Colonel Father Dear

I've often blamed my Dad for being the reason that I have never published any of my writings beyond the blogosphere.  You see, there are so many very good reasons that he so generously gave me over the years for me to use to prove that I did not receive the love, the attention, the support or the belief-in-me from him.  It's all his fault I would say, my dear father who was a Colonel.

But low these many decades later of being an adult and having the perspective to realize where my Dad was when he was 35, 45, 55 and remembering what was going on in his life much less the world in which he worked and played and I realize there was about a 2, maybe 3 year period when I could have "legally", in the value system of personal growth, blamed my father but after that...blaming him was like throwing water against a mirror.

One image sticks in my mind in the autumn of my ninth grade year.  Dad is going up the stairs in our foyer and I'm heading down to watch tv.  I think he's trying to engage me in conversation about what I want to be when I grow up and to take school seriously and during the course of wanting to find any reason to disengage from talking to him about it because I had no idea who I was or what I could do so I said I wanted to be a writer because that had been one thing that I had done on a fairly regular basis for the past two years. I don't remember his exact words but I do remember feeling like hopeless about being a writer, or at least making a living at it.  I also remember this was the first time he let me know in no uncertain terms that where I should focus my energy was to become a high level executive secretary in the government.  I knew then in my heart, if not my head, that in my Dad's world there really wasn't much I could do well enough beyond the basics in life.  If I give him a bit of latitude today, I can guess that he was trying to give me the best advice he could at the time for how I could prepare for the world and take care of myself.  Volumes later, I sure had a lot to learn.

I often wonder about that time in 1972 when my brother and I lived with my Dad and his new beautiful young wife who was just 12 years my senior.  He had only been back home in the States for a little over a year and had convinced Jan, my step-mother, to move out of there sexy condo near the hustle and bustle of Washington D.C. to a split level in the burbs of Virginia.  Everyday my Dad would leave for work at the Pentagon, usually in his dress blues and often taking the bus.  I can't imagine what flack he must have received for wearing that uniform in our country at that time.  And then there was me, a budding hormone laced teen of 14 heading off to a big new high school. Dad had threatened mom for being an unfit mother because she was "queer" (this was the 70's, that was his term) and so my brother and I had been whisked away from an older rental home with three dogs and a cat, my mom and her girlfriend and thrown into what looked like the perfect life on the outside.  Thank God I got to bring my cockatiel, Charlie, with his big home-made cage that my mom's girlfriend had made him for Christmas one year.

Maybe it was all of those things that influenced my Dad to speak so harshly to me, helping to create the toughened heart that had to be broken over and over again to find the release.  Or maybe he was so caught up in the edges of the worlds he was trying to recover to even think about what was coming out of his mouth much less the effect of his words on me.  Whatever the case,  there is always today, right now, this minute for me to write down the memories of my life and in the unveiling find pieces of the gold uncovered from the dross of erroneous beliefs.  

Writing today. Publishing, if not for you and me then certainly for the was.