Rotund blind man sat at the front of the 50 bus across from the cranky driver balding gray who asked me one day how old I was since I was tall and he deemed himself the enforcer. “I’m over six and under twelve,” put my quarter in the fare box and sat midway down the aisle, a few rows in front of the rear door, driver’s side, where he couldn’t see me since he kept the shade drawn behind his head — protection from the back of the bus spitballs from Regis students, making noise, bothering people like any high school punks would do. I observed the blind man continuously roll his boogers between his thumb and forefingers, prying them from his bulbous nose; I saw him do this day in and out. Like a castrated dog licking his wanker, the close lidded soul practiced this daily hygiene that intrigued me for all its pathetic grossness. No one called the blind man on his habits. He was solid just for getting around. I would see the same old fella downtown, after riding from 44th and Federal down to the banking district along 17th Street where I transferred, blind man sitting crosslegged selling pencils out of his hat, seeking alms. Could this be transference, projection, sublimation on my part? What’s the Freudian slip I’m looking for? Never knew my father. I was always looking for a replacement. Afraid to pick my nose in public as a kid, I don’t mind doing it now. Was I always rolling those boogers like dice, not crapping out, trying to get the answer without asking?
Not expecting to find him now, hardly searching, once for a few days at the library up in the records near the Western History collection downtown, I traced his name from my baby book inscriptions out of Alabama back to New England at the time of the Revolution, but I couldn’t find what had happened to him since he abandoned my mother and sisters right after I was born, and more recently on a free trial from Ancestry I found his probable birth year, and maybe a family he left behind in Alabama, a picture of his grave with a plot for another wife in Lake Havasu, but I didn’t want to pay more to find a virtual father, since I never knew him and never will. What’s the use of discovering the paper trail of an ex-soldier I assumed so much about who couldn’t handle a wife and kids, adopted girls my sisters and never knew his own son, I never disputed the fact he was gone till I was 21, only hearing stories from neighbors, whom I never asked, they would offer explanations out of compassion, conspiring theories so I wouldn’t suffer his loss. My mother when she found out from my sister that she had let loose the unknown secret that we had different fathers when I said we should be celebrating our mixed English and German heritage asked me what I wanted to know, I said nothing in particular, but she added that she always loved him despite his desertion. I never suffered his loss, although maybe I was in denial, or sublimated his abandonment — seems like it was a convenient Oedipal arrangement; I didn’t have to do a thing to be rid of him and inherit a devoted mother.
With three older sisters, I didn’t need to talk, I just pointed, and they brushed my hair long till one of their boyfriends insisted I get my hair cut, the first of many visits to Bob’s Barbershop at 38th and Clay, where I sat stone still just like I endured the dentist’s drill without novocaine. Wetting the bed and crawling scared of lions under my crib may have been outer signs of trauma, but nothing extraordinary. A long haired boy who pointed his way around the females may arouse your suspicions about his genderness, and I expect some people fostered thoughts, like when I cut the collar off a red sweatshirt, turned it fleece side out and sliced the front of it down to my breastbone and then laced it up with leather and was collecting bills on my paper route and an older girl giggled at my get up, which I retired immediately, although I continue to treasure and promulgate the sense of style that came from my mother. Succumbing to friends in North Denver where I lived who established their manhood a variety of ways, like running their German Shepherds after cats, or hanging out with neighbor hoodlums who were Sons of Silence supreme white wannabes, or talking trash about two guys older than me who were either too smart and studious or homos, not always sure which way they swung, I remained friends with both of them and didn’t think twice, it’s all right. As it turned out one grew up a graphic designer the younger brother of my oldest sister’s best friend who shared her name Marylyn though not the spelling, I can picture him in a photo alongside me both of us wearing clip on bowties he’s holding a basketball, his artistic sense contributed to suspicions about him besides which he didn’t ride his bike much and was the youngest son of a Mason; and the other boy my senior was later discharged from the Navy diagnosed as a schizophrenic paranoiac who was a homosexual and my mother and I took him to Mass thinking that might help his sinful state but he was plain crazy which should have been enough to ostracize him or make me more aware since he tied me up once years later but I convinced him I was going down the stairs out of his apartment one way or the other. That was the low rent apartment days of LoHi when immigrant families found homes and boys found gangs unless they were gay. Boy, was I naïve? I ultimately stopped seeing him when I had a son and the family met him on the new 16th Street mall in downtown must’ve been around ’86 and after a short exchange of pleasantries I confessed to my wife his craven relationship for me since we were paperboys together and we agreed his company should be avoided with our boy in tow and that was the last time I saw Butch. Would a father have counseled me to insinuate their intentions or avoid their headlocks as we wrestled in mime the likes of Gorgeous George and Dick the Bruiser? At least the young priest who ceremoniously married my sister and brother-in-law where I served as ring-bearer never bothered me as a seventh or eighth grader like he did some of the other guys driving them around in his blue Impala on Saturday afternoons or errands after school maybe because he saw my mother and me escorting my crazy paperboy homosapiens friend to church since this young priest devolved to become Colorado’s most notorious priestly pedophile.
