It is Father’s Day, and I didn’t spend the day with my dad. I didn’t want to waste his money. He paid for me to come to the Nebraska Summer Writers’ Conference, and he wants me to learn to trust my voice, to gain confidence in my abilities more than anything else.
I was not out of touch, though. My husband, Clint, went as my emissary since he was also visiting his parents today, only a mile away from my dad. I had Clint deliver a book to my dad, a biography written by Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s speech writer, who graduated from law school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln the year before my dad did. I picked the book up at Barnes and Noble yesterday and knew my dad would like it. He got to tell Clint the story of how he met Ted Sorensen and had a rare chance to connect alone with the man I’ve made my life partner.
Clint was ebullient about the new puppy his family got yesterday. While he was full of joy, I was moved to tears when he told me that the card I'd written moved my dad to tears, as I'd hoped it would.
I’ve just started to express the gratitude I feel toward my dad for cheering me toward this spot where I sit under a tree in my 30th year pursuing life as a teacher and writer. In the card I told my dad he’d been right all the times he said he was father and mother to me both. I’d never wanted to give him that much credit, feeling that I'd made it through my youth despite him. But with the pain of my youth more properly processed, I see with deep appreciation the sacrifice my dad made to grow with me, despite who he’d been before and the complete lack of expectation he’d ever had for raising a daughter alone.
Today at the conference I met a man named David Luck. I took a liking to him immediately because he seemed to have roots that grew deep within him. His roots to life had been growing for 73 years, and so far I’ve found that those in their 70’s are my favorite vintage. I’ve watched my dad ripen in the years I’ve known him without my mom, since he was 52, and I was 4.
There was something about David’s singular ability to focus on me with his full attention that I found familiar. First I learned he’d raised his children as a single dad. Then, after I disclosed the circumstances of my background, he got a Eureka look in his eyes and said, “You know why I raised my kids alone? My wife committed suicide.” He was the first man I’ve met, other than my dad, who had lost his wife to suicide and unexpectedly raised his kids alone. It was like I’d known him right away as I’d selected a seat next to him in the crowded workshop on the daunting process of getting published.
David has self-published and knows the pitfalls, a process my dad is also going through as well. While the 70’s are a happy time when people have come to terms with their achievements and can relax, there’s a also a known race against time.
Neither David nor my dad seems to be huffing or puffing, though. Tonight David will sleep in a sleeping bag on the banks of the Platte River on his way back to Denver from Lincoln. My dad sleeps now in his house alone, happy, I’m sure to have heard from my siblings from his first marriage, to have seen Clint and gotten the book and card from me, and best of all knowing I’m being supported in a community of writers on a path where confidence can be hard to come by, and we need all the cheerleaders we can get.
While David has remarried and was four years divorced from his wife when she committed suicide, my dad has stayed married to my mom in his heart for the 26 years since she died. While they may not have stayed married this long had she lived, I have had the luck of being the living reminder of the woman who my dad feels was the love of his life, the woman who rejuvenated his spirit during the only time it ever faltered, when he was 40, faithfully married for 20 years with five kids. Sometimes I find myself wishing my dad hadn’t done the damage of leaving the first family. During those times, I was thinking rather ponderously and seriously without taking into account the full value of my existence.
Even my grandma, my mom’s converted-to-Catholic mother, at times seemed to have the same question. She’d lived through, stayed married, and continued to love my grandpa despite his years of carrying on an affair. But to leave a wife and five kids, to have her daughter responsible, or at least complicit, and now dead from the wreckage. Should it have happened? But there I was.
There I was with my dad, since I was four. Before the day that my mom killed herself, my dad was mostly the ghost in my life that he’d been while his first wife raised the first five kids. My dad was the guy behind the newspaper in the morning, who ate his toast and eggs with ketchup, kissed my mom goodbye and teased me with the moniker of “old bag” before going off to work in the morning. I could get a laugh out of him before bedtime if I did an entertaining stunt or a dance trying to delay my exit from my parents’ attention.
And then the void that had been my dad’s presence before my mom’s death made a complete 360 shift into her void, the one who had been my emotional center now gone, and my dad and I left bereft and together.
I called my dad just now and read him what I’ve got so far. He listened raptly, said “Very interesting, very interesting,” and when I was done reading, asked over the phone, “Can I go to the bathroom?” He wants to give me the attention I need.
