Tell Me About Your Fathers

It’s nearly impossible to think about children of your own without thinking of your father. My father and mother divorced when I was young. I’ve always idealized him to some extent; he played guitar in a band when I was young and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. He later moved to Florida and started a series of businesses, something else I ended up admiring him for, although it took me a few years to realize why. He pretty much cut his own path through life.

One of the strangest things about Pop is his ability to transmute me into a whimpering child by dint of his presence alone. It doesn’t matter that I’m nearly thirty years old; every time I hang out with my dad I end up feeling like a loud-mouthed kid, spouting brash ideas. He exacerbates this by a propensity for giving the same advice over and over, trying, I suspect, to make up for time we didn’t get to spend together when I was a teenager. Sometimes his ideas are ridiculous, but I just enjoy hanging out with him hearing him bitch about old girlfriends and tell me about how he got screwed over by some jerk in the past. (My streak of stubborn pride that has been both asset and detriment over the years comes right from him, bolstered from my mother’s side, too. I’m not an asshole—it’s genetics!)

These days I usually go down to Florida to visit him—despite growing up in Detroit, he can’t really hang with the cold—and we bop down to the Keys for some diving. Sitting in tiki bars after a day in the ocean, slurping back rum and Cokes (a drink I picked up from him), smoking cigarettes (a habit I picked emulating him), and listening to goofy old rock tunes (he thinks all my bands sound like copies of his bands and he’s usually right).

Pop wasn’t around as much as he should have been when I was a kid, partially for reasons beyond his control, but we have a good relationship now, primarily because he’s a man I respect. It gives me hope that someday when I have kids of my own, despite any mistakes I will make, they’ll be proud to say they have known me.

Tell me about your dads, though! I want to know what your fathers are like, good or bad.