So I could be looking for leaks about my paterfamilias, maybe there’s a passel of siblings growing old who would be thrilled to find me related but I doubt it, and otherwise I might find a grave, or his grandchildren, but he didn’t look me up or my son, so why would he care for another branch of his progeny. He’s in absentia as they say, I doubt he ever sent any support although I saw on a school form a long time ago that he was living in Colo Spgs the name of the town on interstate signs south of Denver. The Northerns who lived in a little place next door on 36th who always impressed me as genuinely old, said he died in the war and that was good enough for me, as much as Laura’s husband was gone too, off playing baseball, and Laura gave me one of his bats, which was always way too long for me — she lived on the other side of the Northerns, and there were a few women about who didn’t have husbands, and then the women who did had husbands gone most of the week some traveling others working overtime, so I was growing up among women more than men. That was normal in the 1950s when men hankered down to forget their war wounds hustling their dreams to care for families and buy houses and appliances and cars, and the women were drinking stuck at home with the kids, but Laura opened up a daycare which she was constantly hassled about because regulations came into play and after all this was a business that women were mostly running so they had to be told how to do it, whereas my mom became a receptionist for a family of Italian doctors who catered to all the paisans on the North Side so she knew everyone and they knew she ran the place outside the doctoring part. No one is left to tell me about my father, since my mother and sisters have all passed, and the brothers-in-law still alive never met him, although I found one younger friend of my mother on the internet who is now 92, but she was friends back in Chicago Heights, knew her first husband, I’m not sure she ever met my father although she visited a few times on business and no doubt caught up with my mother about her love life but I was younger and wasn’t privy to those conversations, and as taciturn as my mother was, it’s doubtful that Kay learned a lot so I’m not sure calling her would be more helpful than investing in Ancestry so I never did.
In the parking lot of the Miller’s supermarket on 38th Avenue just a few blocks from my house Goodwill or St. Vincent had deposited a wooden shed where people could donate clothes to be passed onto the poor, since both organizations were in the business of compassion for consumers through their thrifts, and there was a hatch that tilted open so you could drop your bag of worn rags into the locker, but I discovered one day that the lock on the back door didn’t work, a loose hasp, but people were honest and wouldn’t otherwise take the goods for their own use yet it provided me entrance into a cubby hole that viewed the world in private. I would sit in there and look out through a knothole on people walking and driving down 38th, comfy nestled among bags of clothes, and occasionally I was inside this womb of recyclables when someone dropped off a bag. Was I looking for a parent, the inseminator, or pleased with the warmth of the recycled womb? I treasured the observer status of my own “rear window” on the routines of passers-by. It prolonged my infantile pointing by replacing it with spying, another wordless accommodation to growing up, watching how things got done before taking on the responsibilities of school, and work, and lust, and love, interred as the man of the house.
