Sometimes, even when you know something is coming, when it arrives you're surprised (and chagrined that you lost sight of it). Such is the case today. Yesterday was my father's eighty-fifth birthday. I'm not alone in missing it. He, himself, never lived to see it, having died twenty-seven years ago this past Memorial Day.
My father was the smartest man in the world and when I was very young, I worked incredibly hard to not disappoint him and failed every time. As I got older and watched each of my sisters and brothers endure the same cycle of affectionate expectation and angry disappointment, I wondered why it was we grew up, because as we did, he had less and less in common with us. He was passionate, with an acerbic tongue driven by his hopes for each of us that, so often, seemed to be beyond our abilities to ever fulfill.
I can recall vividly the day, in a fit of anger over a niggling project that was not coming out right, my father telling me 'it was never my idea to name you after me.' I can still see myself standing as if rooted to the spot and realizing he had a smirk on his face because he knew he had wounded me and that nothing I could say would ever counter that, and so, from that moment on, I said as little as possible for as long as possible.
My father was the quintessential 'wait until your father gets home' parent, with a son who sought out trouble, such as mocking the nun who taught seventh grade (I cannot imagine how I came by this behavior, honestly) to the point where the principal, Sister Immaculata suspended me. Believe me, I was one child who could wait for his father to come home.
As I grew older the distance between us grew larger until we rarely attempted to bridge the chasm at all. I grew up thinking we didn't get along because we were so different only to realize many years later, it was because we were so much alike, perhaps too much alike.
My father got up in the middle of the night to drive to the railroad station in New Brunswick, N.J. and took the train into "New York" (actually Manhattan but I think everyone who does not live in NYC always thinks of Manhattan even as they say New York), where he taught the sons of power brokers like the thin rail of a young man who grew up to be the publisher of the New York Times, yes, Arthur, I mean you, as I also mean TD, who was the son of the former owner of one of the two New York professional football teams.
It was how my father defined himself in the world. We'd ride the bus up to 62nd street, beyond Boyd's Chemist, past the GM building and he'd tell me "I tutored Douglas T---" whose father had designed it. As I was to discover decades later, the parents of these children thought of him not at all, he was part of their scenery.
He was so smart--he had to know that. And yet, he still made the journey, traveling in the dark in both directions, six days a week so that we would want for nothing, as long as what we didn't want was him. He gave his time to total strangers. I heard amazing stories from those whom he taught at the reception in my mother's house after his funeral. I thought those stories had confused him with someone else, since the person they described wasn't the man under whose roof I had lived.
In the years since his death I've become a father myself. I'm not suggesting cause and effect, but I had never wanted children when my wife and I wed but, when we learned she was pregnant with Patrick Michael, I was ecstatic. Since then, I've often wondered how he and I, fathers both now, might speak to one another as opposed to all the years when we spoke at one another. Then I remember you cannot miss what you did not have. I, long ago, stopped asking for forgiveness even before my father was no longer able to grant it. And now, when I look in the mirror, I can see the past more clearly than ever, but have no idea of how it got there or how to repair it.
-bill kenny
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