Here is an entry from my friend’s blog that everyone should read. I have her permission to to post it here, but you can it and the rest of her blog at this url: http://famvi.hypermart.net/horseshoes/ . Thanks and enjoy.
Hey everybody, and a special ‘Hey” to all you fathers, step-fathers, grandpas, mama’s boyfriends, baby daddies, stand-in uncles, single mothers and whoever else is gettin the job done; Happy Father’s Day!
My father has been dead for 19 years this year, but I love him as much as ever, and still write to him on a regular basis. Since today is a day for remembering him, I’m gonna.
My daddy, Pops, was the kinda guy that only I thought was wonderful. Most people wanted to focus on all the scary, bad things he did, but for me, those things were silly and had nothing to do with who he was. I’ve written a lot about my father, privately and publicly, and there are things I’ve never said, but always wanted to. So here on this site, on Father’s Day, I’m gonna remember something that won’t go away. It’ll feel like I’m telling somebody, but at the same time, I feel relatively safe knowing that nobody will read it. I haven’t been able to share this memory that would so embarrass my father, because it breaks my heart completely. But I wanna get it out. Maybe sharing it will change how I think about the whole poverty thing. I see it in my mind’s eye as though it just happened, and I feel it for him:
Standing at the Steak n Shake, fighting tears and begging the kid behind the counter to just give you the damned milk-shake. The milk-shake that your wife asked for with what might be her dying breath. It’s not even about the time you don’t have, you just plain don’t want to explain to this kid that your wife is lying in hospice and has starved almost to death in the last stages of cancer before your helpless eyes. You don’t want to explain how if you’d have known that she was gonna die before you, you would’ve treated her better. You don’t want to tell him that you haven’t been home or to work or anywhere but the hospice in over two weeks. You couldn’t possibly describe the helplessness. Now, so close to the end she has whispered what you think was “ice cream” and you jumped at the chance to finally do something for her. You don’t want to explain that you don’t have three dollars or any way to get three dollars, that after this trip, you won’t even have gas to get home after she… when it’s over. You haven’t thought that far ahead during the time you’ve been by her side. You’ve just waited, desperate to help her, to somehow make this easier and now all she wants is this milk-shake, this God-damned three dollar milk-shake!
My father, a grand-father many times over, a man who worked hard all his life, snatched a milk-shake from the Steak n Shake and ran out like a child. I saw him later that day and the only way I can describe him is “thoroughly beaten”. My step-mother did, in fact, die that day, with the melted, untouched milk-shake still on the night stand by her death-bed.
That’s the painful story that I have never told anyone about my father. I’m not ashamed that he stole a milk-shake. I’m happy he did what he could at the time. It’s not shame I feel. It’s fear. I’m not afraid that, when the time comes, I won’t have three dollars. I’m sure I won’t have. I’m afraid of that awful feeling he had about it. I believe, after all that he had been through in his life, this lack of three dollars did him in. I can’t be sure; he killed himself shortly afterward.
I don’t want that to happen to me or mine, so I try to prepare us to come up short, to not sweat it, things go how they go. I don’t know if it has any effect. We’re all still always whining about what we don’t have, without trying too hard to get it. But maybe, just maybe, coming up short at the crucial moment won’t be such a surprise to us. And maybe we can live through it.
Happy Father’s Day Pops.