For men who subbed as fathers, for men who accommodated Mother, for men who gave me ties and fostered chinchillas for my mother, who painted our house and wooed my mother, for the men who married my sisters, the men that visited our manse on 36th and didn’t deny me, rather raised me up, made me swim and fish and Boy Scout about, these men I thank, although I’m not sure that they understood their importance anymore than I did. Just a few blocks away between Decatur and Eliot on the same avenue, Tom lived in a little house, it may have been a duplex or attached rental, I disremember, but about the time that I could venture up the block, the same time when I would have been hiding in my Goodwill clothes crawlspace, I would walk the two blocks to Tom’s place, my godfather, and before he moved away for good not quite the responsible godfather, probably to meet more old war buddies, maybe in business with my dad, he gave me a box of silk ties, which were the exchange rate in those days, a gentleman wore a nice silk tie, and maybe a different one every day, even though he might have only one suit, the Glengarry Glen Ross guys, and I treasured those ties until about the time of college when I threw out the outward signs of establishmentarianism even the Carnaby Street orange polka dot one my first steady girl gave me after she went to England. Tom’s last name if I ‘member right was Trumble, but I could have said it was temblor, or trouble, or trueman, he trundled out of my life. There wasn’t another man until my sister Marylyn got married, and Jack became the locum tenens.
It was 1961 and Kennedy was President, someone with a military record when that mattered to the upper class, like in England with all the landed gentry and lords and leering upper class still signing up for the Great War to lead their resident farmers and stable hands to slaughter, when my brother in law mind you I was but ten stood up to hijackers of a Continental jet out of Phoenix to Cuba, said he would stay after passengers were released, was overpowered and my sister Eileen saw the FBI ushering the hijackers and Jack out of the plane in handcuffs because they didn’t know who was who the hijackers were disgusted Americans looking to defect, thinking to herself that’s Jack before she called her sister Jack’s wife to tell her and Kennedy gave Jack a silver cigarette box for his service which Camels finally killed him but guys in those days mostly smoked their lives away. Jack was a local hero, and he became my Webelos leader after we all graduated out of my mother’s Cub Scouts den, and we met at their apartment which was in a basement just north of the new I-70 about where Teresa who was displaced from my second grade class because her home was taken for the highway, and one time I made some smart remark and he called me on it establishing his authority no longer kowtowing to his wife’s spoiled little brother, but he was probably feeling her pressure on him after having a second child and still stuck in a small apartment while he flew around the nation on Denver’s airline, commandeered by another explosive abusive sort named Bob Six who married Ethel Merman her disappointment too turning to disgust, as Jack was cavorting with the women who stewarded the planes which led to his divorce from my sister after three more kids.
Other father figures in the days of my life included H. O. P. his initials who led us Cubs on a charge, as Cubmaster and then Scoutmaster, from Pinewood Derby wins to the greatest number of Order of the Arrow braves, me included although I almost didn’t go to Camp Tahosa that last time and as it was I lost the trail leading a group of Tenderfeet so we showed up an hour late for dinner, even though only his son achieved Eagle Scout, the rest of us benefitted from his hard tasking and scout masting, training knots and folding flags, he drilled us as much as the priests did in Latin at Catholic school, and took us for a longer time through the transition between grade school and high school, from preteen to adolescence, and he had to have known that we were not as interested as freshmen as we had been in sixth grade, and like any teacher, that hurts, the pack and the troop were not the same, and I seldom went back once I moved on. I wrote him a letter ala Moses Herzog when I was reading Bellow’s novel in college to say I loved him for the values and responsibility he instilled in us and I mailed it but never heard back — he either got a lot of those or was made so anxious by my reverie of love, he didn’t know how to respond, or maybe he had heard those rumors of priestly abuse by one of St. Catherine’s court of priests and didn’t want to risk the contact.
