Father's Day?

There's an assignment, contest? underway to write an anecdote, description demonstrating what a swell bloke Dad was, is, has proved to be? whatever. Is this Father's Day? I'd planned to simply ignore the 'Day' as I do nearly all Calendar special days, including, to be honest, birthdays. But I've had a change of heart.

I loved my father. He's been dead about twenty five years. By any usual measure he was a sorry excuse for a Dad, especially if that is measured by whether or not he was provident. He was improvident. Love for a parent, however, really can't be measured with any meaningful accuracy by what they provided us. The only truly meaningful measure, I believe, is 'did the parent successfully impart the information that they loved us in such a way that there has never been the slightest doubt?' I have not the slightest doubt that he loved me. What I feel most deeply with respect to my father is persistent regret that I never made any effort to tell him how much I loved and appreciated him.  

I've been haunted by memories of the last time I spoke to my father. It happened when I was sixteen, living alone in a boarding house in Neutral Bay, on Sydney Harbor from where I took a ferry everyday to go to work in the city. I had an accountant's clerk job in an electrical supply store in the city. Returning home from work, about to board the ferry, I was approached by my father who asked me for money. I have no idea how he discovered where I was, or would be. I doubt the meeting was by chance, as he was not the slightest bit surprised to see me. His trousers were held up by a men's necktie. In his right arm he carried a bundle wrapped with newspapers that clinked like the sound of bottles. I asked him what was in the bundle. "Company for the weekend," he replied. I walked away and boarded the ferry with my father following me. I ran upstairs to the top deck, almost ran to the downstairs nearer the bow, ran down and jumped onto the wharf trapping my father on a ferry he had no real intent to ride. I never saw him again.

However, I did receive communications from him, sent from Australia when I lived in New York City. By far the most dramatic of the two was a visit from a Catholic Nun (my family was notCatholic) who, she said, had to decide whether to take herleave to visit Ireland, or come to New York and personally deliver a message from my father. The two had met while my father worked as an architect (most likely as a draftsman) for a firm which built school houses for the Church. She told me she'd had his desk raised to accomodate his height. By that time I was probably thirty five or forty. Unhappily I expressed, as far as I can remember, no gratitude to the Nun. At that time, I guess, I was still frozen by unrecognized anger. He died, my two younger brothers told me, when I was about forty eight.  The Nun never delivered an actual message; perhaps she judged that I was not prepared to receive any message. So, she served as the message. I've certainly never forgotten her.

Some years later I learned the concept in a formal environment, the est Training, that one must unreservedly love one's parents. There was a codicil: in the event of a monster parent, the love might need to be given from a distance. When he was in his early twenties my father had immigrated, alone, to Australia from London. He came with a degree in Architecture. Early in his career in America he worked as a junior architect on the splendid San Francisco Opera House. By an odd, perhaps even unbelievable coincidence I was twice on the stage of that imposing structure: once as an extra in Aida when I was in High School, and once again when I graduated from HS. Neither time was my father in the audience.

Barry