| | I woke this morning to a call from my dad on Father's Day. Normally, it's the other way around and a son is calling his dad but since when have Dad and I ever done things by the book? I've never asked for him to reciprocate this sentiment but when I'm asked, I will be quick to say that Dad is also my closest friend- after all he has known me intimately longer than any other man I've known.
Our relationship hasn't always been this close, warm or affectionate. If my view of God is shaped by my relationship with my father it's no wonder that I'm open to the idea that the relationship between the Almighty and his humans is continually in a state of evolutionary flux. Some might want to debate the finer points of my theology with well constructed arguments from systematic doctrine and all I can say is that I'm sorry that your dad doesn't love you as much as mine loves me.
Not to sound cliched but Dad and I are so close that I don't feel compelled to celebrate a holiday that honors him by being with him on that specific Sunday. I'm painfully aware that I have fewer days ahead with him than we've shared in the past and so small projects like putting on a porch roof, take way to long to finish. It seems that we work enough to justify the time together as something that men do but the truth is that we spend most of that time in fellowship- he drawing from an energy that can only be tapped by pouring himself into a younger man and me from stepping into that space and receiving the art of being blessed.
Much of who we are as a family is not shaped by the Auterson side. The product of a broken home, Dad was mostly raised in the care of his mother and so it's her family, her idiosyncrasies and her history that largely impresses a shape on who we've become. Thanks to Facebook, I've gotten to meet 2nd and 3rd cousins and learn where nature has had more influence on me than has nurture- apparently the smart ass in me comes firmly from Auterson stock.
In these new friendships with family (that are my age but that I've never met) I'm asked to explain why we had little contact with their side. There are any number of wrong answers that I use to make this right but at it's core is the truth that my Dad did not know his own father. To the best of my knowledge they never spent a Father's Day together- ever.
1945 found my father living with his mom in San Francisco; the Second Great War was flinging planes into the air, bullets across the battlefields and industries into motion. As was his way, he went to the theater on a Saturday afternoon to catch the shows with all his buddies. Entrance in might have been paid by bringing a scrap of aluminum foil or a piece of rubber tire that could by recycled for the war effort.
Stepping into the lobby his heart leaped into his throat pounding. Standing between the expanse of worn out carpet and the door under a hazy smell of buttered popcorn was his father. At the age of eight his little heart was anxiously fearing the inevitable.
"If your dad ever gets his hands on you, Franky, he'll take you away from me. He'll kidnap you and haul you down to Southern California. Don't let him take you," his mother's words hang somewhere between his ears and the childish chatter of the crowd.
He had two options, either try to make a break past his dad in a large group of boys from school or join a smaller crowd slipping out the side door. Never taking his eyes off the man across the room he slipped out the side and as soon as he hit the wash of the bright California sunshine, he ducked into a space between the bank and a culvert under the rail tracks. His eyes never left the front of the theater while his heart slowly calmed down and his thoughts quieted.
"Franky, what are you doing in there?" a buddy hollered at him from the walk.
"Shhh. I'm hiding from my dad. He's come up to take me away," he hissed back.
"He won't try to take you if we are together. Here, walk home with me."
Scrambling out of his hiding place, my dad furtively walked along the tracks in the shadow of his larger friend. After a half a mile or so the sound that he'd dreaded to hear grew closer, two motorcycles coming along the road from behind. As they approached the lead of the two bikes pulled ahead a little and stopped.
Dad's parents had easily been apart for five years at this point and both had remarried, the split happened sometime after dad had turned three and been farmed off to relatives in New Mexico. Barely past being a toddler, he'd been placed on a Greyhound bus from Ponca City, Oklahoma to Portales, New Mexico. On the ride he'd soiled himself and no one wanted to sit near him except for the driver who graciously shared his lunch and made sure that he got to the front door of his Grandparent's small home.
Astride the bike was his father and step mom on the back. Pulled up nearby was another couple who'd made the ride up on a second Harley, nearly 400 miles on Highway 101. Tired, his dad's face visibly brightened.
"Hey Franky! It's me your Dad! Hey son, come here!"
The only recourse was to run and hope that the adults wouldn't try to follow on their bikes across the rail yard. He quickly bolted to his left followed by his friend- the two boys zigged and zagged through the rail cars as fast as their little legs would go. The hollers and shouts from the adults to come back eventually was lost to the distance as they wound their way through the neighborhood on the far side of the yard.
He snuck home slowly, hiding at even the hint of an approaching motorcycle. As the sun settled off into the horizon west of the bay and the shadows grew lengthening into dark he finally reached his neighborhood. Slipping onto their houseboat from the marsh he was greeted by my Grandma.
"Where have you been all day? Your dad is in town. He came by looking for you and I sent him down to the theater," she says.