Most of these men protected me, taught me, modeled behavior for me, why Jack took me to the father-son breakfast in Cub Scouts, the only time I went since it was strictly a male affair, but the man who was my first employer probably taught me more about masculine attitudes because he was holding the purse strings, authorizing my checks, overseeing my selling of newspapers when I wasn’t delivering, and he stood in marked contrast to another manager at a nearby paper station north of Gaetano’s on Tejon who his boys said supplied false sales claims to the Denver Post people downtown so that his crew could win the big prizes, the trips to Disneyland and the honor of being the best paperboys in Denver but that neighborhood was totally Italian and there may have been some neighborhood connections that would have prompted a win in spite of the odds. My manager Bill kept us in line at the garage just off 32nd and Tejon, where my electrician years later divided the humble abode into two halves where he and his crazy wife lived awhile now a postage stamp high-rise he made some money holding out, Bill had a couple fingers missing on his hand and he would tell us how he would joke around downtown and place his hand by the elevator door and make people think two fingers just got stuck when the new automatic door closed without an operator to watch for safety’s sake. His best boy was an older kid Eddie who was already enrolled in a business leaders association for young people Junior Achievement, but his father Luis had killed his mother and some siblings trying to cover up his abuse of a daughter and was the last person executed in Colorado before the reform of the death penalty, last person executed in the US before Gary Gilmore, he wanted to be hanged, so helping young Eddie testified to Bill’s mentorship and fatherhood. If we were top sellers for the month, he would bring us to an all you can eat buffet up in the Westminster shopping center which is the height of luxury for growing young boys who would go through the line three times, and when I was robbed in an apartment house the Albert Whitaker house just a block up from where I lived across from old man Tatum’s place now the Lumber Baron Inn who stepped out of his basement hovel one time to pay me for the paper in a night gown and sleeping cap, big grey beard straight out of Dickens, Bill told me to up the amount taken from me by three guys who kicked in my spokes so I couldn’t chase them and I increased the cost of the damages to my bike so although it took a month I got more money from insurance than I lost and so I was grateful but he was a Goldwater supporter which made my mother cringe since she had attended the Democratic convention when Franklin Roosevelt was first nominated because her husband was connected in a different way back in Chicago as he was a detective on the tail of Capone’s captains or at least that’s what I heard. Stories about him prove just as equivocal as the supposed fates of my father.
How could a father have changed things? I got a sweet German Shepherd puppy after the robbery to accompany me on my collection nights and Sunday mornings when I delivered the paper before the sun rose named Ginger after a dog my mother had when she was a kid so I got some protection and I had obviously learned how to ride a bike a regular expert handling huge loads of papers riding sidewalks for miles around my house and although I didn’t get to play sports in grade school because of my routes maybe a father could have helped me learn and provide enough money where I didn’t need to deliver papers but most team sports were a racket anyway, and I learned in high school how to run cross country and race hurdles and the 880 which was probably the toughest race there was since it was both speed and distance even though Bannister had made the four minute mile a cause célèbre. My brothers-in-law liked Colorado for all its individual male sports like hunting and fishing and having the fastest car but their influence didn’t make much of an impact especially after Joe first took me fishing in that creek in Wash Park used to be on the east side where they used to hold a Tom Sawyer competition and there were so many kids catching released trout that I even got one but I heard Joe say the lines were tangled and it wasn’t my fish anyway. I might have played more baseball there was a father who would take a few of us out on weekends down to Mt. Carmel’s fields on Zuni and try to teach us and I tried out for my grade school team when one time I was set to catch a fly ball and it went through the webbing because the leather lace had come loose so he might have taught me to look over my mitt although years later playing softball I made a running catch of a fly in center at that field off Tejon and 30th that I was always proud of with as little coaching as I had. I cried after the robbery so maybe I wouldn’t have broken down like that and I didn’t get in fights because I didn’t know how to defend myself but I was tall enough that most guys didn’t want to tangle with me and they knew I didn’t have a father and probably didn’t know how to fight which served me well through my life being tall and dark, knowing my way around the city from having a paper route and growing up in North Denver but not attending North High School where I heard there were greasers and fights all the time because I got a scholarship to Regis when the high school shared a campus with the the college up at 50th and Lowell where studies were favored over fights although the Jesuits would take on some rough guys now and then out back of the handball courts.
