Dreams from my father (my version)

Today would have been my dad's 74th birthday.

My strategy for getting through the process of laying him to rest was largely to not deal with the matter on an emotional level, but rather to avoid dealing with it as much as possible, and just get through the process. I process things primarily over time, in story form, and so this post will be my way of processing through the experience.

Consequently, I issue the following warning: this post may well be unreadable.

Now, I *never* guarantee readability in my posts; this blog serves as my written memory, and hence is really organized only for me. LJ mocked me a few days ago, saying she could quote precisely how long I napped for on the Cabo trip. OK, fair point, I may have gone a little overboard on the petty details in those posts, and probably do in my posts in general, but again- this is my memory, and you plumb it at your own peril.

Still, I feel compelled in this case to warn you that this post in particular may be unreadable, even in comparison to whatever its baseline level of unreadability is. So, you really should stop reading. Now. Seriously, stop. Quit reading. This instant.

Okay, fine.

Have it your way.

You were warned.

You brought this on yourself.

Don't blame me.

It is odd to think that, at age 37, I will shortly be the age that my father was at the point of my earliest memory of him. Parents always seem godlike when you're a little kid, and it weird to try and reconcile that image of godlike power with how totally clueless about life I feel right now.

Because my father was raised in India, he carried with him a certain set of expectations for how his oldest son would behave. My mom noted in her eulogy that my dad tried to live out his failed dreams through his children. I think I can credibly claim that this burden fell most heavily on me, due to an Indian cultural expectation of filial piety, especially from the oldest son.

Consequently, since his dream had always been to be a doctor, my childhood was sprinkled with things like Fisher Price doctor sets, with toy stethoscopes, etc., and trips to the hospital where he worked. He was never a chatty guy, but he did drop hints about medical school. Bear in mind that these memories are occurring when I was in the 4-8 year old range.

When I was approximately 7, my dad decided to give me a leg up on medical school by teaching me chemistry. He had an office in the house, and I would study the periodic table while he worked there, and he would quiz me on it. By the end of 2nd grade, I had memorized most of the table, including names, symbols, and atomic numbers. Later, I discovered that all the other boys had spent time with their dads doing things like learning to throw a ball, but at the time I assumed that everyone was learning the periodic table.

It was also during this time, hanging out in my dad's home office, listening to Haydn all day, that I began one of my most ambitious projects: writing down all the numbers. In order. In neat little columns, page after page.

If I had to boil my entire life down to one observation, it's that I was somewhere in the 12 thousands before I concluded that it might be time to abandon this project.

When I got a little older, it was time for science fairs. Since my parents were both in medical roles, they had lots of ideas for projects. One year I did a project that had something to do with growing bacteria in cultures, although I've long since forgotten what that one was specifically. Another year, I did one called "Salivary Amylase and Aging." That one probably came from my dad, who did geriatric biochemistry research.

That project featured my wandering around asking people to spit into test tubes, recording their ages, and then taking the samples back and running them through a spectrophotometer to analyze the amount of amylase present. Less amylase makes it harder to digest food, and then hypothesis was that older people produced less amylase, making it harder for them to properly break down food, adversely impacting digestion.

Note that while all we had in the house was one 3000 year old TV that was the size of a refrigerator and was crammed with about a billion vacuum tubes, one or another of which was blowing out approximately every 90 seconds, forcing weekly trips to the Radio Shack to replace them, we had things like functioning spectrophotometers just lying around the house.

All this, of course- the chemistry lessons, the medical research science projects, the doctor sets, the trips to the hospital, was designed to produce a son committed to medicine as a profession. So the most fundamental way in which I disappointed my father was that I never got excited about medicine. I learned the chemistry, but never particularly enjoyed the subject. I played with the doctor sets, but much preferred playing with cars, trucks, and blocks. I did the science projects, but never got particularly excited about them. And I hated being in hospitals. I still do. I hate the look of them, I hate the smell of them, and I especially hate the feel of them. I knew medicine was off the table by the time I was ten, and that really disappointed him.

My dad also had a very specific idea about his role in the family. He seemed to see his role as twofold: being the provider, and being the discipliner. Everything else he left to my mom. Included, therefore, in "everything else" was pretty much all of the housework, and pretty much all of the child-raising. Given that there were 4 of us, that was a fair amount of housework and a fair amount of child-raising. Both I and my sister did a lot of babysitting and childcare while still children ourselves as a result.