We talked about Father’s Day, and I was right: my brothers and sister did call. He said he talked to Clint about our marriage, and despite troubles we’ve had recently, nearing the end of our third year of marriage, Clint told my dad he wants to make it work, that he needs to be more cooperative. The serendipity of my father relating this to me makes my head spin, that such a conversation would ever take place and that it would be shared with me by my father fills my heart with joy and hope.
It was true, also, that I woke my dad up to read this to him, but he said it was worth waking up for my call, to hear about the conference and connections I’m making. He thanked me for the card and said that, like they used to say about the letters of Gilbert Swanson, it was a “keeper.”
I feel ready now to give my dad my all anew. He goes in for his 11th round of chemo tomorrow, and when he said he was “close to the end,” he meant of chemo and of nothing else. My dad is not done with work, with his interests, with his vigor for life, and cheering us on. In some ways, at 78, it feels like he is just beginning or that we are just beginning again.
I know my dad will not be the only great love of my life, but right now is his season in my estimation. He sees me finding my path with surer footing, and while he’s encouraged me down other paths at times, he’s seeing with the most sureness we’ve felt yet that I’m headed in the right direction. I’ve found the silver in the linings of my life just as he is also finding his.
This past year, in the months in which he’s treated colon cancer like a ball he hit out of the park, my dad has lost no hair, despite his rounds of chemo. He’s finally let it all go gray while his physician remarks “amazing” at his absence of side effects. I hate to make my dad out to be the all-American success story, but he’s had enough failing to make his trajectory of successes leavened with the salt of misfortune.
Sometimes I realize I don’t revel enough in the good fortune of still having my dad here. I'm just discovering my brother Tom, a seasoned writer and artist who works in IT in New York, seems to love my dad just as much as I do. Tom said yesterday that Dad has been his model as someone who has lived his life as a constant creator. He said he loves Dad so much that if he came to New York to chop off his fingers, he'd go on loving him just as much. Our dad has lived a full life. He grew up in a small, Iowa town and went on to have a record-breaking law school career, to be involved in Army counter-intelligence, to handle a huge Omaha government whistle-blowing investigation, and has done the legal work on many real estate development projects in Omaha. He saved a historic train station from demolition and turned it into a nationally known museum, and has given thousands of speeches about history in part to overcome his nervous twitches and tendency to stutter.
I’ve just now realized that my dad doesn’t stutter anymore. Even though he’s still writing books about his life, about history, and trying to get published, even though he still practices law full-time, he is not slowing down but perhaps his engine is calming.
I was at a funeral this week for a friend of my husband’s family’s who died in the town where we’re from in her 80’s. The man who owns the retirement community was a neighbor of mine growing up. He told me he recently heard my dad give a speech about sunken steamboats, and that my dad seems to motored by a power-engine while the rest of us are using oars. I don’t know how to explain it. All I can say is that it lifts my spirit, it gives me hope, it makes me wonder how this man could be my dad, could be so full of life and dynamism , and that my mom committed suicide.
Together, they were dynamic, too. Perhaps they were too dynamic. They had some epic fights. Their love was not marked by complete fidelity. They took revenge on one another. They carried on their affair for five years before getting my dad's divorce finalized and were married.
My parents were elicit. They were separated by 17 years of age and by a lot of education. My mom graduated from high school in Omaha married and pregnant with my brother. My dad graduated from high school in small-town Belmond, Iowa, went on to earn money working hard labor so he could go to a junior college, then got a bachelor’s degree in teaching history, and then went on to be one of three students to get a scholarship to law school.
My dad’s motives for going to law school were not pure and justice loving. He went to law school because his brother-in-law, his first wife’s brother, had decided to go to med school, and my dad wasn’t going to be bested. They were both small-town, country boys. And my dad was determined to show he was just as good.
At 78, my dad is still motivated by competition. He doesn’t have so much to prove now, but he still likes to show a young lawyer that he’s got it in him. With my young, liberal sensibilities, I like to think that competition is a bit crass, and cooperative endeavors are more palatable. But at the same time, it’s also just a difference in our generations’ wording. My dad has worked with a lot of people to get a lot accomplished. Sometimes a person has to be stronger and pushier than others would like to get things done. As we’ve seen with Hillary, when a woman does it, it’s bitchy. When a man does it, it’s the mark of success. But it's success all the same.