These were the Fathers who inspired a generation of Regis graduates, even those who took a long time becoming Fathers like Becker who was a seminarian teaching me German and English and History who balked at some of the Jesuit requirements for his ordination into the priesthood and so became a Brother for a while and still taught and assembled the largest slide library of European art when he traveled the continent playing organs everywhere real pipe organs not little boys’ appendages which Regis University catalogued and digitized after his death which was too early because of a brain tumor but he graduated early and was more our age and became engaged in political causes while he baptized all our kids without the rigmarole of church rules and he started the soccer team and made sure the kids who lacked some team sport sensibilities could play handball. He was the only teacher invited to my small graduation party in my mother’s 1950s era blonde brick apartment on South Sherman where he deigned to drink a martini with my mother and sisters and their husbands but it was mostly olives since he was diabetic and before he became a priest he managed to collect enough cans around the college to buy a used car as he took his poverty vows seriously and that’s what I admired as he was on the right side of progressive attitudes in the church and I and another student lived with his father after graduation and worked in his dad’s warehouse in Kansas City for the summer to earn money for college where I learned even more about the world of work and Wobblies which he wanted us to know, and when he showed up in my house on Fox when another friend and I were celebrating our 33rd birthdays the last time I saw him I shouted why have you come to crucify me and it was one of the happiest days in my life with a man I could call Father but was friendly enough to call him by his last name.
Although Becker became a long time friend who married me and my wife even after she asked if he could keep god out of the ceremony which was fine by him as we were wed in a chapel at Regis College that was desanctified a long time ago probably because it was full of santos and retablos which harbored the taint of Mestizo paganism, another Jesuit who copped a different attitude by only talking Latin in class on our first day as freshmen which alerted us to the hard row we had to hoe named Bakewell we were led to believe by older students was the model for the Hoodlum Priest the movie since he had beat up some irreverent punks and played handball harder than Becker who introduced me to the pickup game but Francis Bakewell with a first name that made us wince for its slanderous sensitivity called me a “scholar and a gentleman” one day in class and although he probably used that phrase on other students it made me proud to succeed in his class and receive his seal of approval. The Jesuits were men we could look up to and a few students in the top class considered joining the Jesuit order of independent scholar priests, many highly ranked academics, and now Pope Francis has died the best for the church since John XXIII although JPII was a winner politically, but only one did go to St. Louis for seminary school and he lost his hope for the sacred after a year during a time when college meant rebellion and radicalization and the Jesuits started to fall by the wayside in our congestures about standing up to the man, with many of those seminarians and priests who inspired us losing their vocations abetted by the first whispers of abuse filtering through the neighborhood where I grew up discovering the priest in the parish church where I served as an altar boy and admired most left to become a mortician and the pastor who spent the money collected at St. Catherine’s to renovate the church in a high Italian Byzantine style rather than send it to the bishop was transferred after he shot a robber trying to make off with the Easter offerings and later it was divulged that the young priest who married my sister Eileen had devolved into the biggest abuser in Colorado which nocuously intimated to all priests that their vocations were suspect and young people started doubting that these fathers who we adulated as spiritual leaders were turning out to be lesser men evil men although there was Ken Leone who I served as altar boy at his first mass reknown for his holiness and devotion a believer in miracles inspired young people with evangelical certitude through his weekend Search camps but at that time he was the exception rather than the rule.
So even when I find father figures they tend to be emasculated and my wife would say most of my friends from Regis were Jesuits to some degree unemotional and overly intellectual always thrilling to debate to counter whatever others say listening to jazz and reggae and ponderous rock although my sisters turned me onto folk music back in my youth which was a starting point for protest and prevailing over establishment predicaments until I met my dorm counselor in college who was a black man with preppy credentials, intellectual and compassionate, friendly to whites still a leader to blacks at school, a fine person who became more of an older brother rather than a father, as we talked trash to each other across the quad in the words of Sly Stone don’t call me nigger, whitey, and don’t call me whitey, nigger, always willing to laugh and engage with Woodstock’s favorites, as he brought his whole freshmen brood downtown to the movies several times to see that musical epic, Paul was a mensch, and we drove cross country talking like clodhoppers after my exchange program in Berlin since I was godfather to a new nephew and I needed to get home for a week and he had a new Volvo he wanted to roadtrip. As a brother he taught me what it meant to be a strong man especially since I had split from my first real love while in Spain and the first part of our road trip signaled hooking up with a few friends dames in New York and Maine whom we knew so we could really call it a buddy movie that benefitted both of us in finding out what life was about beyond our home borders and college especially since he had gone to Harvard for a year but was disappointed with academics and returned to become a dean of students so we weren’t really supposed to be fraternizing but why not since it was summer and I had travelled incognito in walled Berlin and through Europe most people took us for Germans English or Canucks people hardly knew me because I had long hair and wore dark glasses like all the other freaks but I studied all the time in the library window overseeing the entrance marking my time as a scholar and sometimes gentleman.