One day when I was about ten, while I was watching Saturday morning cartoons and quietly minding my own business, my mom came thundering into the room. Now, mom is usually pretty mellow, so I was caught off guard by her intensity. She reached down, grabbed me by the collar, dragged me to my feet, wagged her finger in my face, and said:

"YOU... are NOT going to be a helpless male like your father!!"

And with that, she dragged me down to the basement and taught me to do laundry. I also learned cooking and cleaning. And, I'm proud to say, I'm not a helpless male like my father apparently was. Although, to this day laundry is by far my least favorite house chore.

In his role as disciplinarian, my father saw justice as something swift, corporal, and not subject to any negotiation or explanation. Once, when I was nine or ten, I was sitting on the front porch as two dudes walked by. Our neighborhood was not particularly good, but we had a fire station on our block and that mitigated some of the effects of the broader area. Still, drugs were fairly rampant, and it turns out that these two dudes were smoking a joint, passing it back and forth between them.

Now, I was still too young to know that's what was going on; it's just obvious in retrospect that that's what was happening. What I observed that day was one of the dudes dropping the joint, and then the other calling him a "bitch" as he stooped to get it, and then both of them guffawing and heading on their way.

What my nine-or-ten year old brain took away from that scene was that "bitch" was a funny thing to call someone. So the next day, at dinner, when my sister was annoying me, I called her a bitch, expecting this to be quite funny. So I was very surprised when an instant later I was decked across the face. My dad played a lot of tennis in his life, and he had a pretty good forehand. Or so I infer, based on how incidents like this one felt.

This is the kind of thing that has, I think, forever saddled me with a certain antipathy toward authority. A simple request not to use the word "bitch", coupled with a short explanation, would have sufficed, but instead I got decked without warning. Authority in our family was heavily concentrated in my dad, and this was how justice was typically meted out. Consequently, I have a very strong reaction to people who exercise authority in ways that seem unjust or arbitrary.

Dinner in our house tended to be relatively early; 6 or 630 typically. I was allowed to play on the block relatively unsupervised, with the expectation that when my mom called out the window that dinner was ready, I'd be close enough to here and come in. And once we finished dinner, I was not allowed to go back outside.

In the summertime, because we ate dinner so early, there was often substantial daylight left after dinner. And JD and Dustin, the two boys on the block that I played with, were both allowed to be out basically until dark. So one day, in the summer before 7th grade, I hit upon the idea of slinking out the back door after dinner was over, thinking I would just play with JD for an hour or so and then come back in. It would still be well before dark, and who would notice?

So, an hour later, when I tried to get back in the back door, I discovered it was locked. We never actually locked the interior door, so I was totally surprised. I tried coming around the front, and that was locked too (which was not surprising). I started to panic a little. I went around back, and was forced to start knocking and yelling. No one came. I stood there pounding on the door and yelling for a while. Our house was not that big, so I knew they could hear me.

Finally, the door opened, and my father stood there, holding a piece of molding that you use when two pieces of paneling meet in the corner. It was fairly thick, yet fairly flexible. I knew I was in big trouble.

Prior to that point, I'd never gotten punished with anything more serious than a belt, but I have to tell you: molding is extremely effective, if causing pain is your goal. It hurt like hell. All the while as he took it to my backside, he yelled at me for violating his rule about not going back outside. Again, no discussion, no opportunity to explain that I had stayed very close to the house, that I was aware they were concerned about my safety and had therefore taken pains to make sure I was back well in advance of dark, etc.

When it was over, he sent me to my room. Not long after that, mom came up to the room. I was quite upset, and she held me and said she wanted me to know that no matter what happened, I could always come home.

I didn't say much at the time, but I often thought about that over the ensuing years, and I remember thinking even that day that I was being given something of a mixed message. I mean, I'd been deliberately locked out, preventing me from coming home even if I wanted to, and then I'd been pretty thoroughly switched, which didn't exactly make coming home seem like the most attractive option in the world.

In his role as a provider, my father was much more successful. He came to this country essentially with nothing, and managed to eventually earn a comfortably middle-class living for his family. But it was a long climb up, and my parents often stressed out a lot about money. But my father was pretty careful to make sure that we kids never saw any of that; they had most of their money talks in the kitchen with the door closed after we had gone to bed. But there was only one bathroom in the house, and it was right next to the kitchen, so over time I learned that if I came downstairs at night and saw the kitchen door closed and the light on, mom and dad were having a Money Talk.

