Our Birthdays

I was always connected to my father. Maybe it was the magic of birthdays on adjacent days. When I was little, the connection was tactile. My favorite game was, “Wonder what I am.” I would crawl under his pillow while he was lying on his back in bed and pretend I was an animal. Maybe a hippopotamus. “Wonder what I am.” Daddy would have to guess. Daddy would tell me stories. When I was really little, his stories were about a Christopher Robin-like kid named Kenneth. My favorite was “Kenneth and the fire engine.” Daddy never seemed to tire of telling it.

Daddy taught me to catch and throw a ball. My first baseball glove was US Navy issue that Dad brought home from New Guinea. I’d often hang out in his cabinet shop after school. He taught me drive nails. In 6^th grade, my best friend and I would walk to his shop to eat lunch amid the sawdust, but sometime in adolescence, the distance between us began to widen. He tried the mandatory father-son, birds-and-bees talk when I hit puberty. He warned me about getting girls pregnant. I was trying to figure out how to hold a girl’s hand, how to get kissed. He didn’t know me at all.

Not long after that, he told me he wouldn’t read my stories or poems anymore. He felt his feedback was too critical, too negative. He didn’t want to discourage me. I was craving encouragement. He tried to teach me to drive. Backing down the driveway, I got only halfway to the street before he called a halt.

He wrote me long, single-spaced, type-written letters when I was in college, but we didn’t talk. I thought that was the way with fathers and children. I had just turned thirty when he died, one heart attack too many. I didn’t think he’d been taken from me early. I had friends who’d lost a parent in high school. I feel so connected to him. So many of my values and attitudes are his. So many of my life challenges have been his jagged karma.

But we weren’t close. I am seeing that now. I have a reference point. Morri’s at Boston University this year– master’s program in creative writing – and we’re close. We text more often than we talk on the phone, but when we talk, we talk.

I don’t remember ever talking to my dad on the phone, but I managed to keep him

posted on my progress toward the doctorate. I knew he was proud of me – I’d gotten that far in therapy – knew he wanted me to succeed. But something was missing, is still missing more than fifty years after he died. Maybe I am allowing myself to feel the hurt I turned away from all those years ago.

Morri’s twenty-seven, less than three years younger than I was when my dad died. And she’s still my little girl – okay, my big, little girl – and I’m still her daddy. I’m cheering her on, rooting for her. I get as angry as I ever did if someone treats her badly, but of course I’m no longer running up to school to complain. My dad didn’t have to pull back. He could have read my poems. He could have taught me to drive. He could have picked up the phone and called. Parents don’t have to stop being parents because their kids are in their twenties or turning thirty or hitting adolescence. Maybe if he’d lived longer, I would have learned to ask him for what I wanted from him.