The men post Paul were bosses or my father-in-law Mike whom I’ll get to but I’m a generalist which means I’m still looking for redemption in work or a father to guide me who has switched careers and returned to school and encountered employers or managers or directors or principals who noted my intelligence who were pleased with my work who gave me leeway because they could see I wanted to learn and suppose if I had a hammer, a father to drive my nail, I may not have been so curious but rather disposed to finding a fine line of work and pursuing great things but I just wanted to have fun learning all I could and certainly my mother encouraged that and the men who hired me soon saw that was the best way to get the best from me, play to my strengths and they benefitted too. Out of college I bummed around for a bit pounding spikes for the Colorado and Southern after a stint as a taxidermist with Jonas Brothers where there was a guy named Tom who I liked as a boss who treated his profession as a guilded craft but people were starting to turn against big game hunting and although the family Jonas mounted a massively huge stuffed polar bear in their first floor fur salon they would soon disband the business because furs were on the way out too but I had left for better wages on the railroad working with salt of the earth Mexicans where I lasted less than a year even though I had joined the Maintenance of the Way union I was wayward and moved to Chicago to pursue an old flame. Another businessman black preppy became my boss programming computers for an insurance giant but I was sick the day that Mike Razor from new ownership came in and severed the staff in a buyout I was cut but the office atmosphere stifled me anyway I took up bartending for a Persian cook who had taken over a hamburger joint owned by a bunch of lawyers a way to spend their money where I was day manager of the place located on the widening phalanx of the yuppie northwest side until I got sick of the weather and my girl and left in a huff come December snow blowing me back to Denver.
I had already driven a cab in Denver, and spied on the number of passengers flying Continental for Frontier Airlines since they were trying to gain a foothold in the Denver market a gig arranged by a mother of a friend, and I swept and mopped the concourses of the coliseum every night after the National Western one year but now I needed full time work and finally found a six month job working outside at the Denver Botanic Gardens summer maintenance which nurtured a love of the landscape gardens trees plants views horizons. Ken a Japanese guy was my boss a big fella who laughed at my naïveté around trucks and irrigation systems and horticulture but I knew something about mowing grass since I’d done that as a job back in college for a student who started his own snow plowing and yard work business so I mowed hillsides of weeds with an industrial walk behind brush cutter while the gardens were still being developed after a plan by Garrett Eckbo Landscape for Living and learned about dahlias and water lilies that a new made friend named Riley grew while Ken talked at lunch about all the deals he could get at a bar off I-70 like new bikes and televisions lifted off cargo planes at Stapleton airport but he eventually became a private dick since he had a hand in nefarious activities and I was tempted to take up subterfuge like him I had once interviewed with the FBI after college because my mother lived next to the agent who would eventually head up the Colorado bureau but I tended to be too honest still Ken was a good guy who tried to keep me on through the winter but was forced to let me go.
The advisor who influenced me Telemachus more than any other masculine mortal deity post youth hired me as a grounds maintenance guy because I passed the owner’s personality test even though the big boss said I would never stay since I matriculated with a high score this also disappointed my mother I was there for nine years before leaving to pursue an advanced degree working as a dirtball laying sod green side up that’s an old guffaw and brooming carports and driving the Wayne sweeper we tagged True Grit through underground garages during the windy winter months making plans for gardens I would study all the city park beds for floral arrangements knowing a few guys from the botanic gardens who helped me with seedlings. Roger my Odysseus bought houses and traded up before he built his own raising horses becoming a rancher though he went to South High School and grew up in the city where he worked for an important man who started a luggage business named after Samson for strength who urged him to go to school but he preferred cars and horses like another brother-in-law but boss and he dodged the luggage business because he had to fire too many people to become the maintenance supervisor for a high rolling apartment complex on the border of east Denver Alameda and Monaco letting me run the flowers to sculpt the place into a Kew of annuals perennials flowering shrubs fostering a crew of young guys painting repairing faucets laying carpet cleaning pools mowing grass growing flowers doing it as part of a proud staff not privatized although the owner a conservative city councilman would eventually go that route. When I bought with a friend and my wife to be a house in the inner city as far as he was concerned since he was all about the range and suburbs he inspected he advised us wondering why we would want an old place built with river rocks and stucco an overgrown yard since he lived in the western suburbs and wanted space more than anything along with economic opportunity things that didn’t matter to us although the substantial urban acreage became my experimental station as I started to scape yards for people after hours but Roger’s assistance on maintenance at the house after we bought it and his welcoming attitude to my wife and son to ride his ponies affected me like a father’s support even though he had boys of his own who worked for me summers so I became a go between he could trust.
