Musings on a Father’s Day

I thought it would be appropriate to post this on Father’s Day, since I’ve been thinking about my own father recently. Actually I think about Daddy frequently, but I was thinking about him a little differently this time. It started with my last post and thinking about how everything I did in my life was designed to make my parents proud and not to disappoint them. And as I really kind of dug into that thought a bit more, I realized that the person I was trying to do right for was my father. Then I thought about his life and it made me wonder if it was really my father that was the one who had “the plan”.

My father was born and raised in a small college town in Michigan called Mt. Pleasant. He was one of seven children, nine if you counted his father’s son from a previous marriage and his mother’s daughter from a previous marriage. He was the third from the youngest, so he probably lived a lot of his life on the periphery, maybe just following in the footsteps of those who came before him.

I do know that after high school my father enlisted in the Navy. I don’t know if he ever thought about going to college then. I don’t know if he was a good student back then or what his career aspirations were. But he went in the Navy, served his time, and then came back home. At that point he did go to college, at Central Michigan in his hometown. Whether he had been a good student before or not, he was not a good student in college. He quit school before flunking out and then enlisted in the Army.

I don’t know if there was a method to his madness of enlisting in the armed forces. Did he want to see the world? Was it for some kind of training? Or the G.I. Bill? The only interesting place I ever heard that he went to was when he was in Germany after World War II, so I’m not sure it was for the travel. And since he did go to college again after the Army, I’m guessing that any training he did get, he didn’t use. I don’t know if his plan was to make a career of the Army or just what, but the fact that he met my mother most certainly was not was he thought would happen to him.

Once he did meet Marion Hunter, though, then there certainly was a “plan” for his life. My mother told me, when I married a man that didn’t have a college degree, that she had told Daddy she would marry him but only if he agreed to go back and finish college. Needless to say, she encouraged me to do the same. Mother obviously had her degree. I suspect that had she not met Daddy, she would have returned home to Charlotte and ended up married to one of the suitable young men she ran around with at home. Someone from a similar upper middle class background, with a college degree and a good career. I feel pretty sure that she never intended not to be married to someone like that. And so, she gave that command to my father.

So that brings me to where I started wondering about my father and what he really saw for his life. Did he really see himself in an office job with the phone company developing training programs? Did he really see himself in a business setting? Or was there something else he wanted to do with his life? Or maybe he was just waiting for someone else to point him in a direction.

I know that my father was a good husband and father. He loved my mother and was willing to do what she asked because he loved her and wanted to please her. He was a great father, something I’ve said over and over and over again. And he was successful in his job, well-respected and well-liked. I still remember the day of his funeral when I turned around and saw that the church was at standing room only, filled with people my father had worked with that had liked and respected him and were there to send him off. I know that he was content with the life he had. I never sensed that he was just going through the motions or that he was straining at the ties that bound him. But was that really what he dreamed of for himself?

I do believe that he was happy with the family part. But I wonder now if it was my mother that set him on a path that maybe was different in all other respects from what he thought he would do. He certainly didn’t feel compelled to go in one direction when he was younger.

So it leads me to the realization that it was always my mother that set the tone for me. It was always my mother that pointed me in the traditional direction. She would not have been happy to see me experiment with life.

I think back on my college years. I loved college. I specifically loved the parties and the football Saturdays and the lazy afternoons at Legion Pool and concerts and fraternity/sorority shit. I didn’t love going to class or studying or taking exams. Every chance I got I was doing all those other things. Spending time at the B&L Warehouse or Whipping Post or O’Malley’s. Going to fraternity parties and sorority dances. Playing jokes on dorm mates. Turning football Saturdays into football weekends. I remember one night deciding, along with my friend Patty Johnson, that we were going to go see Gregg Allman in Macon. Somehow we found a number to call for Capricorn Studios and Patty asked if he was there. (Do not ask me why I remember this or why we thought someone would actually tell us that Gregg Allman was in the house!) Anyway, we thought we were pretty together and we breezed through the lobby, casually (we thought) telling her roommate and her boyfriend that we were going to Macon. Of course, back in those days there was no MapQuest and we didn’t have a map and we didn’t know how to get to Macon directly from Athens, so we were going to go via Atlanta, where we did know how to get to. Once we got to Atlanta, it was after midnight and we were probably tired and so we ended up stopping at the local rock station and then we headed back to Athens, a little hungover and a lot disappointed that we had not gotten to see Gregg Allman after all.

That was the kind of adventure that I had the entire time I was in school. And beyond. I just wanted more from life than the workaday world. And I wonder if somehow I got that desire from my father. Maybe I didn’t know him as well as I thought. Maybe he was not the one with “the plan” and maybe he would have been the one to have understood my desire to explore.

I’ll never know for sure, but I do know he was always the one to tell me “you can do whatever you want”. Without parameters, without boundaries. Maybe he was trying to tell me something back then and I just didn’t realize it. Maybe he was trying to send me off into the world on my own terms.