From 6th through 8th grade, I participated in an after-school math program run by an independent group called MEGSSS (Math Enrichment for Gifted Secondary School Students), which was math for super, super geeky kids. It was a 6 year program, and by the time I was in the 3rd year, I was easily the dumbest kid in the class. It was hard, but I loved it, and a lot of the math we did in that class I didn't see again until I was an junior/senior yr math major.

Unfortunately, the program cost money, and it was way the hell out in the county. We only had one car, which my dad let my mom use while he took buses to work every day, and with my sister also getting involved in after school activities, plus my two little brothers, the logistics of keeping me in the program started to look grim.

Plus, year 4 coincided with my beginning high school at SLUH. I had spent the last 2 years at a public magnet school, which obviously helped on the economic front, but the St. Louis public high school system is among the worst in the country, and so I was headed to a private school, which meant significant tuition costs.

One day, as I came down to use the bathroom, I heard my mom and dad having a Money Talk. The subject concerned my continued participation in MEGSSS, how we could possibly afford to keep me in it and high school at the same time, and how, even if we did somehow find the money, we could possibly get me to and from it. I sat outside the door listening for quite some time, and finally heard my dad say, “Well, if he wants to do it, education is important and we’ll just have to find a way.”

A few days after that, my mom approached me to ask me what I thought about MEGSSS, and whether I wanted to sign up again for the 4th year. I loved the program, and knew it was special, but I also knew, from my father’s (as always, totally unspoken) example, that a man provides for his family. Period. To the best of my knowledge, he never once hesitated to make any sacrifice he felt was necessary to provide for us. And so I knew what I had to say:

Me: “Enh, I don’t really care one way or the other. It’s kinda a lot of work, and I don’t know if I’ll have time this year since I’m going to be in high school, and SLUH is supposed to be good.”

Mom: “WHAT? I thought you *liked* MEGSSS!”

Me: “Sure, it’s OK. I mean, I’ve enjoyed it OK. But it’s kinda boring and a lot of work, so it’s OK with me if I don’t attend it.”

With a little more reassurance, my mom was convinced. I still remember how visibly relieved she was at my words. And so I knew I’d done the right thing. It’s the first time I can remember thinking in my head that I needed to be a man.

The second time occurred a little more than a year later.

In my neighborhood, which was relatively poor, I was part of a small group of street urchins that roamed around on our bikes, mostly bored and doing nothing in particular. None of us came from families of any meaningful economic wealth, and so none of us ever carried money around. Nevertheless, we often got hungry during the day, and one thing I learned from the gang was that you could walk into any small convenience store, plunk down 5 cents to buy a piece of gum or something, and walk out with a couple other small items tucked away in your pocket for consumption later. It was something we all did, and none of us referred to it as “stealing.” It was simply “taking.” And it was The Way Things Are.

At the time, if you had asked me if I thought stealing was wrong, I would have looked at you as though you were crazy and said “duh.” But in my 11, 12, 13, 14 year old brain, “taking” was something different. It was The Way Things Are. Our lives went on, the convenience stores’ lives went on, and no one seemed harmed. So I just picked up along the way a bit of a minor shoplifting habit.

When I got to high school, where there weren’t going to be any more subsidized school lunches, I was given an allowance of $10 a week to fund buying any food not originating in the house. Even in 1987, $10 a week was tricky to get 5 lunches a week out of, and I was often hungry by the time I left school. There was a National supermarket just a block away from home, and so I would stop there on the way and often nick something to tide me over until dinner.

Again, if you had asked me if what I was doing was right, I would have shifted around uncomfortably and eventually said “no.” I mean, I knew I would get in trouble if I got caught. But no one ever got caught, and the National was so giant that it would never miss a pack of Starburst, or a Hostess Cinnamon Roll. No one got hurt. Life seemed to just keep on keeping on. It was The Way Things Are.

Plus, by employing this strategy, I got access to much yummier stuff than I could possibly have ever found around the house, where we weren’t even allowed sugared cereal, and even better, this way I never had to ask for any more money. I felt very deeply that asking for any more money represented failure on my part, an unforgivable weakness and inability to sacrifice. So I found a way to replicate the results of sacrifice, without actually doing the sacrificing. Remember, I was using 14-year-old logic: don’t have to ask for more money, get free candy, this is The Way Things Are. That was about the extent of my reflection on the issue. (There’s a good reason 14-year-olds should not be tried as adults.) Anyway, it seemed like a win-win at the time.

Until the day I finally got caught.

