8/52 Fathers and Sons (Part 1)

As a privileged scion of a founding pioneer of a historic city, my father’s early childhood was spent in a quaint old american style cottage tucked in a hill with a carpet of slippery pine needles that hosted exciting downhill cardboard box-sledding and conveniently served for playing hide and seek among the trees and bushes. He must have had a wonderful upbringing as far as stories I’ve heard and read of his childhood as well as whatever indications smiles and props in fading photos could tell.

Like me, school must have had a different rub in him compared to his three other siblings who seemed to have done well academically. I cannot even recall all the schools he attended and have no idea whatsoever regarding what and where he finished college. But unlike me, and to his credit he did earn a college degree.

I also don’t know the circumstances how he came to fight WWII as an Army private and subsequently joining the guerilla movement against the Japanese. He refused to regale us with war stories as it must have been an experience he’d rather forget, perhaps highlighted by the episode where he had to imbibe death and stench as he went from one prison camp to another in search of his older brother who by reason of my grandfather’s instigation was forcefully drafted into the military and survived the infamous death march. (1/52 My Petri Dish)

For one reason or another but mainly by choice, my father followed a simple lifepath deviating from a comfortable life in a growing estate and chose to raise his family by his own sweat albeit under the same roof much to the chagrin of my ambitious grandfather. Somehow, their relationship soured for some reason and I have very vague memories of a tightly knit, loving family. Underneath the holiday gatherings and photo ops, what appeared to be an ideal family was slowly getting fragmented.

As a distinguished traveling salesman he spent most of the week away from home and Sundays at the bloody cock fights. We saw very little of him and if we did, there was an apparent avoidance on our part as the relationship revolved around how we were doing in school and our general disposition. Mischiefs were meted with spankings and ear splitting down talk. He justified his correctional posturing that he might as well spend the little time he had with us straightening us up. Somebody had to do the dirty job he would say.

Although I cherished the trips when he would take me, we were very much on our own with him to his driving and selling and me to my vista seeing and day dreaming. We did not even have birds and the bees stories as once provoked by a song that I would sing over and over until he blurted “Stop singing that song!” to my innocent bafflement. The song?

Darling do you love me?

Don’t tell anybody,

We’ll make a baby

Under the mango tree…

It was only after my sexual awakening that I realized what got him so peeved. Well, I thought the least he could have done was explain it and not just throw it out the window and ordering me to shut up. I wonder how he would have reacted if he heard this nursery rhyme version;

Jack and Jill went up the hill

to get a pail of water

We don’t know what they did there

but now they have a daughter….

My father must have had high expectations of me. It seriously got to his skin when I faltered and failed. There was no intellectual coaching or personalized tutoring then. Only boot camp discipline. And boy did that fire up the rebel in me. We had a volatile relationship that got me confusing him between friend or foe. I once had a chance to ask him why he was so hard on me and he replied that I had the raw material for it…and he explained it by saying that a good sword withstood the searing furnace and immense pounding of the hammer. You will know the quality once it is tested against other swords. Uh ok…duh.

Not all was that bad. He spent as many days as it took to find me a good tempered horse. Brought home bales of grass and a good saddle. He patiently escorted me by car when I rode on the national road to a farm where we deposited the horse on school days. We helped each other with his local tire business and mowed the lawn together. He brought the family to the beach and took me to the deep end. He got us bikes and toys, shined our shoes and taught us how to drive. We opened a gas station together upon his retirement only to part ways because of conflict of management styles. It was the longest period we spent together but he was flabbergasted to find out how much I reminded him of his own father whom he apparently detested and who in many ways influenced me more than he did (Part 2). He invited me back home when I got married (asked for the rent we would otherwise have paid someone else) and enjoyed my wife’s cooking. He attempted to eject a building tenant and bought equipment so that we could put up our own restaurant. It never materialized but rather complicated our lives even more.

Life with him was an emotional roller coaster ride. At the height of our estranged relationship and my new life as a father, I found a dire need to talk to him but we had avoided each other for so long already that it was awkward to even ask for a conversation until one day we crossed paths and pleasantly smiled at each other. “Finally a window of opportunity!” I said to myself and promised to talk to him the minute I finished my regular afternoon walk.

I excitedly came home to a quiet house but was asked to proceed to the hospital. My father had been gruesomely murdered in our garage. He succumbed to 24 stab wounds. I counted them myself and noted the ritual wounds. There were arm wounds from deflecting the attack, one almost severing his hand at the wrist. He must’ve been downed by the hard blow to his head then the coup de grace…both temples pierced, five wounds to the heart and four in the kidneys, a gash across his lips. Someone indeed wanted him dead and silenced.

Because of our circumstances, I was the prime suspect and had to undergo lie detector tests and series of harrassing interrogations which in my mind was leading to self incrimination and a confession. How can you describe your relationship with your father? Have you ever had thoughts of wanting him dead? Have you ever thought of killing him? Do you like knives? How do you rate your temper? What is your financial situation? OMG are they making me dig my own grave? Luckily the physical evidence proved otherwise. Until today, some people apparently believe I did my dad in. Sometimes I wonder if I did so in a parallel universe.

We never got to talk about what went wrong between fathers and sons. Grandpa, him and me. At least, our last images of each other while still alive were the pleasant smiles we exchanged on the road that fateful afternoon. Somehow I’d like to think it meant we understood each other.

I have two sons and a grandson. Now I know what went wrong. My passion is to see the pattern (curse?) broken. I am finding it to be a formidable task.

Apparently, we only get to understand our fathers and grandfathers when we become one.

Happy Father’s Day Dad.

Thanks so much for forging me the way that I am.