This photo makes me jealous. Not in the green-eyed monster way, but with a poignant “why did that glow never bathe me” longing. The man on the left is my father, in about 1944; the army buddy on the right is … who knows? I don’t, and anyone who might have is now long dead. As, no doubt, is he. But I’m jealous of him anyway.
I have no idea what the occasion the photo remembers might have been. A reunion after a long separation in different theaters of war? A last hurrah before someone’s transfer or discharge? The start of a night of partying (i.e. drinking), to be followed by … ?
OMG, what am I suggesting!? That’s my father there, after all, and married to my mother for 40 years. But there’s that look in my father’s eye; that arm around the shoulder, finger touching fingertips; the need to be so close together that the uniform wrinkles. Some things set off gaydar alarms for an old fag like me, even when it is my father in the photo.
And then there was the remark my mother made one night when he’d been gone for days on a drunk, who knew where. I’ve forgotten her exact words, and I was young. But not too young to have a sense of what she meant, to know that we skirted frighteningly close to a fiery furnace of perverse desire that I already feared would one day consume me too – a furnace of sin and scorn from which no man, or boy, emerged unscorched. All this cobbled together from bits and pieces preached as warnings in Sunday School, and gleaned from coffee table conversations of women speaking obliquely with words and glances no child could possibly understand, so they must have thought. Unless he knew already that the words and glances applied to him too.
It may be that touch of fingers in the photo that I’m jealous of most of all. Not that I’d have wanted it for myself if it really did signify, for these two men, what I’m suggesting it may have done. But a touch of such caring, such sharing, such joy in touching. I don’t remember a single such pure touch between my father and me. A tear comes to my eye even now with this remembrance of a touch never even there to become a thing past.
The closest to it, captured in this other photograph, an image that records a moment – and a touch – from so long ago, when I was too young to remember – though perhaps not too young for the feeling, and its absence ever after, to stay with me no matter how old I get.
Yes, a father’s touch, but … Is it too much sun? Is it a morning after a night of baby screams, or drink? Is it the realization that 20 years of child support lay ahead? Whatever, I don’t see any of the joy in my father’s face of that earlier photo in this one, where he’s holding infant me.
I have now lived longer than my father did. Not by much, but enough that I’m now the older (and wiser?) of us. That seems momentous. It must mean something. I’m not sure what, which is why I’m expending these x-hundred words as a first try to figure it out.
I’ll say right up front that, though I knew my father all my life, until his death 40 years ago, I almost feel as though I didn’t know him at all. We were never close. We never shared anything of deep importance to either of us, that I recall. Never talked about things of the soul or the heart. Never talked about anything that wasn’t necessary for day-to-day living in the same house; and later, after I’d left for my life elsewhere and with others, that went beyond the basics needed to maintain a perfunctory father-son connection.
In part, this may have been baked into those father-son connections for most in those days. They say that fathers of his generation didn’t show affection, it wasn’t manly, they didn’t know how. But that photo up top. That touch. Those fingertips.
But for us, much also had to do with drinking - first his, then mine, and perhaps foreshadowed by this photograph from early in our relationship:
I’m not talking about a shot or two, or even a bender now and then, but rather undeniable alcoholic drinking for both of us. Never a good thing for relationship building.
The earliest fuzzy memory I have of my father is of him drunk. I see him to this day sitting in his living room chair, mumbling things I couldn’t understand – not to me; to himself and the cosmos – growing agitated, then calmer, then agitated again.
Though I can’t give it a year, it surely is a memory earlier than my school days. Then, I wanted nothing more than to be different than my father. And yet there are so many ways in which we are alike.
The drinking, for instance, and after far too long, not drinking, both thanks to AA. Most likely I’m in the running as an AA record holder, since I attended my first meetings, with my father, when I was round about five. The program didn’t take for him for decades – nor for me either.
We both made/make things with our hands: my father, the fur garments of his profession, me the needlepoints of my amateur art.
Also, we were both cooks, after a fashion: me a determined home cook all my life, and he a professional for a couple of years in the army toward the end of WWII – though the only dish he cooked after the army was the delightful (though perhaps not delicious) sh*t-on-a-shingle. At least I thought it was delightful as a tittering child. My mother seemed less sure.
And, by now, we’ve both made it into our 70s. One of us may even go further.
Then there’s another, somewhat bizarre, alike for us.
My father had five wives by the time he wed my mother, his LAST wife, of 40 years. “Legalized prostitution,” exclaimed my genealogy partner cousin. Five wives! Though not all at the same time - not all, but some, as that genealogy research revealed. (Be careful what you look for on your family tree; you may be surprised by what you find.)
I’m not casting stones – glass houses, and all that. How’s a guy to keep track of the details when young – details like marriage, divorce, and only then, remarriage – what with all that’s going on in life, and with so many? No, certainly not casting stones, since, using a strict definition from the gay boy lexicon of the 70s, I had five lovers (not all at the same time), searching for the one who would become my husband, by now of more than 40 years.
There are more, and deeper, parallels between us – in the genes, even, of course – that make us father and son, and should make if easier (should have made it easier) for us to find each other. But they didn’t.
Finding Father? What a concept. Until recently, I didn’t even want to, wasn’t looking. Is it because I’m now the older (and wiser?) of the two of us that I’ve started looking at this late stage?
Though it’s far too late to tell him so, perhaps I’m old and wise enough at last to acknowledge to myself that I miss that touch. Always have … always will. Wish I could tell him that, and thus end this essay on an up note. But wishing doesn’t make it so. Never has … never will. Not even on Father’s Day.
Insightful and a bit sad.
Beautiful!