My Father, My Son, Myself
沃特·哈林顿 / Walt Harrington
My father still looks remarkably like I remember him when I was growing up: hair full, body trim, face tanned, eyes sharp. What’s different is his gentleness and patience. I had remembered neither as a boy, and I wondered which of us had changed.
My son Matthew and I had flown to Arisona for a visit, and his 67-year-old grandfather was tuning up his guitar to play for the boy. “You know ‘Oh, Give Me a Home Where the Buffalo Roam’?” my father asked.
All the while, four-year-old Matthew was bouncing on the couch, furtively strumming the guitar he wasn’t supposed to touch and talking incessantly.
When I was a boy, my father wasn’t around much. He worked seven days a week as a milkman. But even at work he was the taskmaster in absentia. Infractions were added up, and at night he dispensed punishment, though rarely beyond a threatening voice or a scolding finger.
Despite our father son struggles, I never doubted my father’s love, which was our lifeline through some pretty rough times. There are plenty of warm memories—he and I on the couch watching TV together, walking a gravel road in Crete, Ill., at dusk, riding home in a car, singing “Red River Valley”.
He had this way of smiling at me, this way of tossing a backhanded compliment, letting me know he was proud of me and my achievements. He was a rugged teaser, and it was during his teasing that I always sensed his great unspoken love. When I was older, I would understand that this is how many men show affection without acknowledging vulnerability. And I imitated his way of saying “I love you” by telling him his nose was too big or his ties too ugly.
“It’s not what a man says, but what he does that counts.” he would say. Words and emotions were suspect. He went to work every day, he protected me, he taught me right from wrong, he made me tough in mind and spirit. It was our bond. It was our barrier.
It was only after having a boy of my own that I began to think a lot about the relationship between fathers and sons and to see—and to understand—my own father with remarkable clarity.
If there is a universal complaint from men about their fathers, it is that their dads lacked patience. I remember one rainy day when I was about six and my father was putting a new roof on his mother’s house, a dangerous job when it’s dry, much less wet. I wanted to help. He was impatient and said no. I made a scene and got the only spanking I can recall. He has chuckled at that memory many times over the years, but I never saw the humor.
Only now that I’ve struggled to find patience in myself when Matthew insists he help me paint the house or saw down dead trees in the back yard am I able to see that day through, my father’s eyes. Who’d have guessed I’d be angry with my father for 30 years, until I relived similar experiences with my own son, who, I suppose, is angry now at me.
More surprisingly, contrary to my teenage conviction that I wasn’t at all like my father, I have come to the greater realization. I am very much like him. We share the same sense of humor, same stubbornness, and same voice even. Although I didn’t always see these similarities as desirable, I have grown into them, come to like them.