Finding replicants of my father allowed flexibility doubtless missing from familial relations encouraging me to explore all the options lines of work moving from gardening to horticulture to design to teaching to writing without the enforceful omnipotence of a man in my life who might look askance or worry or criticize or ignore my potential and my achievements and my ignominious defeats of courage or ambition instead the men just pay me and train me and gain allegiance through their leadership modeling advice orders while educating me learning the ropes mastering skills supervision management teaching students in turn. I moved from unskilled laborer albeit a college graduate to flower tender and garden design drafter and builder a business of my own to graduate school to matriculate become a designer under Roger’s eyeful watch. As a father he blessed me by being there.
Onto graduate school a young man finally cuts the umbilical, maybe with a mother it’s post high school when he adventures off to university and grows a goatee and studies philosophy much to her chagrin of Catholic principles although she divorced and put the boy in YMCA camp despite the nuns’ complaints it was what she could afford as daycare a single mother sacrificing a life for her son but for a father it’s delineating his direction a profession not gazing at his navel in a liberal arts college but hewing occupational foresight to push a young man to aspire to greatness though a degree in design only opened him up to yet more possibilities careers endeavors which he never imagined so the father may not have been pleased but his wife was the person that drove him to do this get another degree her mother denied her father the chance to work in movies he could have gone to Hollywood but they already were raising a family in Connecticut so she the new wife wasn’t denying her man anything in terms of dreams while she pursued her own of raising the perfect son and starting her own design business come an international corporation thirty years later.
One brother-in-law got stuck in my craw since his wife my sister and he asked if they could temporarily take up residence in the new old bungalow I had bought with friends as they were moving back to Denver from Rome, NY, after living in Italy for years he was repairing computers for the military and they were intent on getting back to Colorado so they moved in with their three kids the youngest my godson whom I had roadtripped to anoint many years before after my European Grand Tour and they set up housekeeping till they found a place of their own and my wife to be returned from her European sojourn she intended as a last hurrah before she got pregnant to hear of a family she had never met had already spent a few months in her house but Joe and Eileen were always good sorts and didn’t stay long and Joe helped me take down a few dead trees in the yard and only once did we bend a fence so he was a favored family member over the years even though one time at a yard party where it was raining and we were all huddled on the porch he referred to one of our tenants we had two small rock houses we rented out as a nigger and I told him fifteen years my senior never to never use that word again in my presence and he did not and we remained friends and he modeled aspects of fatherhood which I needed to witness since he had taken his family around the world always pursuing advancement but finally settled on the home space where the kids probably felt more comfortable and Eileen could be near her mother and sisters turning native they were.
Along the way her father my father-in-law represented another deputy filling my missing-in-action father’s shoes of the sheriff teaching me about construction putting up with me loving his daughter responsibly by having a job going back to school for more opportunities constantly improving the house and yard that was run down when we bought it become a gem in an urban environment that he came to appreciate albeit he had fled the blight of downtown Meriden and built his own house in the hills west of town to provide a better life for his wife what I was trying to do but his love for his wife was the most telling piece of our relationship he showed me what it meant though he sometimes got anxious caring for her he never let his love suffer which hasn’t been my best quality though he showed the way and I just need to adhere to the Maintenance of the Way. Mike was a talker and salesman and mason and did everything he could to provide the best for his ADD wife and designer daughter my wife and intellectual writer loaf of a son who his wife favored so he abided the son through countless travails of money begging but always cared for family who grew up taking care of his siblings because his mother had died and his papa was a gambler and drinker so he showed me a way of home making.
