I Was Thinking About Something Today

I love when I have very specific memories of my father. They are fleeting, and the happy ones seem so very distant now that he has been dead for fourteen years. I really didn't even know him for almost a decade before he died, so he doesn't feel all that real to me anymore. Maybe he never was really real at all. He's like retro faded wallpaper that has been scraped off the original walls in a rental property: mostly gone, but thinking long and hard enough, I can almost will the image that once was.

I was thinking about something today. I was thinking about how very difficult it is to be a parent. I am always hopeful that I am a better parent than what was modeled to me. Despite all of my limitations and brokenness, I hope that maybe I can still be a successful parent and raise healthy, confident children who know they are cherished.

I remember my dad's awful temper. That man could fly off the handle at a moment's notice for almost nothing at all, and he was terrifying. His thunder brought down the house. Maybe this is why I don't tolerate yelling well. But I remember a softer side of him, too. He had nicknames for everyone and his gray blue eyes were kind even in anger. He smoked like a chimney burning in winter, but never seemed to age. His sandy brown hair was soft and feathery, and his skin was a rich olive color for all the time he spent out in the field at new housing developments.

He loved animals and used to surprise us with baby rabbits at Easter time, bringing them home in cardboard boxes.

"Lainey," he would say to me when he hit the door, "go down to my car and bring me the plans I left in the front seat." My father was a landscape architect, and he always had blueprints with him. He was a workaholic and had big corporate jobs, as well as Hollywood-type houses to design. He had beautiful block printing and only ever wrote in all even capitals like a typewriter. I can't look at Sharpies and not think of him.

I would run down the three flights of stairs in our house, happy to be of service to a man who rarely asked for anything, running my greasy hands down the white walls the whole way. I loved the squeaking sound it made. My mom would later hand me a bucket and sponge to clean those stupid sterile walls for this infraction, but it was always worth it. Skipping out the back door and kicking it shut with a satisfying slam behind me, I stepped into the garage. My bare feet always stung when they hit the cold concrete, but I couldn't be bothered to wear shoes.

There is no joy comparable to that of finding something so unexpectedly magical in a box that was meant to be something boring. My father always had boxes of plans in his car, but this time, it didn't smell of chemical blueprints when I opened the passenger side door. There weren't rolled plans when I peered in, but two fuzzy dwarf rabbits huddled together. My heart skipped a beat.

Maybe this is why I love surprises; my father was the king of them, and they were always thrilling. From new pets to trips to new places, my father loved to give the unexpected. He lived for it. Bikes mysteriously found their way into our garage for good grades, and they were always top of the line. My father never did anything second rate. "Camping" for my father meant staying at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite. "Roughing it" was a four star hotel. That was as close to nature as he got.

I remember my dad giving us wagon rides down the steep hillside in which our house was built. As a kid, that road was a mountain, and even now all grown up, I feel it when I run the neighborhood. He would sit us in front of him in that Radio Flyer and with only his feet as the "brakes", we would roll full speed ahead down the hill, squealing with delight the whole way. He would steer the ship single-handedly and the wheels would get dodgy from speed wobbles. As a parent now, I wonder how my mother even stomached this scene from her perch out the kitchen window as she washed dishes, her precious babies in a death basket out of control down the steep asphalt. I wonder how we all managed to keep our teeth?

My dad couldn't swim. He grew up in New York and somehow there was never a reason to learn. I guess playing in the fire hydrants in the city streets was enough to keep him cool during the sticky East Coast summers. He was adamant, however, that growing up on the beach in Southern California, we were going to be water safe. We had swimming lessons--private lessons and semi-privates--all summer long for as many summers as I can remember. He would sit in the hot tub and watch us swim laps.

I remember when he killed a huge diamondback rattlesnake in our backyard. It had slithered behind the trash cans in our driveway, and he had to coax it out before it disappeared into the abyss of the woodpile. It became severely agitated, coiled in an angry heap, tsk, tsk, tsking us with its tail. My father instructed me to stand back. He took a shovel and swiftly and accurately, severed its head clean off its rattling body. My father wasn't a large man (he may have been 5'9" on his tallest day), but in that moment, he looked like Paul Bunyan to me. City boy he was, he still somehow knew to bag that snake's head, full of venom, separately. Then he called the fire department to dispose of its still twitching scaly body. That frightened me. As a child, there was something foreboding about a creature so dangerous that even in death, it had to be handled by firefighters to avoid an unfavorable outcome.

As we got older, my father wouldn't allow us to ride with teenage drivers or to get into cars with the nannies that took care of our neighborhood friends. My siblings and I would beg and cry to go with them when the invitations came for movies and the beach, but he never moved on that point. He didn't trust these trusted friends with our young lives, yet he insisted on only owning Porsches and he commanded those vehicles as if we were on the autobahn.

I had never seen that man so upset as the day he came downstairs into the garage and found my baby sister, probably three or four at the time, stark naked, building sandcastles on the hood of his new cherry red 911. Her impish grin and glistening eyes told a thousand stories of how proud she was in that moment. I guess she was drawn to the car's color as much as my father had been when he purchased it days before, but she was less inclined to like her bare tush the same hue when he was done with her. My father was a spanker. And he was anal. He liked his cars kept a certain way, sans sand.

There are a lot of things I would tell my father if he were still alive. I would tell him I don't believe in spanking, but that I love to gift surprises, too. I would tell him I let my kids have food in the car because I care more that they eat, even if it means spilling, than about the leather seats.  I would thank him for teaching me to love climbing trees and for appreciating the rain, what little fell in Southern California. I would let him know I never became the veterinarian he thought I might be, but I love animals anyway.

I would thank him for loving me enough to keep me out of inexperienced teens' vehicles, because I now understand that fear every time my kids climb into someone else's car. I would tell him how much I appreciate how hard he worked to provide us with all of the luxuries we had growing up, and for the sacrifices he made to ensure we had the best education possible. I would tell him I still love flying down hills, but now my choice mode of transit is a racing bike over a wagon.

I would apologize for hating him for all of those difficult years, but mostly, I would like to tell my dad I forgive him for the things I thought he lacked because through my own deficiencies, I get it. Only now do I understand just how difficult it is to be a parent.