IN PRAISE OF MY FATHER

My father was a great man. Capital G, capital M. He had huge arms from working with a jackhammer in the tight spaces of a small coalmine, aiming it at the veins of coal located above his waist and over his head. He spoke truth to power and took on a sadistic drill instructor when he was in the military. Needless to say, he did not have a military career, but they did offer him an officer’s commission. My father was interested in aviation, but didn’t make it on the account of color blindness. They offered him airborne infantry, and he spent time drinking with the officers, who were testing the new jumps and the new parachutes for the troops. In the end, my father did not stay in the military. He went to school to be a mining engineer, but wound up working as a regular miner, because he could make more money. He took up the issue of the mine safety, and became very unpopular both, with the labor union members and with the management of the coalmine, until a mine explosion proved him right, but by then my father was fired from the job and moved on from the small mining town he lived in at the time. He ended up in grad school, working as a stagehand at the local opera theater and modeling for the art students. He was a low profile activist, and when the police tried to make an informant out of him, he played a fool, (or was it his true nature?) and told his would-be handlers that he will co-operate, so long as he will advise everyone that he talks to, that the content of their conversation will be reported to the authorities. They waived my father off and told him to forget that he ever spoke to them.

My father was a smart jock, who sat in the back of the higher physics classes (math was his strong point), and read Hindu philosophy book. He practiced Yoga, but did it in a different spirit, than in which it is done today: He did it for the sake of walking on coals, laying on beds of nails and being able to let two and half-ton trucks roll over his abdomen. I did not listen to my father and chose weight lifting and gyms over Yoga practice. That was my mistake. I should have listened to him more, when I was young. Had I listened to his advice based on the general notions from another time, I would have been more successful in my endeavors. It was one of those things of the had-I-stuck-with-my-father’s-yoga-and-kept-doing-my-karate-practice-I-did-in-high-school variety. But I hadn’t, and instead I argued with him all through my teen-age years, trashing all of his cherished notions and values in the process. I was a young republican driving a truck during my college years devoid of humor or enlightened self-interest. There were opportunities to talk to girls and a red flag or two, but I missed them. While rejecting most of his views and practices, I managed to internalize a few key ones despite myself. One was Achievement and Self-Development. The others were fascination with Eastern Philosophy and ignorance of and immunity from the peer pressure. My father used alcohol to break down barriers and connect with anyone and everyone, regardless of who they were. I never became a jock, but I am able to do the same with mere conversation. I had horrible fights with my father, which lasted beyond my teen-age years, until I moved out on my own. As with most things back then, I was not aware of the significance of the event, while my father got unexpectedly upset.

The older I got, the closer I grew to my father. The only fights I had with him were about his drinking. I tried to get him to stop, but failed. He respected me more after I moved out, and I learned to recognize and value his common sense advice and commentary on the events in my life. His success was an irony, given his drop out lifestyle, where career was evil and money was bad. The more money he got rid of, including giving it away to friends and charity, the more money fell on his head. His few friends privately thought him a fool, tried to emulate his income or outdo him, failed, and were his friends and buddies no more. He craved fellowship and a commune the way I endure wanderlust and long for solitude. He tried to find a commune, religious and otherwise, but saw through the bullshit of his would-be gurus and self-appointed wise men. In the end, I was able to achieve the same degree of the financial success as my father, but I get it done with 60 hour work weeks, while my father took a 25% reduction in pay to work four days a week, and he came and went from his office as he pleased, whereas I got to punch the proverbial clock. My father started out in a basement apartment, where he lived with his parents, grandparents, and sibs. He ended up living in a nothing short of a mini-mansion on the American Riviera, lined with white carpet, marble, and with a heated pool outside and a country club nearby, all the amenities were lost on him, and he found he place thanks to the diligent efforts of my mom and a brother of mine. My father may eschew the material, but I definitely appreciate the sheer beauty and the sheer spaciousness of it, every time I fly down to see my parents. I have my own bedroom with awesome white curtains against the deep azure of the southern skies. My father died after a long illness on October 8, 2015. His final health crisis came too quickly for me to fly down and see him. I was on-line looking for a flight when I got the news. His illness and death were the direct result of his life-long drinking. I asked my folks about why he drank, to see if the hardships of his life and my conflicts with him had something to do with it, but I was told that he drank socially and recreationally. He drank since he was sixteen, and that in their almost 50 years of marriage my parents had separated and almost divorced three times because of it, but in the end nothing, but terminal illness brought on by alcohol abuse, could stop him from drinking. Going back to Ancient Greeks, every classic hero has a tragic flaw, an Achilles heel that kills them. I always thought this notion contrived and unrealistic, until it occurred to me that the firewater was my father’s tragic flaw.