Moving Towards The River Bend

Life's mysteries remain and deepen.

Its answers unresolved.

So you walk on, through the dark,

Because that is where the next morning is.

-Bruce Springsteen

When May 31, 2021 arrives, WPK, Sr., my father, will have been dead for forty years. In February, 2021 I shall inch another year closer to being as old as he was when he died.  

The past twelve months or so have reminded me that everything I believed I knew about my father - when he was fifty-seven and I was fourteen - was not inaccurate. The picture I had painted using those beliefs, however, was incomplete.  It was also, as it turns out, profoundly unfair. 

We are who our DNA says we are.  Life blessed me with Mom who was my hero and who remains so. I suppose that it also blessed me with my father. For while I have tried hard my whole life to tamp down the parts of his personality that I found repellent as a child, I learned years ago that I lack the foot speed to outrun my past.  I do not believe any of us possesses that ability.  

No one you have ever been

And no place you have gone

Ever leaves you.  

The new parts of you

Simply jump in the car and 

Go along for the rest of the ride.

The success of your journey

And your destination 

All depend on who's driving. 

-Bruce Springsteen 

I recognize now that which I failed to recognize when my father was alive, and which I failed to recognize for a number of years after his death, which is how much anger he carried with him in his day-to-day.  Anger towards those who exploited his immense talents for their own profit. Those whose table was filled with the bounty he provided but who never invited him to sit at that table and break bread with them.  Worse than that, I have come to learn, was the anger he directed at himself. Anger at what he misperceived as impotence, which was actually nothing more than well-reasoned fear. 

Dad knew damn well how badly those who screwed him over were doing it. They saw no need to hide it.  Yet he did nothing about it save for put his helmet on, buckle up his chin strap, and lean into the fight day after day.  He was the primary bread-winner in a family that - when he died at age 57 - still had half of its six children who had yet to begin college. He did what he believed he had to do and in the final decade of his life on more than one occasion he turned down an opportunity to do that which he loved someplace other than where he was doing it. He was afraid that if that opportunity, once pursued, did not pan out, his pursuit of it would have crippled not only him but mom and us kids too.  

Dad - circa 1964

Browning School for Boys - New York City

"The devil you know is better than the devil you don't know" is an adage by which WPK, Sr. lived his life.  His adherence to it ate him alive.  It destroyed him.  My epiphany on this point gladdens me, because it has prompted me to remove my foot from the throat of my late father, which it likely never should have been.  It also breaks my heart.  

As it turns out, the final great lesson Dad taught me was that (to borrow a line from an old song I love), "I'm not gonna let them do to me what I watched them do to Pop".   I am change-resistant for I am my father's son. However, I have opted not to allow my aversion to change to paralyze me. I have opted not to allow it to consume me from the inside out.  I have opted not to allow it to eat me alive.  

Happy Birthday, Dad.  You deserved better than you got from this world. You certainly have deserved better than you have gotten all these years from your judgmental, colossally-wrong youngest child.  I get it now.  I understand.  Finally.  Now I get why you always seemed tired.  I am fucking exhausted myself.  

WPK, Sr. - Christmas 1980 

I'll see you in my dreams...

-AK