skills.  The words pour forth easily, and I hope my words ring in the hearts of all fathers forever…

 

“Thank You.”