Current mood:	contemplative
Current music:	Elliott Smith - Everything Reminds Me of Her
Entry tags:	life

Absentee Father's Day
So I see that today is Father's Day, which I wouldn't have really noticed except for the fact that my friends list has a lot of Father's Day posts on it. Lots of lovely David and Baz photos. While I normally don't like children, even I can admit that Baz is cute. David seems like an amazing father.

I don't really pay attention to Father's Day because I don't have a father around to remind me of the day. He died 20 years ago last Sunday, Flag Day. If there's anything to be grateful about such a thing, it's that he didn't die on Father's Day itself.

The problem is that my father was absent for much of my life. My parents weren't married and after they broke up I saw him occasionally, but not regularly. I was almost given up for adoption, but for some reason my father chose to assert his parental rights. Not that him doing so ever did me much good, because that was pretty much the last time he really seemed to be all that interested in me. (And maybe if he'd allowed the adoption, I wouldn't have to deal with the one thing in my life that does haunt me every day, childhood sexual abuse at the hands of my uncle.)

I only knew my father for 15 years. He died at age 38 of a massive heart attack, caused by congenital defects.

I have no memories of him before about age five (because I have almost no memories of anything before age five) though I do remember once being woken up around 7am on a Saturday morning and being made to wait outside my grandmother's house for my father to pick me up. It was foggy and cold, the way some spring mornings are, and I waited alone while my mother sat in the kitchen watching. I thought this was an unusual thing, having not been involved in one of these weekend visitations before. It seems strange to me now that a mother would force her child to wait alone outside for a visitation pick up, it's something I would never do if I had children (which I don't, and never will).

I remember seeing my father most when we lived in three particular houses, from the ages of nine to thirteen. I think that the only reason I saw so much of him then was that he was married to a woman with children and she probably urged him to spend time with me. I remember spending weekends at their trailer, playing Space Invaders and Tank on the Atari 2600, staying up by myself to watch The Ghost and Mrs. Muir on late night TV. I remember the tadpoles my erstwhile stepbrother and I caught at the nearby creek and the time I cried the night before we went to King's Island. I remember seeing The Last Unicorn and Return of the Jedi with my dad.

One Saturday evening during a visit, he asked me to go find the stepkid, who was out somewhere in the trailer park, so we could go and pick-up fast food for dinner. While I was out looking, the kid came back on his own and my dad took him and left without me. This is one of the few things he did that still actually hurts me. He asked me to look for the kid, then left me behind. It just underscored to me how unimportant I felt he always considered me. The stepkid was good enough to go, but his own, real, flesh and blood kid? Forget her. That seemed pretty indicative of our relationship as a whole. (As an aside, who leaves their ten year old daughter alone to wander around a trailer park without supervision while they take the other kid and go get dinner? I know it was the 1980s, but come on. Apparently, neither of my parents was very fond of making sure I was supervised in my youth.)

There was another winter night near Christmas when I waited hours and hours for him to pick me up, sitting in the dark living room, watching every car to see if it was his wife's green whatever with the round tail lights. I think he finally showed up. I was probably nine.

When my dad and his wife moved into a small neighbohood close to mine, I went to see him instead. Those were better times, when I could see him at my convenience rather than his. I remember making steak and the birthday where he gave me $50, most of which I spent on magazines with pictures of Duran Duran. He stayed in that house after he and his wife divorced and I watched The Breakfast Club for the first time ever on cable tv, back when you changed channels with those little converter boxes with the sliding channel selector. I stayed weekends and he bought me my favorite foods and we finally had some time without interruption to have a real relationship.

That was too good to last, of course. When I was thirteen, he packed up and moved to Florida for some reason. He wrote occasionally and I gave him a hard time about the lack of contact, but there wasn't a whole lot I could do, except miss him. He asked me to come and visit him, so I got on a plane for the first time in my life (alone), and naturally missed my connecting flight in Atlanta, had to wait four hours for another flight to Gainesville, which I spent riding the inter-concourse tram and wandering around the airport. We spent a good week together, he bought me all my favorite food and critiqued my taste in music. There was no money for the return trip, so I had to take a Greyhound bus for 14 hours just to get home.

The next time I went to visit him in Florida, I was fifteen and it was part of a family vacation with my aunt (his sister), my uncle and my cousin. Because I hadn't seen him in so long, I chose to stay with him for the week while they went galavanting off around lower Florida. Things went along just fine until Wednesday morning, when I woke up because his alarm was going off. My dad lived in a tiny duplex with no bedroom, so he slept on the couch and I took his air mattress. I lay there for several minutes wondering why he wasn't getting up to turn off his alarm. I stumbled over to the end table and turned it off, and when I stepped back far enough to see into the kitchen, to my horror, he was on the floor.

I tried to revive him in the way that a naive fifteen-year-old would, and having no luck, ran to the other duplex unit to get his neighbor, Neil. Neil, I think, knew my father was dead, but he told me to run across the yard to another neigbor's house so they could call 911, and to stay there. What happened next was pretty much a blur. I think my dad's landlady ferried me around. I had to go to the hospital to say goodbye before they did the autopsy. I called my mom from there and at first I couldn't talk. The conversation went something like this: "Mom, he's dead." "Who?" "Dad, he had a heart attack, he's dead."

Since my aunt and her family were somewhere in southern Florida, my dad's landlady, one of the few Christian people I've ever met who has actually lived up to the name, took me in until state troopers could track down my aunt. She let me stay in a spare bedroom, fed me, made her teenage daugters take me with them on a trip to take their niece to the movies. She was so nice and I couldn't have needed it more.

The police eventually found my aunt and I've since forgotten or blocked out most of the rest of the trip. I don't remember how we got home.

The real tragedy of him dying at this time of my life was that we'd just begun to reconnect. I was getting old enough to have common interests with him, I wasn't as much of a child that he might have felt was a burden or maybe didn't know how to relate to. I was becoming someone he could actually talk to and debate with. And then, in a flash, it was over.

My last memory of the whole summer was after my brothers set fire to our house (another great event of the that summer) and going over to my aunt's house, where I could hear her arguing with my mom about how I stole some of my dad's belongings (some VHS videotapes) that had been brought back from Florida. All I had to remember my dead father were some VHS videotapes he'd made from old school A&E programs and HBO/Cinemax movies, which I was legally entitled to anyway as his sole heir, and she was quibbling over them. (What a fucking bitch. Is it any wonder that I ended up disowning her a few years ago?)

The fact of his death was ever present that summer and I made sure to remind myself that he was dead every time I woke up so I wouldn't have to remember it later, so it would be in my memory and undeniable, so I wouldn't wake up and not know he wasn't alive anymore. Time has healed that wound, if by healed you mean inured.

I don't think about him anymore because there's no one here to remind me. I'm away from my mother's side of the family and I don't associate with any of his relatives because they're pretty much all assholes like my aunt or super-concentrated yuppies who don't even care that I exist. And it's not because I didn't love him, or that I don't wish he were still here, it's because this was the pattern he established over my whole life. I didn't see him for years at a time, and to some part of my brain, this is just the longest absence yet. Maybe that part of me is still watching for him, out the window, to show up in his ex-wife's green whatever with the round tail lights.