I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve tired of judging my dad. I did that for so many years. I judged and critiqued everyone in my family. What else where they there for? They seemed to have done everything, and only through critique and full appraisal of them could I find my lessons, how to live the life that is authentically mine and not in anyone’s shadow. And yet I find myself absorbed and enamored with them. I grew up a lonely child, but I also grew up full of my dad, my brothers, and my sister. When I had their attention, I was on top of the world, and when I didn’t, I carried them with my on all of my adventures. Even now when I practice yoga, I often find them dancing uninvited in my head, but I do not wish them away. I have learned to treasure the people who dance in my heart. Memories can fade, and so I try not to waste a moment while they are alive within me.
I look now at all the times when my dad’s flame has teased us with its extinguishing. He had his first heart attack when I was seven. At the time I was attending a private, Christian school that my mom had started me at in preschool. A minister from the church affiliated with our school visited my dad and tried to save him. My grandma kept me with her while my dad was in the hospital. I wondered if I would have to live with her, if he would die. He was already old enough, 48 years older than me. She was even older, 57 years older than me. If things got any worse, I’d be living with my dad’s parents in Iowa, then in their 80’s, which seemed too ancient an existence to even be comprehensible.
My dad pulled through, while my grandma died six years later, leaving my dad an even bigger solo presence in my life. There was another scare when I was 14, and my dad had his second heart attack. He took both heart attacks seriously and changed his diet to a strict vegetarian diet and exercised religiously. I was extremely relieved that my dad made it, and that it would continue to be he and I and not me and who knows who raising me.
But I was still a teenager. I can’t say I enjoyed every minute of living with him. He could be obnoxious blaring classical music to wake me in the morning. Teasing me in ways he found playful was sometimes his form of entertainment. My dad was not an expert parent. He never read a parenting magazine. But he raised me full of passion.
When I came home hanging around with two guys I knew when I was 12, my dad warned the guys that the only way they could be assured of not getting AIDS was to masturbate and leave the girls alone. My dad was a horrible cook; he never cut the oranges that would allow me to stay on the soccer team; and he didn’t help me with my homework. My dad didn’t monitor what I watched on TV, and he didn’t limit my TV watching either. He marveled at my ability to make weekend plans. I kept as full of a social calendar as I could just to get away from being inundated by living with a man.
Sometimes I found not having a mother extremely unfair. Sometimes I wished my dad would re-marry, would give me someone other than him to live with. He found ways, though, to try to make me happy. As a lawyer my dad would rave at any perceived injustice I shared with him. When Albert Gorby and I did not get along on the bus, my dad told me to keep a log of each action Albert took to torment me. That way, if I ever lost my temper, I’d have documented proof of what Albert did to provoke me. This all seemed like a perfectly natural course of action for me to take, and I was glad my dad understood.
When it came time for me to go to college, I wanted to go away to Seattle. I had never been there, but it seemed cool and was far away. I was mad at my dad. He’d obviously done something to make my mom killed herself, though I hadn’t figured it out yet. I tried to figure it out through writing. I interviewed everyone I knew who'd known her about my mom and wrote a column for my high school newspaper about her suicide. I’m sure no one in my audience could relate, and perhaps I was horrifying them. But I needed to work it out of my system. And I felt that I needed to get away from my dad to do it.
Somehow, by some stroke of luck, my brother Tom was visiting from Iowa City about the time that I was deciding which college to go to. I thought maybe I’d go to the University of Iowa, compromising a bit since I only had the little I’d inherited from my grandma to help pay for college, and my dad had suffered financial losses that had led him to file bankruptcy and for us to leave our big, beautiful home that we’d shared with my mom and to move into a condo off a highway when I was 16. That was a great loss I didn’t forgive for awhile either.
Tom encouraged me to consider a small college. He said I should be a big fish in a small pond and mentioned Cornell College, which was close to Iowa City where he’d lived for the past ten years. He put everything in such a way that I thought it was my idea to go to Cornell. I got very excited about their one-course-at-a-time and felt nonconformist to be considering such a unique system of education. I thought I might even be able to show my dad that I was just as smart as him if I could table math and science for awhile and focus on one-course-at-a-time.
When my dad took me for the college visit, we got on the Interstate and headed east and drove for hours talking. I kept asking my dad, “Shouldn’t we look at a map?” but he kept saying he knew where was he was going. I was always surprised and a bit annoyed by how much my dad thought he knew. But he drove us straight to Mt. Vernon, getting off at the Highway 1 exit just before Iowa City. We stayed in a hotel in Cedar Rapids and found a restaurant that we would later frequent every time my dad visited me in college. But before I made the decision to go there, I was shocked when my dad seemed to pull a route to a cemetery out of his sleeve, where he showed me the graves of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather who he suddenly revealed met at Cornell. I realized I’d been set-up, but I fell too in love with the college to care.