"I saw him in the lobby and ducked out the side," he tells her. "He chased me later but I ran away. It took all afternoon to get home. Mom, I'm sorry."
"You mean he came all this way to see you and you ran from him? Good, boy! Serves him!" she says in a tone that I imagine could have just as easily come from another woman I once loved. Telling me this, dad comes to the same conclusion. Hearing this I wonder how it is that history seems to fall so easily into itself.
Unexpectedly she began to curse his father over and over again using an expletive for fornication that he'd never heard anyone ever use with such openness.
Years later he'd been raised by a loser rebound step dad, a second stepfather whom he still calls dad and a foster father of sorts. What he hadn't gleaned about being a man from them, the military had taught him until he came to know Christ through salvation. As a maturing Christian he eventually contacted a pastor friend and asked him to follow up on his father who still hadn't left Southern California since that sunny day in Frisco.
"Your dad wants to know why you ran away from him," Bob told him over the phone. "He says he'll never forgive you for that. Apparently you really hurt his feelings."
In retrospect my Grandfather was an alcoholic and so the subconscious skills necessary to shirk responsibility, pass the blame and illicit unnecessary guilt were pulled out to the stops and flexed firmly on my dad. Explaining as best he could to his friend that he'd simply run from a stranger in obedience to his mother's wishes, Dad's heart sank knowing somehow that explanations would never be enough to undo all the twenty years of damage that lay between them. Pastor Bob went back several times over the years but never was able to get past the alcoholic haze that covered my Granddad's emotions like the smog over Anaheim.
I never met him. My cousin tells me that one of the last times he visited Grandpa he was wakened at around three in the morning and told to get dressed quickly. Stumbling into the deep dark of an Arkansas night, Grandpa led him to an open field and on a blanket they stared up in wonder as Halley's comet dropped its way across the stars overhead. By this point, he'd stopped drinking and started living right but the years of living wrong hadn't forgiven him and he soon passed away.
Even when my dad was in his fifties, he never was able to breach the accusation that he'd abandoned his father as a boy. Afraid that our only memory of our grandfather might be of a drunken and brawling fool he kept Lance and I away from him. At his funeral in Arkansas, family assured my dad that eventually, Grandpa had settled down and become the good man for good that the demon alcohol had once possessed.
"Mom?" he asks her long after his dad was buried in the Arkansas hills, "Why did you tell Dad to come find me at the theater that day? If he was really going to kidnap me, why let him know where I was?"
I love my father for exhibiting the grace to seem naive when he already knew the answer. I love the way that does this still when having to confront the hurt and damage and sin in someone's choices. He loves that I'm one of the few people who values this and will give him a truthful answer so that grace can truly manifest itself.
"She lied," he tells me as we sit under the porch roof we still haven't finished putting up. "She says she can't remember ever telling me to run away from him. Son, it's because she was lying and hated him- that's why she can't remember. She's right that it never happened. He never threatened to take me away... that's what never happened."
I've just handed him a gift for father's day. Thirty years ago when I was eight he gave me my first watch. I've spent the last week carefully shopping for a simple Seiko as a way of finally saying thanks.
Sitting under that unfinished porch roof I find myself weeping quietly. There's an appropriate rage welling in me that only sorrow can bring. I grieve for the Grandfather I never knew, I grieve for the boy I hear speaking with the voice of a man I love so dearly and for the first time I wonder if how we act as sons speaks in anyway about how God's heart has been shaped towards us.
I see a brief glimpse of a Father calling after a son who can't be found. His voice still echoes under the flow of several thousand years of human history. In the cool of the day he called to a son hiding behind the foliage of a fig tree... and tenderly he's calling still.
Later that night Dad and I talked about it all again over the phone. He was sitting out in the yard of Mom's family farm looking up somewhere between 80 acres of Kansas and the Oklahoma sky and I was looking west through the windows of the Suburban. Between where we were I could see sheet lightning and thunderstorms out on the horizon. I thought about the flow of time, the fall of light and the weight of gravity that Grandpa and Sammy and Dad and I had all shared looking at those same stars with Abraham when God called him out of Canaan; called him with a promise to put the fruit of death back onto the tree it should have never been dropped from.
So Dad called me this morning to say thanks for the gift, for the conversation and for the time that we have. Every tick of that watch reminds us that time is neither friend or foe and while it may be relative, it can never be reversed. Thank God that it least time can always redeemed.
At the end of that call I hung up reflective. I whispered a prayer of thanks for all that I know of who God is from a father that has only ever known little of his dad. I look to that time when all fathers and sons will stand face to face with the one who is both Father and Son and in the moment time won't ever mean a thing... forever. |
| | Posted 6/21/2009 3:06 PM - 9 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
- recommend
  - recs0
- share
- email
 - sent0
|
