Dad's Heart, My Life

"Modern-day cowboys," he called them, out there on the open road, their own boss. I think he envied that freedom, real or imagined.

I always sensed in Dad a certain yearning. A wistfulness that maybe his life could have turned out . . . not better, just differently. Some of this, perhaps most of this, was the product of his job situation. But not all of it. Dad never had the luxury of career options. Had he, he might have become a forest ranger. And he talked about starting his own company, even schemed with a friend on how to go about it.

I don't think Dad was dissatisfied with his life. What happened, I believe, is that he learned what we all learn, that no life turns out like we want it to. But you also learn -- if you're lucky -- that that's all right.

My Father's Son

I understood his yearning -- and acted on it. I did have choices. Dad's years of sweating Cole Steel had provided me with options he never had. Though he died when I was a high school senior, the foundation was solidly in place for me to go to college. When I graduated from Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales in Pennsylvania in 1974, however adrift, there were few doors that weren't still open, if only I could push through them.

And I sprinted from the very idea of a career in business, the one thing that Dad was so grateful to run to. So grateful in fact that he was willing to work himself to death on its behalf. And I cannot be convinced to the contrary. In college I disdained the economics majors. I was an English major. I walked around with a paperback book stuck in my back pocket, making sure the top inch was visible. I played on the basketball team; I appeared in student-directed plays. Yes, I fancied myself quite the latter-day Renaissance man. I was going to "teach"; I was going to "write." I aspired not to a career, but a calling.

For me the math has forever been unforgiving: Career equals death. No way I was going to kill myself packing boxes into a truck. Spend my life on the phone talking to New York. Allow a boss to dominate the conversation at my dinner table.

I would not be my father.

A Silhouetted Memory

When he died, Dad left no unfinished business between us, so far as it went. We'd had 16 years together. What he left undone was the rest of my life with him. A friend told me once that he knew he finally had a complete life with his father when he bumped into him at a strip club. What are you doing here? What are you doing here? I can't imagine Dad at a strip club. It's been quite a while for me, too. But I understood exactly what my friend meant.

So without a life together forward, I look back, searching for him in details.

He could walk the fields all day in the fall, hunting pheasant. So there was a time when he was in shape. Or maybe it was just that he was younger then. Once, we were out in the driveway shoveling snow. I was maybe 8, 9 years old, making Dad 40, 41. When he finished up he came over to where I was playing and told me to hop on his shovel. I sat down. "Hold on," he said. I grabbed the wood handle, and with that he took off running down the street, which was still covered in snow.

He sprinted past four or five houses, ran himself in a wide circle and brought me around crack-the-whip style and started back up the street. From my vantage point behind him he was silhouetted in the dark, the steam trailing from his mouth like a locomotive's, brightened by the street lamps, his boots chugging on the snow crust.

Dad, indestructible.