I can still remember the English teacher who sold me on the college experience at Cornell. He talked about how they took students on a theatre tour of London during their 3 ½ week class. I couldn’t believe that a college class could actually go to London, and the more I learned about what they did and talked about in an English classroom in college, the more I couldn’t believe this was real. My dad chatted up the senior who gave us a tour of the campus. It looked like what I’d always thought a college should look like without ever having visited one, aside from Nebraska's biggest university. It was only a 4 ½ hour drive from home, it was beautiful, I had family roots there, it seemed manageable and stimulating, and I was sold. Even though I had a boyfriend who I liked, and he was staying in Nebraska for school, it seemed like a great idea.
When it came time to leave for college, I was much more emotionally complex than I could have ever expected. I couldn’t believe I was leaving my dad. I didn’t know if he’d be okay without me. What would he be without me? I don’t think I even considered that I didn’t know what I’d be without him. I’d fought with him so much my senior year in high school. I had a serious boyfriend to whom I transferred a lot of love, and my dad could do nothing but annoy me. I hated the condo where we lived, even though I had the basement to myself. It didn’t feel like home, and I resented the change in my life. My dad said that maybe this was nature, that parent and child must war before the child leaves home just so they can leave the nest. I hated how my dad seemed to have a stupid answer for everything.
But on the day I left for college, I was filled with so much more than hate and resentment. I had just returned from a trip to San Francisco paid for my mom’s aunt, who I barely knew. I stayed with my mom’s cousin who worked as a scientific researcher in Stanford, and she was generously determined to show me what life held outside of Nebraska. She told me that Ronald Reagan was not the hero my dad touted and that he was a horrible man who had invented a lie called the trickle-down theory which was not real. The rich stayed rich, and the poor got poorer. But my dad loved Ronald Reagan. My dad was also Ron, and as a child, I had imagined that my dad was just as capable of being elected as Ronald Reagan. I didn’t know why Margaret had such a vendetta against Ronald Reagan, but I wanted to find out more about what the problem with Republicans was all about.
Margaret had gone to school at Grinnell College, in Iowa, so she tantalized me with praises of an intellectual existence outside Nebraska, my dad, and Omaha’s Republican influence. After doing well in college, she’d gone out to San Francisco, and still there, she introduced me to Japanese food, the subway system, and the beauty of the hills. She told me that the world was corrupt and that being a scientific researcher was the only ethical profession she could think of. She thought not even teaching was a suitable career because even then you’re grading and evaluating people. She had a beautiful home, which she owned with her husband, who was a very kind man and also worked at Stanford and was much less bitter than her. They had shelves full of books, and she assured me they were more important books than those that shelved my dad’s library.
I came home amazed by San Francisco, resentful of Margaret, who had never had children and refused to watch anything but documentaries. I felt belittled by her but also impressed by all that she had shown me. Mostly, I felt confused. I loved my dad and Omaha and didn’t want to hate them or leave them, but she made me feel like the more I learned, the more I would want to move away. My boyfriend also told me he loved me for the first time in the 10 months that we were dating when I left for San Francisco. Now I was home and leaving Nebraska, my dad, and my boyfriend. How would I make any of it last? I asked my sister to help my dad and I drive my stuff to Iowa. I didn’t want to fight with my dad, and I didn’t want to be alone when I said goodbye.
The goodbye was hard, sad, and made me cry, yet also made me feel weird for being curious about this new chapter. I wanted to succeed in college and make new friends, but I was also so tied to home. I didn’t want my boyfriend Clint to forget about me. I had a four-year plan. I would study Psychology and English so that I could become a lawyer or psychologist or both, and then we would get married and live in Nebraska.
I drove 5 hours across Iowa and into Crete, Nebraska, once a month for 5 days when we had our block break in between classes so I could refresh and continue my relationship with Clint. They were intense weekends full of passion and eventually fear. As the year went on, Clint became more social than he’d ever been. He couldn’t call me for my birthday in March because he was pledging and wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone outside of his fraternity that day. By the end of the year, he finally agreed to drive across Iowa to see me, even though his parents wouldn’t like it, because he was out of school before me, and he would help me move home.
By the time he got to Iowa for the first time in May, our relationship had become imbalanced. I’d invested so much in him and his college environment and was livid at how much I’d put into him while being a studious bookworm in college, and now he was seeing my environment for the first time, a seasoned partier seeming completely happy despite the distance between us. Our relationship didn’t last over the summer, and I was heart-broken but free.
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