Sons and Fathers

 “Everyone I know goes away in the end.” — “Hurt” (Trent Reznor)

Here in Nicasio, it’s raining softly and steadily. Everything around me is green. The coastal fog creeps through the treetops of the surrounding forest, as the massive mountain where this cottage is perched stands in silence, witness to it all.

As am I. 

My mind is drifting back to childhood moments spent fishing with my father. Maybe it’s because I’m visiting my oldest son, who for many years was my only son, just as I was the only son of my father.

My oldest son is a father himself now, in his early 40s, he has a son and a daughter of his own.

My father was the youngest of three sons (and three daughters as well) in his family, growing up on a farm outside London, Ontario. His own father died in his 40s, when he was only about ten years old, and I could sense that loss in my father all the years I knew him.

It was palpable.

Ultimately, he lived to the age of 82, and though it sounds funny to say this, I think partly he willed himself to live that long so that we would not lose him prematurely, the way he’d lost his Dad.

He was a tobacco addict who survived multiple health crises as he aged — heart attacks and strokes — the worst of which landed him in the hospital.

Finally, one night not far into the new year of 1999, a massive stroke hit him and hurled him out of bed to the floor, where he repeated over and over, ”I’ve gotta go. I’ve gotta go.”

I was nearby him that night, which was a rarity since we lived on opposite ends of the continent. But on his final night I was just a bridge away and I rushed to his side to be there with my mother as he passed away peacefully in the early morning hours.

It’s barely comprehensible to me that that was a quarter-century ago now.

When I was growing up, my Dad taught me specific skills. One was how to fight, in order to counter the bullies I would inevitably encounter in the schoolyard. I was skinny but scrappy, and he showed me how to grab onto a bigger boy, knee him where it hurts, flip him over and let my nose bleed all over him.

The nosebleed would happen because the guy would have punched me, which then always, as inevitable as the next chapter in a Bible story, led to my nose letting out a massive stream of bright red blood.

But my Dad explained that the flip-and-bleed-all-over-him technique was only a secondary option, because the first option was to try and talk myself out of the confrontation by diversion tactics, if possible.

I took his sage advise on occasion, but I also had a stubborn streak, which led me to stand up to bullies of one stripe or another many times during my life. 

But back to the fishing. My father absolutely loved to fish. We would spend hours drifting in his small boat or trolling with the 3.5 HP motor set low, our lines trailing us with lures or baited hooks, tempting the bass, pike, crappies, perch, walleyes, sunfish, bluegills, and catfish that populated Michigan’s fresh water lakes.

It was during these hours on lakes that my father dispensed his fatherly advice.

When my own first son was born, I was 34. I already had two daughters but for the first time, as I looked at him, I felt like I was beginning to understand my own father and his advice for me.

We’d led very different lives, my father and I. Mine as a writer, journalist, lecturer, and author was foreign to anything he’d known in his career as an office manager in the dairy industry.

But as I looked at my own beautiful baby son, I suddenly felt an urge to tell him what to do when he encountered bullies at school — or wherever. It was a ridiculous notion, I know, in that moment, to worry about an infant in that way, but I definitely wanted him to be strong in character and know how to fight for what is right.

At the same time, I knew I’d pretty much become my Dad.

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