Rambling post-Father's Day Musings
All the Father's Day diaries with all their wonderful reminiscences of great dads got me to thinking about my own father, whom I don't remember at all. I wish I had the inspirational experiences and bonds with my father that others have reported here today. I might be a very different person today if I had.
I was very young when my parents divorced; they had been high school sweethearts and my mom got pregnant with me in the last couple of months of her senior year. They married right after graduation. I came along in December of '64, and I suppose that being so young and having a family proved too much for them after a while. They split when I was two.
For a few years, apparently, I visited my dad and paternal grandparents on Wednesdays and every other weekend, though I have few memories of it. When I was five, my mother met and married a man named Jack Smith [spit], and when I was six we moved from Fort Smith, AR to Tucson, AZ. And, except for one or two short trips to his new home in St. Paul, MN, I never saw my real father again.
I never, ever connected with Jack Smith; he was sometimes physically cruel and, even though he treated me reasonably well some of the time, the times that he didn't totally destroyed any trust or affection I could ever have felt for him. Example: When I was ten, I sprained my ankle very badly jumping over a fence at a friend's 4th of July party. A week later I was still limping and, for some goddamned reason, he didn't like that, so he made me take the shoe off my uninjured foot and walk back and forth for hours on the asphalt of the parking lot next door to where we lived. It was a mid-July day in Tucson, with a temperature of well over 110 deg, so the asphalt was molten and kept sticking to and burning my bare foot. I ended up with blisters and second degree burns on the sole of my left foot. Because I was ten years old, and apparently I limped more than a ten year old should.
And all this time, I was constantly told that I was stupid and worthless and would never amount to anything blah blah blah blah blah ad horrificum. What a prick he was.
My mother divorced him when I was 14, at which time we moved to Broken Arrow, OK (suburb of sorts to Tulsa). There, she eventually met and married my current stepdad, Lamar. He's a great guy and we get along fine now, though we did have plenty of friction between us during my teen years. Considering the tender mercies of Jack Smith, that was probably inevitable. But we reconciled a long time ago, and he's the closest thing to an actual father I've ever really had.
Many years ago, I found out that my mother had thwarted a number of attempts over the years by my biological father to contact me. I'm still not entirely sure why she did it. When I found out, I was very angry with her, but over the years that anger has transformed into an abiding disappointment and regret. Even so, though I love my mother dearly, I'll never truly forgive her for robbing me of those chances to connect with my father.
The damned thing is, I don't really remember him ... or at least I have no mental image of his face. I have random, disjointed recollections of him (him washing my hair in the bath, sitting with him at a Univ. of Minnesota basketball game, visiting his mother [my grandmother's] grave) but his face doesn't appear in any of them. My mother tells me that he and I look remarkably similar, but picturing myself in my own memories of my father is vaguely disturbing. So the sum total of my memories of my father comprise a small handful, and I never see his face.
From what I now know about my father, it's clear that something cast a shadow over much of his life. I don't want say that losing his firstborn son was the catalyst for his downfall, but something certainly was. He was a serious alcoholic, with a long history of medical problems over the years related to that affliction. He eventually drank himself into a liver transplant, complications of which killed him several years later.
My mother called me one night in 1994 to let me know that my father, Gary Dan Tidwell, had died in a Minnesota hospital two days before. He was five years older than I am right now. When I heard, I felt numb. I knew I should have felt something more, but because I'd never made those lasting connections, all I felt was disconnected and mildly depressed.
A few days later, I was thinking about the death of my dad, and I ended up writing a song about it. (slow southern rock/blues in the Black Crowes or the Allman Brothers vein)
Grievous Spider
(c) by G. D. Smith
Well you know that there's a spider,
Crawlin' the walls of my life.
And it weaves a web of sorrow,
Full of loneliness and strife.
And I've tried -- Lord how I've tried!
To wipe that web away.
But the spider keeps on spinnin',
Right up to my dyin day.
(chorus)
Everything I do, no matter how I try
Ends up ashes in the wind.
So I think I'm gonna quit,
I'm gonna sit right down and cry
And never get back up again.
Well my daddy was a weak man,
You know he drank himself to death.
His own spider wove a shroud for him,
Till it closed of his last breath.
Well the apple, as they always say,
Never rolls far when it falls.
And sometimes late at night, when I cannot sleep,
I hear my daddy's mournful call.
(chorus)
Everything I do, no matter how I try
Ends up ashes in the wind.
So I think I'm gonna quit,
I'm gonna sit right down and cry
And never get back up again.
Lord you know I wish that I could break,
That grievous spider's hold on me.
But that clinging web is in my eyes,
And it's just too damned hard to see.
So I'll just sit here in my darkness,
And think of all those might-have-beens.
And when that spider spins it's final strand,
I'll embrace that welcome end.
(chorus x2)
Everything I do, no matter how I try
Ends up ashes in the wind.
So I think I'm gonna quit,
I'm gonna sit right down and cry
And never get back up again.
Y'know, I wish I felt the loss of my father in real life as much as the song would indicate but he's really most conspicuous by his absence ... by the hole in my life where he should appear.
I'm not entirely certain I know where I'm going with this, except perhaps as a cautionary tale. Kids deserve involved and present parents. If you have kids, please do your damnedest to keep BOTH their parents a big part of their lives ... they're almost guaranteed to be be richer, better adjusted people because of it.
Even though my wife and I are separated, my 6 year old son and I spend at least half the week with each other. I don't want him to grow up and not remember my face. That's an pretty awful thing for a child to deal with.