Father

Hey Dad,

It’s me. Still slogging along down here, putting one foot in front of the other and so on. A lot has happened. I got married. And divorced. And married again - very happily this time.You’d love Bridgid, my second wife - she’s a lot of fun, really good looking and smart and funny and she sings like an angel. I can’t imagine what she sees in me. 

I have a daughter, Claire. She’ll be 21 this December. I actually have 3 other step kids as well, from my first marriage. Claire is bright and artistic and wonderful. In fact I’m quite proud of all the kids.

Do you remember when you used to lie back in your recliner with me sort of lying back on your lap? You’d cross and uncross your legs really fast and I’d try to keep up. It made me laugh and laugh.

And do you remember coming to take me out of school a few times? You’d take me to check on some of the oil wells, or to the stockbroker’s office to watch the ticker tape. I’m pretty sure you had no idea how important and special those excursions made me feel.

Well, I did get accepted to medical school. I actually got in to several but I chose the University of KY because I could get in-state tuition, even though I had been living in Saudi Arabia for the preceding six years. I graduated with “high distinction.” I wish you could have been there, I know it’s what you always wanted for me.

I think I rebelled and chose to try & play music professionally precisely because you & mom were so eager for me to go to med school. I don’t know why I did that, because deep down I was always so desperate for your attention & approval that I’m surprised I didn’t just get it over with & apply long before I finally did. I remember quitting band and going in to ROTC my sophomore year of high school to try & win your approval for something. As you know I really hated it and went back in to band as a junior. 

Daddy, you were grossly inarticulate as far as being able to talk about feelings and being able to say that you loved me and so on. And I’m ashamed that I took that personally & held it against you for the longest time. I thought you didn’t have much use for me but now with some perspective I can see you just didn’t have the tools to share things like that. Mom told me some of the things you said about me, after your cancer became terminal, that showed me how wrong I was. 

So I’m sorry if I was sort of distant after I was out on my own. I loved you dearly and miss you every day. Please forgive me for being so dense, I just didn’t recognize then what I recognize now.

Father

My father is smart.  He can recite the Declaration of Independence, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and countless Shakespearean sonnets and soliloquies on demand. 

 
My father doesn't know a stranger.  When the Jehovah Witnesses came to our door and my mother urged him to tell them we weren't home or, worse yet, that we were Catholic, Dad would answer the door.  When the kindly old lady announced that she had a message for us from the Lord, my dad invited her in for coffee. 

 
My father made me feel important.  He regularly took me to work with him at Miami University where he taught English literature.  He'd tell the class that I was his assistant instructor for the night and let me pass out papers and sit up front with him. 

 
My father was an impetuous romantic.  When the Village Square Townhouses apartments were scheduled to get new carpet installed he spray painted a big red heart three feet in diameter on the shag green rug and wrote "1-4-3, Dee," his short hand way of saying I love you to my mom.  She was aghast, but he reasoned that they were just going to tear it all up anyway. 

 
My father was fun.  When I was four or five he'd pretend he was a polar bear.  He'd get down on all fours and let me ride on his back.  If there was any leftover pizza in the fridge, and there usually was at our house, he hand me a piece saying, "Here little bear, have some cold walrus."  I was about 12 before I finally realized that there really was no connection between walruses and cold pizza. He let us have food fights on the nights mom was away at law school.  We almost got away with it until we left a telltale piece of baloney stuck to the ceiling. Once mom spotted that he had to think of other ways to have fun.  He went through a phase where he loved model trains, and he installed a train that spanned the length of our large dining room table and made a huge oval path.  He took our lunch orders and then delivered lunch via electric train.  We were entranced. 

 
My father can sing.  If he has stage fright, he hides it well.  He can do more than carry a tune, he can sell a song. His specialties are "Brandy" by Looking Glass, "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straits, and "Steamroller".   Even in the midst of chemotherapy he belted out "Black Water" by The Doobie Brothers with my little brother at a karaoke bar in town. 

 
My father loves to eat.  If what you're eating at a restaurant looks good to him he'll ask, "Are you gonna eat that?" or sometimes he'll just help himself to your plate.  Once I brought a new boyfriend around and dad just started eating the man's pancakes.  I nudged my boyfriend and told him, "This means he likes you.  He feels comfortable enough to eat off your plate."

