My Father's Influence

It's funny how people influence your life. I have been thinking a lot about my father recently and about how much he influenced my life. What makes this unique is that I can only remember seeing him a couple of times. Once when we were living in Borger, our mother told us that our father had come by earlier in the day. He wanted to see us and would be back shortly. I was really excited. I think I was 5 or 6 years old, but I might have been younger. I was aware that other kids had fathers and I was also aware that I didn't have one. I think I was even surprised to find out that I did have one. It was the first time I can remember seeing him. He came to the house and it was pretty evident that Dick remembered him. My mother and father divorced when I was about 18 months old. Dick would have been almost three when they divorced, so he must have had some memory of him. Dick immediately climbed into his lap, but I hung back.

It must have been a pretty hard for my mom, raising two very young kids by herself. I am pretty sure she was bitter about the divorce, though I don't ever remember her criticizing my father. However, there always seemed to be a tension surrounding any conversation we had about him. Remember in the 1940's divorce carried a social stigma for a woman.

I will give him credit though. If you have ever been to Borger Texas, you realize that he had to go out of his way to get there. My father was in the Army Air Corp when they separated, so the constant moving to new bases must have made it difficult to keep in close contact with us. I remember a few times, either on birthdays or on Christmas, when he sent gifts. I especially remember a black satin robe with beautiful embroidery of a dragon on the back. I believe he picked these up when he was in Japan. Other than the one visit in Borger and the sparsely received gifts, I don't recall having contact with him again until the summer before I entered the eighth grade. He made arrangements with my mom for Dick and I to visit him in Rapid City, South Dakota while he was stationed at Ellsworth Air Force Base with the Air Defense Command. Dick tells me that we went up by bus and that our mother and aunt drove up and picked us up and we took a driving vacation on the way back home.

The week or two we spent with him did define my relationship with him. I remember feeling like he expected me to know how to behave on a military base and as a military kid. He sternly required us to respond to any adult including himself with a "yes sir or no sir" or "yes ma'am or no ma'am". I know now that this is pretty common behavior in military families, but it was new to me. I was close to my mom and this formality with him just didn't meet my expectations of a "dad". He worked during the time we were there except for weekends and evenings. Consequently, we spent most of our time with his second wife, Mary. Dick has pointed out that he took us to Mount Rushmore, took us trout fishing, showed us how to build and fly gas powered model airplanes, and taught us to enjoy Creme de Menthe over vanilla ice cream. Dick remembers these activities and I don't. I do recall flying model airplanes and eating ice cream with Creme de Menthe, but I don't recall when or who I did these things with. I guess I was so angry with my father, I just wouldn't let myself enjoy the trip or the remembrances. As I recall Mary went out of her way to see that we were entertained. We went to the Officer's Club swimming pool most afternoons. My father had other children with Mary. They were pretty young at the time, in fact I don't think all of them had as yet been born. We got along well enough. I do remember him taking us out to see the F86 Saber jet he flew and we got to see closeup some of the jets takeoff.

I remember thinking that my mother was in competition with Mary and wanting to not like her. I was pretty successful in accomplishing this, but it wasn't anything Mary did or didn't do. I was just at an age where I thought if Mary wasn't around, my mother and father would get back together and I would end up with a full-time father.

I'm sure it was difficult for him trying to establish a relationship with me during that visit because I wasn't very receptive. At any rate I didn't end up establishing the relationship I desperately wanted with my father then, and I don't remember him ever trying again. I think he had a family that was present and needed him, and whose needs he was aware of. He just never was aware of mine.

The next time he played a part in my life was during his memori.al service at Arlington National Cemetery during my senior year in high school. He had been killed when his USAF T33 airplane collided with a Canadian T33 airplane near Hahn AB, Germany. The two Canadians and the officer in his back seat, Major Rabbit, were able to bail out and survived. My aunt took Dick and I to Washington so that we could attend the service. I only remember that the trip was my first airplane ride and that Dick teased me about the plane being on fire pointing to the red flashes on the engine coming from a flashing red light. I also remember seeing some of Washington while we were there. Dick tells me my aunt arranged for a limousine and a driver from Phillips Petroleum Company to take us around Washington with her. He reminded me that we got thrown out of a session of the Supreme Court because he fell asleep.

Everyone was pretty emotional during the service, but I was determined I would not cry for my father. I was still mad at him even then. I missed not having a father and I still held him responsible. Now I had also missed my opportunity. I know that I must accept some of the responsibility for the failed relationship with him. It takes two people to have a relationship. Though I find fault with him because he didn't try to establish a relationship with me after that trip to South Dakota, I didn't try either. Sometimes we wait too long to fix a relationship. We think we have unlimited time, but we don't. Hurt feelings often get in the way of developing a wonderful relationship.

Dick had kept in contact with Mary and his other children, but I never have. They have been pleasant and welcoming the few times I have been around them, but I never felt a kinship with them. Probably, because I never really felt a kinship with my father.

I started this out talking about how he influenced my life and so far I have told you how he didn't. But he had a profound effect on me. His absence made we want a dad very badly. I remember day dreaming about him being around, taking me places, doing things together, and just being a "dad" to me. I built up this great fantasy of what a relationship with a dad would be like. I even started searching for a husband for my mother while I was in junior high. I never found one, but I did become close to the father of a friend. I learned to love him as a father and he filled most of the gaps my relationship with my natural father had left empty. Over the years he would play an important part in my life and influence most of the major choices I would make. One of them being the affirmation of my selection of his daughter to be my wife and life-long companion.

The other way my father had a great influence on me is that as a result of his death, the Air Force and Social Security survivor benefits paid my brother's and my way through college. I believe college would have been beyond my mother's reach, even with Dick and I working full time. My college education and the people I met in college have provided me with a wealth of opportunities for success.

All in all, I think the influences my father has had on my life have been positive. I don't hate him any more, as I have matured enough to realize that all people make mistakes and that happily ever after rarely happens. But because he was not around, I developed very strong feelings and opinions about a father's responsibility toward his children and their mother. My relationships with my wife, my children, grandchildren, and great grandchild have all been affected because of the impact his absence had on me. Hopefully it has been positive for them.

I think what I have learned most from the relationship between my father and I, is that you can still have an influence on people even when you are absent from their lives based on their expectations of you. If you are absent from a relationship, you don't have any control over what that influence will be, but if you choose to be present in their lives, you have some control over what that influence is. What that means to me is that you can never walk away from a relationship. You will always be part of it whether you are there or not. The relationship and your impact on it will continue, only in a different form.

I wish to thank my brother for some corrections to the events recounted here and details about my father's death he sent to me after the first posting of this piece. I don't know if my memory lapses of the events recounted here are a result of old age or mental blocks I have put in place. Probably both.