THOUGHTS OF MY FATHER ON FATHER’S DAY

The first 33 years of my life with my father saw a few moments of joy and happiness as we did things together that made me who I am today and many more moments of hell - that also made me the man I became.

His stories about flying, that photo album he had of all the old airplanes he flew, taking me to the airport to watch airplanes flying (back when airports didn’t have locked gates ad security), that opened the door to the work I’ve done as a writer over the past 40 years.

Those nights and weekends in the basement workshop where he first made model airplanes for me and then taught me how to make them, led to the major reason I am known internationally now, as a modeler who writes about the hobby.

His inability to understand why I had to take off my shoes to count beyond ten - while he could do calculus in his head - and all the other things I couldn’t do that he could do and didn’t understand why I couldn’t, and his rage at me for not being able to do those things, made me fuly ready to leave a home I didn’t think of as one, three days after high school graduation. But even though I did that, I still tried to do things he had done.

The seven year War of the Cleavers over the Vietnam War and my undying opposition to it, after I came home from serving in it, was epic; let me assure you.

Through all that, my father did things I didn’t know until later he had done. Have you ever for even an instant worried that the concrete freeway you’re driving on would disintegrate beneath you? No, you haven’t. My father was the guy who figured out how to be sure a piece of pre-stressed concrete was solid (without breaking it open). That was the discovery that made construction of large structures with pre-stressed concrete possible. Had he not been a government scientist, I’d have inherited a patent worth billions.

My father was only arrested once in his life. That was back in 1938, when he was flying a plane full of ‘03 Springfield rifles to Mexico, to be sent on to the Spanish Republic. He had to land in a field outside Brownsville, Texas in the middle of a huge storm after running low on fuel. He got arrested after one of the cops who came to find out what an airplane was doing in a farmer’s field opened the cargo hatch in back. The guns got taken, but they couldn’t prove he was smuggling them anywhere, so he was released.

When he and the rest of my family came to visit my first wife and I in San Francisco shortly after we got married, and he started a fight with me over what we were doing, my wife told him to get out of her house and never come back. And she never had anything to do with him or the rest of my family while we were married. I asked her why she had done that. She replied “I saw the sweat stains on your shirt that were down the arms and down the sides of your shirt by the time they got out of the airplane, and I knew they were not going to be nice visitors.” In those days, I didn’t tell people anything about the first 18 years of my life.

And then in 1977, the year Linda and I got divorced (because of my inability to talk about things and immersing myself in work that didn’t really interest her), my sister invited me to come down to Orange County where she and her husband lived, for Thanksgiving. Since that was also a fraught relationship, I said I would come down, in hopes that perhaps things would become less fraught. I didn’t know Dad and Mom were also there for the holiday till I walked in the door and saw them sitting in the living room.

That was the day 33 years of life turned around in an hour.

While the rest of the family and visitors were doing the things people do when they gather for Thanksgiving, Dad asked me to step out on the back porch with him.

That was where he apologized for everything he had done to me - and he knew them all. I had no idea what brought this about, but I wasn’t going to question it. I never asked him afterwards; now I like that mystery.

And then, when the apology was complete, he told me how he’d been sent to boarding school starting at age ten. That was when he decided he must be unlovable, being sent away and how formal his father would be each September, driving him to the train station in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, “where my father would shake my hand and send me on my way.” He knew he must be unlovable because his mother never came to see him off.

In 1938, his father died of a heart attack. He had to give up the flying and take a job with the government, so he could afford to buy a house and bring his mother out to Colorado to live with him. As he told it, the first night they had dinner at the house, he told her “The wrong one died.” When she asked what he meant, he told her “You never loved me. At least Dad would take me to the train and shake my hand when I left each year for school.”

And then his mother told him that the reason she never came to see him off was because his father wouldn’t let her, due to his belief mother and son would have tearful good-bye, and “he told me it was time you grew up and accepted your responsibilities.”

He looked at me with tears in his eyes and said “That moment she told me that, I realized I had lived my life on a lie, and that all I had learned was to be angry. And it’s all I ever taught you.”

All the crap between us melted away in an instant, as had all that between my father and his mother that night in 1938.

I hugged him and we told each other we loved each other.

(Here I will state that controlling my temper - the energy I used to oppose him - has been a lifelong struggle. What he told me led to a decision to work on curbing it. Fortunately a therapist told me it would never leave, but I could re-direct it. It’s been easy the past 12 years to re-direct that energy in my political participation. But I still watch for it.)

He was a man of his word. He didn’t forget that afternoon, for all the rest of the ten years we had together. He was dismayed when I left that good government job I had in Sacramento three years later, but there weren’t any arguments like would have been before. He wished me luck. And when I sent him a copy of “In The Year Of The Monkey” after it sold and made my reputation as a writer in Hollywood, he called me up and said “I read your script. I think I finally understand you.”

You see, the thing the Original Creative Genius With 150 Independent Patents In His Name, whose shadow I grew up in, really wanted to be was a writer. But his writing proved that “99% is a bitch and 100% is a breeze.”

He was my biggest fan for the two years we had left together, calling on the phone to talk about what I was doing and being really happy, now that I was happy.

The last conversation we had in person was in the summer of 1987, when he and Mommie Dearest (she managed to get disliked a third time in succession by the third woman in my life of the three who ever met her) came to visit. He and I were sitting together in Griffith Park; he told me at the end, “You’re lucky, son. You get to do the thing you were always meant to do and wanted to do.”

It was a surprise when I got the call in April 1988, that he had gone into a coma and was in the hospital. The cause wasn’t a surprise - he’d told me that he had put a piece of uranium in the front pocket of his lab work pants at work for a week when it wasn’t know what that would do, and that he expected to die of “some cancer down there.” He’d been dealing with coloectal cancer for the previous 18 months, which is why I knew when he visited me the summer before that it was likely the last time we would see each other.

I flew back to Denver and stayed with Mommie Dearest at their home. She and I almost had our only real conversation ever that week, but she pulled back, unwilling to take the step Dad had taken and risk that his apology was made too late.

I was sitting by his bed in the hospital, alone with him while Mommie Dearest and my brother went down to the cafeteria. I suddenly realized he had opened his eyes and was staring at me.

He couldn’t speak, but he nodded when I asked if he could understand me. I told him I was going to ask him some yes or no questions. For him to say “yes,” he would squeeze my hand twice; for “no,” once. I wanted to make certain I knew he said yes to the most important question I was going to ask him.

During that last conversation in Griffith Park, he told me that when his time came, he didn’t want any “special things” done to delay it. I told him to go home and write that down, to be sure everyone knew those were his wishes. The first thing I asked Mommie Dearest was had he left any written instructions about the end of his life? He hadn’t.

So there in the hospital, I asked him, “Do you remember our conversation last summer?” Two squeezes. “Do you still want what you told me you wanted at the end?” Two squeezes. I told him I would be sure to take care of things for him. Two more squeezes.

His eyes closed and he dropped back into the coma. I was the only one who knew what he wanted. I was expecting a fight when I told Mommie dearest and my brother, and was glad my by-then Converted Mormon idiot sister who wasn’t talking to me once again while she complained how their skiing vacation had been disrupted by him “doing this to us” wasn’t there.

Surprisingly, Mommie Dearest didn’t argue. It became clear she was glad to have me take the responsibility of telling the hospital staff to cease their “extra measures” (and then of course, two years later, when I last saw her face to face, she accused me of “killing your father.”)

And so in the end, despite everything during all those years, I was able to be the son my father needed. I let him go because I loved him.

And he’s still my biggest fan.

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