Dad

(Warning: This is a longish post.)

For most of my childhood, I didn't have much of a relationship with my dad. When I was really young, I remember he would play with me and Jason a lot. We'd "wrestle" him which meant he'd lay on the floor and let a hyperactive five and seven year old crawl all over him, jump on him, and do our best to "pin" him. He'd let us do that for a while, and then he'd clamp his giant bear paw hands onto our chests and hold us against the ground until we squealed. I'm pretty sure he was a fun dad when we were little, but sometime in the mid-Eighties, things just changed.

Dad became the angry guy who came home from work late, loaded his plate with leftover dinner, plodded downstairs, ate in front of MASH reruns, and stayed in his recliner until he fell asleep, lights on, tv still blaring. We never talked in any kind of real way. He was the disciplinarian, the one we were afraid of when we'd done something wrong. He worked, he yelled, he slept. That was kind of it, and for a lot of years, I resented the heck out of him for it.

This isn't to say he was a bad father. He wasn't. He always provided for us materially. We weren't rich, of course, but we always had a comfortable house, two cars, plenty of food, a family vacation once a year, and all the unnecessary things that made life nice - a computer, comics, toys, etc. He'd come to our events, whatever they were, and give us the awkward side-hug afterwards - "Proud of ya," he'd mutter, kind of embarrassed. He set a good example of church service and hard work. He was a good man. We just didn't have a lot to talk about for the better part of a decade.

Part of that had more to do with me than him, of course. I mean, Dad was raised on a farm in a tiny corner of Idaho. The guy was built to work, to fix, to do. He was a laconic problem solver. Along comes son #2 - a talker who didn't really care for work in any form, who'd rather sit around and think or write than actually do. I painted. I was in plays. I read comics and was afraid of guns. We didn't have much in common. I'm positive he often shook his head at how little of him seemed to manifest itself in me.

Things changed in my early twenties. I was back from my mission and had gone through kind of a catastrophic break-up. Moping around the house, half-heartedly trying to get myself together to start a new semester in college, I was lost. Dad, either on his own or at my mother's suggestion, offered to take me on a trip. "Anywhere you want to go," he said. He said we could go anywhere we could reach within two or three days of driving. Mount Rushmore, northern California, the Grand Canyon - "Where do you want to go?" he asked.

In the end, we picked northern Idaho, Coeur d'Alene and than maybe over to Spokane or something like that. We'd both been up there in the past for different things, and it seemed both far and close enough to make for a good trip. So we took off on a Thursday, I think, and spent four days just driving around. Coeur d'Alene, Spokane, Moscow, Wallace, Boise - we made a giant loop around Idaho, eventually landing back in Rexburg.

It's not like we had some giant hash-it-out conversation about our relationship. Nothing like it really. Mostly, we just talked like guys talk - about work, about girls, about family. Dad treated me like an equal, a friend. He told me stories about his dad and about growing up on the farm. He listened to me complain about the hurt I still felt over my breakup. He heard me say, "Yeah, I just got an email from this girl I used to know. Her name is Suzy Day. I'll probably go see her the next time I'm in Logan." We ate out a lot and stopped to look at things whenever the fancy struck us. The night we stayed in CDA, we found a movie theater and went to see U.S. Marshals with Tommy Lee Jones. It's a manly action film with gun fights and car chases, and yet whenever I see it on TV, it makes me a little misty because that's the one Dad took me to.

There are a lot of things like that - seemingly silly, incongruous things that make me sentimental for Dad. His affection and devotion were never flowery or even traditional. His love came out in the extra Whopper he bought at Burger King because he thought you might be hungry, or the socket set he gave you because he knew yours was missing pieces. Taking you to a movie when you were down. Going for a drive to the dump or to the sod farm. Staying awake during your part of the play. A random call just to check in when he was on his way to inspect a farm. Buying your kids more toys than they could ever wear out.

Things changed between Dad and I on that trip. I felt like we were friends a little bit after that, and that was new for me. We kept at it and took many more drives in the ensuing years. If I was around and Dad said, "I need to go to X, do you want to come?" my answer was always yes. Going for drives and going to the movies were the two activities where Dad and I could absolutely meet in the middle and be friends. Over the next fourteen years or so, Dad became a man that I could trust with just about anything. He became a person whose phone call I looked forward to. He became the person I could rely on without question.  I knew that he loved me. I came to appreciate the power of his loyalty and his humility.

Dad was always a little bit of a prickly character. Even after evolving into a warm parent and doting grandparent, he still didn't do well in big groups. When we'd get together at the Rigby house, he'd still kind of hide out in his bedroom and watch Law and Order reruns when we were all sitting in the living room talking. He'd still snap at my mom over seemingly small things. I think he struggled more than any of our will ever really know with depression over Mom's cancer and the threat of being left alone. He was never perfect, and yet he was still one of the very best men I have ever known.

This September, he will have been gone for three years. In some ways, it feels so much longer than that. In other ways, it seems like he was just here visiting last week. He's so present in my mind through so much of my regular day, and yet I feel his absence really sharply a lot of the time. He is here and yet he is so obviously not here. I feel like I understand more about him now - not just kind, silly grandfatherly Dennis, but young, overworked, slightly depressed young Dennis. I think back to the anger and resentment I felt for him and want to say to my younger self, "Hey, cut him some slack. He's doing the best he can." I think young me and young Dad can both be forgiven for their shortcomings.

I stopped feeling guilty for Dad's death a while ago. For the first year or so, I felt like the fact that he was working hard, straining himself, sweating like he'd been swimming all at my house made it my responsibility that he died. If only I could fix my own house, if only I'd done more of the work, if only I'd never asked him in the first place to help, maybe he'd still be with us. Maybe that heart attack wouldn't have happened. These feelings ate me alive for several months. But then, without any fanfare or announcement, they just kind of went away. It just dawned on me that I didn't feel that way any more.

The feeling I was left with was a strange sense of gratitude that, of everyone in his life, I was the one person who got to be there with him in that final moment. I so wish that I somehow could have saved or revived him. I wish it had just turned out to be a scary story he could tell his grand kids for years to come. But it just wasn't within my power -or probably anyone else's. He had to go, and I was there when he did. I wish it had never happened, but it did and I'm touched in ways I can't articulate that I was there for it.

He was my dad, and I miss him tremendously. More than that though, I'm glad I knew him. I'm glad that he found a way to cut through my haze of self-involvement and resentment so that we could become friends and I could realize what a remarkable man he was. I am lucky, lucky, lucky - or blessed, rather, to have had him as a father. I think the best thing a dad can do for his kids is make them feel loved and give them something to aspire to be. Dennis Brown did both of those things for me, and I'm grateful for him.

(This is a scrapbook page from back in our Boise days. I love how entertained Dad and Maryn both look.)