I still remember standing there in the baking aisle of the National, surreptitiously sticking a pack of starburst AND a cinnamon roll down my pants while pretending to examine bags of sugar (oh, the irony). As I turned to go, I saw a woman’s head peering around the end of the aisle suddenly vanish. If I had been a smart criminal, I would have immediately divested myself of the stash. But it never occurred to me that there might be plainclothes detectives guarding the store against urchins like me, and I chose to just try hightailing it out of there. I made it halfway out the door before feeling two hands grab me by the collar and yank me back in.

She dragged me into the back office of the National, where there was a uniformed security guard, a giant black man, waiting. They proceeded to do a whole good cop-bad cop routine on me. The woman said she wanted to call the cops and have me sent down to the station, charged with theft, and sent to jail. The security guard said, “You want to send him to jail for trying to steal a piece of candy and a doughnut?” Meanwhile, I was shaking, and so terrified I couldn’t even cry. Jail actually didn’t sound half bad, I remember actually thinking that, because I couldn’t bear to think what would happen when he found out. And very, very deep down, I was ashamed, and couldn’t bear to think what my parents would think of me.

In the end, they just called my house and made my mom come up to the store and get me. She was mortified. As we walked home, she said “I can’t not tell your father about this.” I couldn’t say anything. I was still too ashamed and terrified to say much of anything.

When we got home, she sent me to my room. I waited in there for what seemed like a week, but was probably only an hour or so. I eventually heard my dad come home, walk up the front steps like he always did, hang his coat on the coat rack downstairs, and then open the door to the hallway and head toward the kitchen.

Silence followed.

I started sweating.

Suddenly, I heard the hallway door explode open, slamming into the wall, and I heard my dad hit the steps at a dead run. His feet were hitting the steps hard, and in the couple seconds it took for him to make it up the flight, I thought to myself, “Stand up and take it like a man.” So I stood up from my bed (I had been sitting on the edge), and turned to face the door as it blew open and my dad came running in.

“Dad, I…” I started to say.

And then he gave me a full forehand right across the face. With full forward momentum. It knocked me over onto the bed. Then he set upon me, and for the first few blows I tried to parry a little, but then I just went fetal and absorbed the blows. While he was hitting me, he was yelling at me about how I’d disgraced the family name, and showed no appreciation for the sacrifices he had made.

It’s true what they say, that when something like that is happening, your mind just disengages and goes somewhere else. It’s like it was happening to someone else, and meanwhile I wondered in my mind why he wasn’t asking me *why* I’d done it. It didn’t seem to occur to him at all to inquire as to what I had been thinking. I mean, I knew I’d done something stupid. I was totally ashamed of myself. But even as I’d done something retarded, part of my thought process had actually been to try and be less of a burden on the family. And I wanted to tell him that. But I never got the chance that day.

Eventually, he just tired himself out, I guess. He got up and stalked out, saying only that I’d better not come downstairs, because he didn’t want to see my face. For a long time, I just lay there on the bed, still in the fetal position. I don’t remember anymore how long it was until I started crying.

When that part was over, what remained was anger. I was really pissed off. I was especially pissed that he seemed most concerned about the family name, and not at all about what I might have been thinking. I remember as I lay there vowing never again to do something so foolish- not because he’d told me not to, but rather because I knew that I might have gone to jail, and going to jail would mean jeopardizing my ability to get out of that neighborhood. The other kids in our little group of street urchins, none of them ever graduated high school, and I don’t know if any of them ever made it out of the neighborhood. But my dad had also instilled deep within me the idea that education was the way you bettered yourself, and made a better life for yourself and for your family. And I was determined to get out of that crazy house, out of that crazy neighborhood, and on to some place where no one knew I’d once been a common petty thief. And so I never shoplifted again.

During my junior year, I dated for a while a girl named Dawn. The drama that was my story with Dawn will have to wait for another day, but one Friday night her parents were not coming home, and she invited me to spend the night at her place, presumably as a major tactical move in what was ultimately her failed quest to take my virginity. I did enjoy her attempts, though, and so I agreed. I figured it would be easy; I often spent weekend nights at Plaid’s, and I knew he would cover for me.

Thing is, this was the age before cell phones, and when I got the invitation early that evening, I tried calling over to Plaid’s house. He wasn’t home, so I talked to him mother. I told her to tell Plaid NOT to call my house that night. I even made her repeat exactly the message to give to him, so that I could verify that she had it right.

You can probably see where this is headed.

