Funny how we never seem to outgrow the competition we develop with our parents. Not always an overt or aggressive style of action but a quiet determination to somehow undo in your life what they had carried over from their life. To undo the corruption of an otherwise perfectly serviceable set of personal traits.
I swore to myself that I’d never be like my dad.
Funny thing that. You get to the end of the whole process of eliminating and cleaning undesirable qualities in yourself only to find that you end up where you needed to be anyway.
The Puppy
Dad’s first parish assignment as a priest was in a small resort town in northern Wisconsin called Eagle River. Quiet, idyllic, and with the exception of the evening news, it was far removed from the turbulence of the mid 1960’s. It was also an almost perfect place to be a little boy.
The church was holding an auction one summer and being a young man in elementary school, the event seemed a good a place to engage a world that was just starting to dawn on my awareness. I was now earning an allowance for chores and the ready cash in pocket that day was empowering.
The next item up for bid was a small mixed breed puppy. Now I really hadn’t been in the market for a pet but Dad has his dog, so why shouldn’t I, or so went my reasoning. Besides, I had cash to spend on myself, or so I had been told.
I raised my hand and submitted my bid. No other bidders stepped forward, which I suspect was in part a courtesy to the little boy bidding on a puppy.
Down went the gavel and I was the proud owner of a pet of my own.
Power Change
The puppy turned out to be the first of many challenges to Dad’s power in the family. I thought it was just a pup but it was also my first step towards establishing myself as a person in the household. No longer just “the kids”, there was now another young man in the home and the older one didn’t quite like the change.
While I was just discovering about myself as a person, I found myself bumping up against Dad’s set of ideals that I think until that point, he thought were going to be an inviolate set of rules that the whole family would follow.
Skirmishes over how a man conducts himself in the world continued through the rest of our relationship. A little intense at times during my adolescence but eventually smoothing out as we both grew older. He was never overbearing with his displeasure that I challenged him on issues, but he never forgot and he found some sort of reckoning with me later.
But I Don’t Want to Be Like That
I remember the first time I said something that sounded just like my father. I was talking with one of my sister’s and I had to stop and apologize for sounding like him. It still happens today but the shock of that first time was disconcerting.
With all the years gone by now, my attitudes have been tempered with experience and time. I am not my dad but he and I do share some truly admirable traits. I have the same bald head as he had (“Grass doesn’t grow on a busy street”, he would joke.) but more importantly, we share a concern for others. His life experience developed this concern in ways that are different from mine but we both reach out to others to help.
I am still not my dad but we are alike in some ways. We especially enjoy the company of puppies that eventually grows into a love of dogs.
“I suddenly remember being very little and being embraced by my father. I would try to put my arms around my father’s waist, hug him back. I could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body; he was that much larger than life. Then one day, I could do it. I held him, instead of him holding me, and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way.”
― Jodi Picoult
Dad's Back 