FATHER'S DAY

by
J C Sullivan, Ohio, USA

Each year the month of June usually tells me warm weather is here for real. And it's the month that celebrates a day that continues to make me confront conflicting feelings - Father's Day. Although I knew more than one man as my father, each occupied the same physical body. Memories are bittersweet and span many years.

True to his Scorpio nature, Da was an enigma to his family and perhaps to himself as well. We never knew much about his youth; he shared few memories about growing up. Maybe his youth, like mine, contained many bittersweet or painful memories and feelings. A family member once told me that when his younger sister Kitty died during the flu epidemic of 1918, during World War One, his mother told him it should've been him who died instead of her.

We know that after graduating from Cathedral Latin High School in 1929 he disappeared from Cleveland, never telling anyone in the family what he was planning. They eventually heard from him; he'd hitchhiked,or rode rails, West with a friend. While there he attended the University of New Mexico and apparently fell ill with a mysterious malady. We don't know if it was of a physical or spiritual nature, perhaps it was both. He returned home to Ohio when he recovered.

We've a photograph of him in his Army uniform, wearing a Sam Browne Belt and packing a forty-five caliber pistol. It was taken during the Depression years when work for most American men just wasn't available. While on temporary duty at Fort Knox, Kentucky, at a U.S.O. dance, he met a bright, spirited and beautiful Irish-American lass from Louisville. Later, against the wishes of her family, because she was so young, they married in Louisville's St. Patrick's Church, in the Irish district called Portland, and he brought her home to Cleveland. His bride, from a city at least as old as Cleveland, was insulted when my grandmother attempted to explain to her what traffic signals were.

The first father I remember was a quiet, fearless hero. He had an athletic build and was darkly handsome. During, or immediately after World War Two, a fire broke out on our street, Shelley Court, in the Berea projects where we lived. With a blanket over him for protection, he crawled in and rescued two sisters. Unfortunately, their mother, whose husband was away in the Navy, died in the fire. I still have the framed oil the sisters painted and later presented to him in gratitude for his selfless act. My mother told me she'd been upset the following day when the newspaper story mispelled Da's name.

This first father, the one who enjoyed taking his sons with him, occupies my first conscious memories. Shortly after the end of World War Two he took my brother and me through the 'bomber plant', which is now Brookpark's I-X Center. We felt privileged among our peers, as if a heretofore secret world had been revealed to us. We'd seen part of the adult world; bodies of aircraft in various stages of construction; we saw what some people did 'at work.'

This first father enjoyed taking his sons on the bus to Hopkins International Airport. Together we watched aircraft take off and land. Da would identify the planes as they taxied. "That's a C-47, the military version of the DC-3," he would say, pointing out an olive-drab colored warbird. We people-watched bodies scurrying to and from important places, where we imagined they did important things. He topped-off our day of simple pleasures with lunch with at the airport restaurant. That made US feel important, as if we were part of a bigger world, and had only paused in Cleveland to refuel our bodies.

This was the father that made my brother and me Cleveland Browns football fans. The first 'real' fight we ever witnessed was in the 'Dawg Pound', the bleacher section at Cleveland Stadium. In those days, when the Browns were perennial champions, there was never a screen raised behind the goal posts to prevent the football from going into the stands. If you caught the football after it was kicked there, you kept it. After one such kick, two men were violently disagreeing on who was going to keep the football. My memories with this father are treasures, before our family grew to nine children, and life's stresses apparently molded him into another man.

This later father sought activities in which perhaps he sought personal therapy and relevance, or even flight from personal demons. He no longer included his sons in activities. I can't recall that he ever attended one of my baseball or basketball games. Nor did he share his feelings about things. Except when he was angry or upset about something, which seemed to be frequent. We never had a one-on-one dialogue, the kind of talk in which fathers reveal to their sons how men naturally communicate and express feelings to each other. Instead, he seemed to retreat to other activities and adult toys that occupied his time, talent and energy; like the black Royal manual typewriter perched atop his basement desk. I often think how he would love using my personal computer, word-processing software and Seikosha printer.

From his subterranean desk, his solitude next to the furnace, a few feet from the ever-present mound of soiled clothing from our family of nine children, he banged out letters on his old black, Underwood typewriter and wrote - the White House, Congress and friends around the world, especially missionary friends in Patna, India. During the '50s he was published in an international Catholic newspaper when he'd written that, in an attempt to convert him, Americans should send Russia's Joe Stalin a Christmas card. The editor, apparently sensing there would be reaction, added his postscripts about what the "guy named Sullivan" was had to say. The editor's instincts were right on the money because reaction, indeed, came in - from all over the world. Most suggested Da needed psychiatric counseling.

In what must have been a half-hearted venture, he apparently ran for political office once. I recall seeing a letter offering him condolences of sort on his unsuccessful run for Governor of Ohio. No one else in the family knew about this.

As I left my teen years, I departed home for the first time. Later came marriage and eventually children, three daughters. As Da and I both grew older our relationship improved somewhat. He was certainly more laid back after his retirement. My younger brother says Da even attended his own baseball games. However, as men, Da and I were still unable to communicate feelings to each other than those that were on the surface every day. As a result, we blocked ourselves from a fully human relationship.

After an absence of fifteen years he visited me recently in a dream. An overwhelming and indescribable feeling of love filled me when I saw him return. He was with two others; all were engaged in important work, just like his homicide and undercover Detective work in Cleveland had been. They couldn't stay, they didn't have a lot of time. As in life, we two Scorpios still didn't have the right words for each other. Sensing this, and reading my heart, my father took the lead and broke the long silence before leaving again. "But you KNEW I loved you," he said.

"Yes, Dad, I knew," I said, "but you never told me."

My children, now young adults, know I love them...I continue to tell them so.