The next day, when I got home, my dad asked me where I’d been the night before. Which was odd, since I’d told him I was spending the night at Plaid’s, and he’d never asked a follow-up question before. So I repeated my cover story. That’s when he said:

“Well, then why did Plaid call here last night, and then say you weren’t with him? Where the hell were you?”

(pause)

“Uh, I was at Dawn’s.”

I expected at that point that I would have the shit kicked out of me. I braced myself for it. So I was totally caught off guard when all he did was sadly put his face in his hand and mutter:

”I can’t believe you would just lie to me, right to my face. Get out of here- I can’t even look at you.”

I’ll never forget how… disappointed… he looked. He didn’t seem angry at all- just sad. And that made me feel worse than I ever did any of the other times I was ever in trouble. If I had to define a moment in time as the lowest my relationship with him ever was, it would be that moment.

Of course, little more than a year later I graduated from SLUH, and headed off to Pomona College. In part because of the academic performance expectations he and my mom had always set, I did well enough to go to a very good school. I went to Pomona intending to double major in physics and psychology. I enjoyed physics, and my father, grudgingly accepting that I wasn’t going to do pre-med, was willing to compromise and accept the only real second-place career option: a Ph.D. in a hard science. Psychology seemed fairly useless to him, but as long as it didn’t distract from physics he could ignore it.

At Pomona, I was happy in school for the first time since maybe 4th grade. I loved it there. I got involved in a million different things, and slept on average maybe 4 hours a night most of the time, with the occasional crash that caused me to sleep through a morning of classes. There were so many different things I got involved in that I was pretty overextended, and as a result my grades were not especially great- I graduated with a 3.06. So for four years, my dad and I had the same discussion of my college career: he argued that I should stop doing “all that other stuff” and just focus on physics and my grades in that. That conversation was pretty much the only one we had.

As college drew to a close, I applied half-heartedly to physics Ph.D. programs Univ of Washington, UC Davis, Univ of Illinois, and… … one other place that I can’t even remember anymore. Illinois rejected me, then UW rejected me, then UW rejected me a 2nd time a week later with a different letter, as if I hadn’t gotten the message the first time. JOC and I threw a party at our room every time I got rejected, so the upside was that we got 2 parties out of it. Whatever the other place was also rejected me. But then UC Davis accepted me, and even gave me a fellowship. But I decided to defer for a year because I wasn’t actually sure I wanted to do it. Once I actually had an acceptance, I realized that I’d really only applied for a Ph.D. because it was my dad’s expectation.

I wound up selling TV advertising time at Katz in Los Angeles, where I managed to put together a successful sales career, despite having been that kid who was supposed to go out selling candy bars to raise money for my school, and after knocking on 100 doors in the neighborhood, ended up selling exactly 1 candy bar, to my mom, because she felt sorry for me. Integrity and honesty in negotiations turned out to be a primary competitive advantage of mine, and I learned those things from both my parents.

Although he didn’t especially approve of my decision not to go to graduate school, my dad never stopped providing for me. I graduated from college with nothing- no money, no particularly marketable skills, no car, etc. As a graduation present, he gave me the 2nd car, which he had gotten while I was in school. And though I tried hard not to ask for money, and mostly succeeded, I knew he would have given me money without hesitation if I needed it.

It was while I was working at Katz, selling TV advertising time, that my dad had his stroke. It was the week before my birthday, and I had a pretty somber birthday party. I made dinner, and people hung out with me until it was time for me to go to the airport and head to St. Louis.

Everything about my relationship with my dad changed with the stroke. Like many people, I knew intellectually that everyone dies, and consequently, eventually my parents would die, but I was not prepared for this reminder of his mortality. I felt particularly ashamed that our relationship at that point had been virtually nonexistent; I saw him when I came home, and we had the usual conversation that implied that I was wasting my time on the path I was on, but other than that there wasn’t much. And that was really more my fault than his.

In reflecting on the 37-year-long relationship that I had with my father, I don’t know if I will ever stop being disappointed in myself that it took his nearly dying to make me start to truly appreciate him, and to tell him that I loved him. For all his limitations, he loved me honestly, and within the scope of parenting as he understood it, did a good job raising us. Many of my most fundamental qualities, both good (a deep desire to provide for the people I love, virtually irrespective of sacrifice), and bad (a deep-seated inability to articulate the feelings that cause me to want to provide for the people I love), I get from him.

So thank you, dad, for helping make me the person I am today. I will miss you in the years ahead.

I love you.