Fear, Fathers, and Books On Tape

An excerpt from a future memoir

by Skyler Fike

“Hey, son. I want to share something with you. Take a look…”

Contact Joyce Meyer about possible partnership it read. Or something along those lines.

“I’m going to be getting in touch with some people who can get me connected to her. I think I might even be able to open for her at one of her events. This could really get things moving for me. But keep this on the hush hush.”

As I sat in the passenger seat heading north on Coit Road, I read the lines myself. This goal was one of many on the page, many things never to be accomplished or achieved. There were tons of these pages too; they lined the countless journals of eternal optimism crafted with grand inspiration over years and years and years.

My mother, who divorced my father a long time ago, calls my father “the most inspired man who ever lived” which was usually followed by the sour caveat sounding something like “but he never did anything about it.” To this day she will still admit, “your father has great ideas, son”, but she still holds to the discontent from never seeing any real follow through.

I’ll give it to her, he is inspired. And eternally optimistic. Maybe too much at times. But this is all not entirely fair. There was a day in which my father did work very hard. He wasn’t around terribly often since he did a lot of traveling, but nonetheless he was a good man, and he worked hard. And traveling or not, he loved his children well, as well as he could anyway. But something happened along the way, something that incited in him a kind of fear, a fear that disabled him from barreling forward confidently with dreams and ideas.

Whether or not this was conceived as a result of the divorce is beyond me, but it makes sense. A man can become a wonderful, passionate creature when he’s been given a woman who supports and believes in him. My mother, too, is a good woman, but whether or not she believed in my father is another story. Regardless, she was tired. My dad was gone. My mother drank. My parents divorced.

I’m not sure if it was before or after the divorce (probably before) when my father started to collect rows and rows of books-on-tape. Not the kind of books on tape you really want to listen to, though. Inspirational, motivational, self-help books. What was worse was the constant quoting and sharing of tidbits of information from these wretched plastic rectangles. Euphemisms and one-liners riddled my brain for years as I try to connect the dots between an inspired man and the words he spoke.

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Short Assignment No. 3 for WELD Writer’s Club. A small excerpt from what will be a longer memoir in the future.