 
My father never judged me even when I judged myself.  When I learned I was pregnant out of wedlock in the spring between my junior and senior year of college I dreaded telling him.  Instead of disappointment, he embraced me and said, "That's great news."  He practically jumped up and down yelling to my mom, "Dee did you hear?!  We're going to be grandparents!  This is great!"

 
My father made me feel pretty when I felt anything but pretty.  In junior high I was shorter and heavier than the other girls in my class.  Everyone seemed tan while my pale skin freckled or burned. But every day through junior high and high school my dad would stop me before I headed out.  He'd look me square in the eye and he'd say, "Bridgid, you're alright."  And eventually I started to believe him. 

 

 

 

Topic: Father

The room was full of boxes. The boxes were all about the same size, seven feet long, a little over two feet wide, a little less than two feet tall. They came in many styles, some quite garish in their audacity. I stood in front of a simpler one, maple I think with a modest brown stain. It felt right. I looked briefly about at the others, glittering prisons for the soul and knew I was right. The man who specialized in finding the best Christmas presents at Big Lots wouldn’t approve of wasting too much on a fancy box that we were only using once. The man who owned the room asked if we wanted a sign on the box. I asked for one that said Dad.

He was never the best Father in the world. I don’t think he would argue with that. Father was too formal. Fathers were stern, they “knew best.” Father was a costume he wore sometimes when he thought he needed it. But the mask would always slip and Dad would be found smiling underneath, laughing at a joke only he heard. I was never fooled. I never called him father, he was always Dad.

While the man who owned the room of boxes prepared him for his final trek to his homeland of Price Hill, a reporter, one of his people, asked me what my father had taught me. I don’t remember what I said then, they didn’t use it on the news. But I know now what I should have said. My Dad taught me to play. To play with passion and joy, to love the game as much as the winning. He taugh me to laugh with others and at myself. He taught me how to make a baby smile every time. Not the most important lessons, not Father lessons. But the best Dad lessons one can teach.

We put his body the box and we put that box in the ground, not far from where his own father's bones rested. I remember the last time I saw that box, as autumn leaves swirled in a light breeze and the sun dipped behind the hills to the west. I laid my hand on the wood, for a long time, alone. I was the last person who knew him to touch that box. I said my goodbyes and joined the caravan of grief to return to lives that had to go on.

Lou

Topic: Father

Author: Chris Dunn

“Oh, yeah? Well… My dad can beat up your dad!” This taunt got thrown around a lot when I was a child, rarely at me, of course, since my father taught me to work hard to avoid the situations where such taunts would arise (i.e. Fights). Instead, I was typically on the sidelines when two boys would square off in disagreement and allow things to escalate to sharing each other’s breath in close proximity along with the traditional pre-fight exchange of threats. There wasn’t always a fight in the offing, sometimes it was just simple macho posturing for status, but either way I was always afforded time to think on the unspoken question. “Could my dad beat up theirs?”

My father was strong. I remember him rushing me, cradled in his powerful arms, to the emergency room. Despite my added weight, he leapt in a single bound up the four foot loading dock rather than waste the time scaling the steps. His thunderous command cut through the tangled, ER bureaucracy. We didn’t wait in line, sitting for hours with the bloodied and bandaged in the waiting room. We were ushered straight to x-ray and in short order found ourselves sitting an exam room as a bored-looking doctor pointed to the gray image of my skeleton with an obvious foreign object hovering within the nest of bones. “Yeah, it’s a penny.” The doctor was obviously unimpressed.

And he was certainly crafty. Our townhouse on Bising Avenue was frequent host to bearded college men, some his students, some his fellow professors, some just friends. The would hover over their armies as they stroked their beards, adjusted their spectacles, and pondered furiously for hours. I tried to watch and learn from the masters as they shuffled their horses and bishops in intricate, slanting attacks and defenses, but the game moved at such a ponderous pace to the eyes of an eight year old. Win or lose, his mastery of the game’s rules and the procession of obviously learned men who had journeyed to our backwater berg just sto challenge the master, proved his station as one of the greatest. It would be nearly a decade before I won my first game against him. It is still one of my happiest days.

