TheBanyanTree: Father's day

[Monique]

For Father's Day this year I celebrated in high style by giving good old Dad a call. Dad is a racist bigot with delusions of persecution and a disdain for the female gender. Charming guy. He has no life to speak of, and hangs out in his subsidized old guy apartment waiting for something to happen to him.

Nothing much ever does. 

He's prone to badmouthing his ex-wives, those he divorced and even the one who dropped dead next to him in bed one night. Well, technically she didn't drop dead until the ambulance was almost to the hospital, but all the same. I suppose he wants us to feel sorry for the way he was mistreated throughout his marriages, because everyone knows that sympathy gets you farther than people just wanting to be nice.

Today, however, he surprised me by not only remembering Andrew's name but asking about him as well. Usually he asks me who I'm married to. He doesn't remember Stew at all. 

Old age sucks, doesn't it?

He asks how things are here and I don't tell him I've been a lot of pain for the past few days because what would he do with that information? He would have to ask what's wrong and since I have no logical answer I tell him everything's fine here.

He asks if I'm making a lot of money, which as everyone in my family knows is the true measure of success. He never did - he subsists on social security only. I tell him no, not lots, but I'm doing okay.

I'm doing okay.

He tells me he was unable to go to the father's day lunch my siblings had planned for him yesterday because of recurring digestive issues. He told them to go ahead without him. As if that made any sense. Instead, they picked up food and brought it to his apartment house, to one of the public rooms available for these things. His apartment is too small to have that many people.

I used to feel sad whenever I'd hear about one of these family gatherings because I was never there. Strangely, I still sometimes do, just a twinge of melancholy that I'm neither needed nor missed. 

I don't mind not being there, it's more the idea of never being part of a family. Or never having felt like I was, even when I lived there, before i turned 18 and left for good.

For my own good, that is. 

Every conversation with Dad is focused on his recitation of his health and his doctor visits, with retellings because there's only so much to tell about. And he talks about his housecleaner, who does a great job but who steals. So he says. She's Hispanic, and everyone knows you can't trust them, even if they can clean.

So says Art Fernandez, and he should know, don't you think?

So thank you Dad, for going ahead and marrying Mom when she turned up pregnant, and for making the effort to be a dad, even if you never did quite get me. Even if you never stood up for me, at least you never beat me, except for that one time when I was 8 or 9 and skipped school. Thank you for making sure I didn't go hungry, and thank you for the letter you wrote me when I was 19 and in trouble and your wife hated me for embarrassing the family. I know it must have taken a lot for you to write to me, for it's the only letter you ever wrote to me. 

So, thanks Dad, because it could have been a lot worse. I mean that, even if it does make me sound like an ungrateful monster of a child. But I'm so glad things weren't worse, y'know? I truly am. If that's not enough daughterly love, better luck in your next life.





Monique Colver
Sent from my iPad