Landscape architecture growing from Olmsted’s vision for Central Park designing and building up from the land carving its natural aspect working from blueprints integrally involved fell away from this dual determination following the specialization compartmentalization of the architecture and construction and engineering modules but one man broke away from this paradigm and started a school where the twains would meet again so Walt at the Conway School became my mentor as I learned the design side of landscaping beyond the horticulture I had cultivated. Other men toured me through the business side of budgets government design services my boss on the college campus Dean not a real dean just his first name a Scandinavian I assume like Roger moved to Colorado from Wisconsin to facilitate the physical plant of this pioneering urban campus composed of three institutions seldom asked to cooperate beyond their fiefdoms of education now collaborating so the campus and the job parlayed my strengths of maintenance design scholarship tenuous boundaries Dean letting me figure it out innovate with computerized irrigation and organic fertilizers and nontoxic pesticides and perennial flower displays moving large trees out of construction zones to replant rather than timber them. When he became director of the campus I suffered under his adequate replacement who lacked the vision the renovation reincarnation of the physical plant slowing to mere maintenance egged me to break out fly away flee the father stand-ins. A career change ordained a new guru once rightfully invested as education secretary.
A father should signal be a signpost stand semiotically like the compass star the freeway sign the orange cones of construction zones showing the way around obstructions obstacles inherent hazards regarding changing life circumstances ambitions occupational inducements endeavors whereas the mother nurtures educates instructs the father calculates the odds so degreed in design later in life I ignored the guilded apprenticed rigors of drafting drawing before designing as a course through a firm so the career change which might have been avoided with a father’s tool and die pattern knowledge business sense only lasted a decade until another father is needed to lay the foundation for a new house of cards Rexford to the rescue as this tenderfoot teacher’s principal and guiding father lighthouse. The altar of the charter school movement instigated his investiture to found an urban campus advancing projects to integrate disciplines along the lines of Olmsted’s design teaching students how holistically the world’s warp and weft weave together enlisted me hired me to join the tent meeting of educational innovation he called on his disciples in the Puritan tradition to charge their lessons with emotion scholastic integrated devotion. When told to teach a compact course beyond my education in literature history theology landscape design suggested something I knew about not taught in schools Rexford thrilled to my proposal teaching students the recent history of the urban aboriginal performance art raconteurs the Denver Mudmen who bombed art fairs and malls around the city wearing loincloths and homemade masks deriving inspiration from New Guinea students took on the challenges to discover and dissect conceptual art making masks and performing at a school wide assembly scattering the mud that makes the nature that makes the world around the school. Rex didn’t guide but modeled and enthused, the benign father leader that I always needed.
So fathers their heralded role acclaimed as work steady providers men of the house rolling up their shirtsleeves for some one-on-one at the backyard hoop are fake news like the mother’s role reversal of nurturing emotional self preserving Pertelote to the father’s Chanticleer no longer rock whether they ever did since parents perennially make offspring into their own images which can scarcely be accomplished in union but more easily drawn from the single artist progenitor. Everyone searches for the parent who got away, who was lost to them, who abandoned or ignored or didn’t have the time or strength to inculcate a remedied response in their issue so why should I grieve after the invader sycophant who inseminated then eviscerated then terminated then eradicated memory never to glean again, or so I would hope but I signed up for another free trial on Ancestry and found not only the wife and three kids he abandoned before the war but no evidence of his stay in Denver for four years after the marriage license I dug up years ago only to find his residence in Colo Spgs and marriage to Mittie in the 1950s and their eventual removal to Lake Havasu where he died in 1980 and she survived into her nineties and only passed a few years ago without a trace of his Denver stay and my insemination and birthing and his disinterest and neglect and abandonment of another family. To search for a missing father implies someone misses him experiences loss acknowledges a broken link between who he is and whence he came but the child is father to the man not the father the child risen in her eyes the mother’s immaculate conception’s image of perfection. I found fathers to mentor coach employ befriend me in roles of son and father student and teacher gardener and designer worker and boss because Mother willed my destiny and fruition and actualization because I’d go a million miles for one of her smiles a woman who avoided the camera pushing me into the spotlight. Thanks Mammy, and all those men who fostered me.