Deliverance

              I’m passing that milestone where I will have lived more years without my dad. I think about him a lot. I have his tie, a few of his pictures hanging here and there, his watch, and other relics. I remember walking home from middle school only to see him near the front porch in a white lawn chair attempting to get some sun. I would open the door to the scent of cinnamon rolls he had just made. The older siblings didn’t know this side of my dad, but he loved to bake.

              I have inherited or adopted many of his traits. I wouldn’t be a software engineer if not for my dad’s example. He would take me to his work on the weekends, and I would observe him performing various maintenance tasks. He would let me jump on the internet (in its infancy) and chat with people across the world. I learned to type this way, and I became very good at it. He sent me to numerous houses to fix a variety of problematic computer systems. I probably went on a hundred or so unique instances of troubleshooting adventures, all because of my dad.

              It goes without saying, and saying it is like listening to a broken record, but I never understood how much he meant to me until I was in my twenties and he was long gone. He wasn’t a perfect father, he suffered from a variety of health problems and things he was conditioned with (from the Marine Corps, his religion, his parents, etc.), but he was a good dad. With what he had, and the beliefs he held, he did a pretty good job. I look at my two daughters now, and I think about my relationship with my father.

              He was blunt, much like I am. I wonder if he was on the (autism) spectrum (knowing what I know now). He loved Rocky and Bullwinkle, classical music, radio talk shows, and Saturday morning baking programs. He was deeply religious, and I only wish I could talk to him about that subject now (even without his exalted knowledge). He had a logical mind, was fiscally and politically conservative but voted third-party (for the most part). He had an interesting personality, one very distinct from any I’ve ever encountered. The same could be said of my own, but I am a bit more pessimistic.

              All that any good kid wants to do is to please their parents. My daughter is the same way. Today, I had to have a talk with her. She cried because was concerned that she disappointed me. I never wanted to disappoint my parents. There were many times that I said and did things that probably pissed them off, but at the end of the day I never lost respect for them. I’ve learned a lot from things my parents did and didn’t do. Weeks before my dad died, he told me that he was proud of me. That was the first and last time that I heard it. I tell my daughters that I love them every day.

              We’ve fallen so far from the tree. Even in my little anecdotes about my dad… I don’t share his love of baking shows, and I would have probably come to a disagreement with him about one or more scriptures. It hurts to admit it, but it’s only because I still have that respect and admiration for him. If I’ve deviated a little, how much has man deviated from our first estate? Why do we deviate, and what do we do when we feel that conflict, disharmonization, tangledness, or cognitive dissonance? That guilt-like feeling isn’t necessarily guilt. It’s our fallen state. We’ve left ourselves the last pickings of the tree: A moral wasteland of ineptitude, ignorance, and ambiguity that we’re stuck in and left dreaming about the days our parents led us by the hand and gave us something to hope for.