And smart? Puh-lease! The man’s brain is a vault of knowledge. I’ve seen him – albeit, at the oddest of times - pull from it reams of poetry and prose. Don’t you dare mention a crow around him, unless you’ve got time to hear all 13 different ways of looking at it. For years I assumed he knew Shakespeare personally and had helped him write most of the plays. We had a rule in our house, parents weren’t allowed to answer Jeopardy questions, until the kids gave up, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get an answer in edgewise. “Why don’t you go on this show?” we would plead. He unraveled the mysteries of poetry, converting it from a tangled web of sing-songy lines into heart-felt sentences arranged in meter. He was the one who taught me that Shakespeare was more a bawdy, joke-smith than a lofty, unreachable master whose reputation obscured understanding. I owe my English degree to him, in more ways than one.

But this is a fight... Does he have the fire and fury inside him to take down his fellow man? Surely, I’ve seen him red with rage at the injustices this world can heap upon people. Many time of I’ve heard him speak with the harshest invective against those whose would exploit their others for their own gain. I’ve seen him tear apart a chair with his bare hands and punch a hole in the dining room wall, but never have I seen him strike another person.

In truth, he often seems too gentle for this world, and must take pills to numb the many pains it can cause. He’ll give you the shirt off his back and spend hours – much to my mother’s chagrin – talking to the witness of jehovah - you know, since they came all the way out. He is the founder of the only faith whose tenets I believe in total. Put simply: No hitting.

So can he beat up your dad? If we’re talking philosophically, it’s likely no contest. And if we’re not talking philosophically, I really don’t care.

Topic: An Unexpected Guest

Sometime in the spring of 1994 I donated a bunch of eggs.  I'm not talking about eggs like bacon and eggs, but of human eggs, the stuff of life.  I was working full time as a licensed practical nurse in a locked Alzheimer's unit at a nursing home and finishing up coursework to become a registered nurse.  My kids, Ali and Aaron were ages 7 and 5 respectively.  And I had just remarried their dad about a year prior to my egg donation.  My first and second husband, the father of my children and I had always had a difficult relationship.  We eloped in 1987, divorced in 1992 and remarried in 1993.  He had promised he had changed and that it would be different this time.  So what do you do when you have a difficult marriage that it isn't working much better the second time around?  You buy a house in the suburbs. 

We had rented through both of our marriages and even lived in a mobile home.  Well actually it was a trailer, not even a double wide and certainly not worthy of being dressed up by the name "mobile home."  Maybe if we had a home, a real house with a yard and a patio and a basement things would get better.  Maybe if he had more space, maybe if our little family of four had more space he'd be nicer to me.  But where would we get the money to make a down payment?  We needed about three grand.  He worked as an office manager and we were paying private school tuition for both kids. We weren't on food stamps anymore like we had been while I was in LPN school, but money was still pretty damn tight. 

I saw an ad in a local newspaper for a fertility clinic out of Christ Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio looking for egg "donors".  They wanted healthy women of proven fertility to donate eggs and the compensation they were offering was in the thousands.  When I went to be screened I asked how we could be considered donors when we were being compensated so handsomely.  They told me that I was not being paid for my eggs but for my time, that it was illegal to sell human body parts, that human eggs were the stuff of life and were not, could not be for sale.  But after intense screening I was selected to become a donor.  I had to a complete history and physical, took the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) and a standard IQ test.  I was interviewed by a psychologist who wanted to ensure that I was donating my eggs freely, that I understand I had no claim on them or on any children that might be born from these eggs I was giving up.  I eagerly signed.  I had two kids and didn't want anymore.  At least I had enough sense to know that bringing more kids into my troubled marriage or should I say, troubled marriages, would have just made things more complicated. 

I completed two cycles of egg donation and went for two "harvests" at the hospital in 1994.  Yes, that's what they call it when they surgically remove the eggs from your body, a harvest.  It was unpleasant.  I had an IV and some drugs but they didn't give me the good stuff.  The eggs are harvested intra-vaginally, and the procedures felt like someone was pinching my insides.  Not as bad as childbirth I consoled myself and tried to focus on the fact that I was making money and would be helping a nameless infertile couple or couples. 

