Go Hug Your Father
For most of my childhood, I viewed my dad as stone behind an office door. A kind, comforting stone, like a moss-covered boulder you meet in the woods — but stone, nonetheless. My mother regularly urged my sister and I to “go kiss your father” or “go hug your father,” if he had a bad day, or really, any day at all. She’d whisper these refrains in Spanish and English, hoping he’d believe the idea originated from us. I wondered why it was appropriate to show affection to someone I barely knew. Still, the practice became a ritual I dutifully participated in á la “honor thy father and mother.” That deep Catholic shit.
On quiet weekends or holidays during my high school years, dad would appear suddenly and suggest we “go for a drive.” On these drives along River Road, the smell of cigarette smoke mixed with leather and cheap air-freshener thick in the air, he posed questions like, “Have I been a good father?” His inquiries always felt genuine — his eyes big, brown, and searching — but nevertheless difficult to navigate as a fifteen year old. Akin to asking the point guard the results of the game at halftime. You likely have an idea, but it’s difficult to give an accurate response without playing out the entire game.
Yet now that the game’s played out, I think I’d say yes.
An only child, the product of a one-way marriage, my father yearned so deeply to be seen. My paternal grandfather — “drunk, womanizer, sin vergüenza,” to quote my mother — had no time for his bookish son, and so, my father had no words for him, either — at least none he shared with me. Though I imagine “good father” would never make the list. My dad spent his life wading in this pool of sadness, compounded, I believe, by the sorrow that dripped from his mother, passed to her from a father who stepped before a train and cemented by a husband who never wanted her beyond their first night.
On my last day before moving to New York for graduate school, I hosted a pool party in my parents’ backyard. As we blasted music, splashed and laughed with beers in hand, I noticed my father, a slight smile on his face as he peered at the group of us from the top window of the French doors. We gestured wildly, beckoned for him to join us outside, but he disappeared into the house instead.
Years later, a friend commented on this memory. She too remembered his smile through the window that day. Adorable, she called it. I smiled politely, secretly burning with irritation, and rerouted the conversation.
My dad longed to ride horses, sail boats, adventure across the world and live a big, boisterous life. When really, he lived a quiet one: the “good immigrant,” a man who trusted, and worked, and played by the rules. Every Father’s Day, birthday, Christmas, another object or image of a sailboat or horse materialized. Could he become the cowboy, the sailor, the hero, if he surrounded himself with these artifacts?
The year before my parents moved from my hometown, I garnered a fancy full-time job and splurged on Christmas presents. I bought my Dad sailing lessons at the Yacht Club and felt incredibly pleased with myself. Despite my best efforts and maybe irrational hope, he never took the lessons. At the bottom of myself, I could have predicted as much. Was he too scared of failure? Too sad? After all, barely any time had passed since the university failed to renew his contract — the well-mannered Southern way of firing an employee of fifteen years. Who wants a psychiatrist who needs a psychiatrist? He tumbled further and further away from us. A man I barely knew, suddenly unrecognizable from an image I could hardly trace to begin with.
My father was different from most fathers, at least according to all the cards in the Father’s Day aisle. He didn’t like to grill, or fix things, or drink beers with buddies — he didn’t have any buddies at all, it seemed. Where were his friends? Had they vanished? He must have had them once, I remember thinking, in high school.
The summer before he died, we took a strange vacation to Galveston with my parents. Exhausted from our New York lives, my wife, then fiancée, and I longed to relax in a big way. My father had different plans. He mapped out every day as he never had during our childhood trips — jam packed with boat tours, museums, seafood restaurants, jet-ski adventures — as if he could make up for every speck of lost time here, now, all in the span of five days.
More than anything, though, he wanted to fly a kite — as far as I knew, an entirely new aspiration. Nevertheless, we popped into a beachside store full of them. More kites than I had ever seen; the sharp smell of plastic dizzying. Sometimes my father had a real boyishness about him; at times it scared me, and at others, amused me. That day, I relished the way his eyes pored over the colorful array of kites that covered every inch of the store. Hanging from the ceiling, lining the walls, layers and layers of them, many hidden behind others. Massive and tiny, box kites, delta kites, diamond kites, a whole menagerie of animal-shaped kites, some with wings, others with tails and streamers in every color imaginable. Of all the options in the store, he chose an unimposing medium-sized delta kite — yellow, orange, purple, dusty blue, and green — with a strong black crown and a long tail packaged and ready for assembly.
Every morning during this trip, he woke up at five and waited for us poolside. His free coffee in hand and a Styrofoam bowl of fruit and pastries set up alongside his iPad on the table before him. We could spot him there from our room. Sometimes a swimmer did laps nearby, but mostly he remained the sole visitor at that early hour. How many times I’ve wished I woke up that extra hour earlier each day so that I could have shared those moments with him. But no, I teased him for his sunrise wake up calls and urged him to let us sleep, the necessary shake off of our hectic lives. We were exhausted — but maybe we always would be.
On the morning of our last full day in town, however, I agreed to wake before dawn. The plan: my father and I would ferry the kite down to the shoreline and lift the rainbow toy into the sky. We journeyed to the sand together as the sun lifted its head among the clouds. The wind whipped our hair into strange parts and the waves crashed like applause into the sand.
I ran with the kite to pick up wind and soon realized he could not follow. His knee would not cooperate — a pain that developed over the course of the last several months. He stopped in his tracks and massaged his leg, urging me to go on. I felt ever more determined to push the kite into flight. I ran a jagged line into the sand once more and released the string in my wake. At last, the stingray-shaped fabric with its colorful tail sailed through the air. I caught my father’s smile from many feet down the beach; a smile like the one through the French doors all those years before.
I wonder now if flying that silly kite was the best embrace I could have given him.