I vaguely remember getting a call from the clinic it seemed like a year or so after the procedure.  They just wanted to let me know that a child had been conceived and born from my eggs, a healthy child.  They didn't tell me if this child was male or female or where the sperm came from, just that this couple wanted to make sure I was thanked for my donation.  I appreciated the call but I felt really thanked when I got my check for $3000 and used it for a down payment on a 3 bedroom cape cod house.  After that call life moved on and I rarely thought of my egg donation experience.  The new house didn't save my marriage and we divorced again in 1998. 

But 24 years later I was in line at Kings' Island on a Friday evening when my sister called and asked, "Did you ever donate eggs?"  I told her briefly about my story.  She told me that a 22 year old young man from Paintsville, Kentucky had just called her. He found her through DNA matching on Ancestry.com.  My sister and my father were listed as close personal relatives of his.  The young man told her he was the product of an egg donation.  His parents had gotten eggs from Christ Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio.  All of the details fit.  He had been looking for his egg donor for years by this point. 

The young man, Coltt and I talked on the phone for over an hour the next day.  I tried to answer all his questions.  I was nervous at first but quickly became at ease.  It was like I'd known him all his life.  Two weeks later he came to visit me.  It was a four hour drive so he and his boyfriend ended up staying the night. 

I guess I shouldn't be surprised at how much he resembles my son Aaron both in appearance and mannerisms.  And it kind of feels like I found my long lost son but not quite.  I can't take away from his mom who carried him and raised him.  He did ask why I did it, why I donated the eggs.  And I had to be honest.  I did it for the money. I wanted a house.  But I got more than that.  My unexpected houseguest has become a friend, a second son of sorts and that is worth way more than $3000. 

Topic: Landscape

I'm a big fan of windshield time.  I've always liked driving, it seems to clear my head.  Part of it is the scenery.  I don't really care if the terrain is bleak, or stretches up and down as well as across.  It's all good for me.  I can use the minor changes -- or even the lack of change -- to think about how to handle my most pressing issues.

It especially helps if there's some music, though it needs to be interspersed with some voices as well.  I'm still a proponent of radio as a medium, and a bit of tuneage that I use for a sing-along... well, that's fine.

I still have no idea what that has to do with a horizontal paper orientation, though.

Topic: Landscape

Author: Aaron Collins

Last September, my wife, my father-in-law, and I drove from Phoenix, Arizona to Cincinnati, OH. Joe had fixed up a 2007 Volvo “Something” that I’m not sure where he acquired. The car was ours as long as we could get it over to Arizona, pick it up, and drive it home. Joe wanted to come with us just in case something happened with the car along the way. I’m glad that he came with us because some of the stretches of road were some of the longest and loneliest I’d ever experienced. Normally, Joe said, he’d drive through New Mexico, Texas, and then up through Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and into Ohio. But I suggested we should go a different way so we could see more of Colorado. I was picturing mountainous vistas, which there were for a minute, but that changed quickly. Turns out, the bottom left corner of Colorado into Kansas is the forgotten abyss of America. There were stretches for fifty miles or more that did not veer or curve in the slightest, where you could see no livestock, no trees, buildings or people. I didn’t understand this at first, but this caused me a great deal of anxiety. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe our continent was like the universe; mostly wilderness and expanse peppered with civilization here and there. Or more like extremely dense populated areas sandwiching a great scar of a void in the middle. It was beautiful and scary to me. I suppose some of the fear was generated from feeling overwhelmed by the lack of stimuli on the horizon. I just couldn’t fathom the…space. So much space. This went on for quite some time. At some point we did hit a gas station which was like an oasis. You had to wonder WHO THE HELL LIVES OUT HERE! There was a hand written sign for a rodeo party on of the telephone poles out sign and a farm in the distance with two or three cows grazing. The woman at the counter in the gas station had this look about her, like she was from the past. They had Keurig though and I made myself some coffee and then we drove on for most of the day through similar stretches of nothingness until we reached Missouri which was actually a relief. There were trees and businesses and people. My anxiety retreated.