When I look for the headwaters of love, for its source in my life, I always arrive back at my father.
Every other Saturday morning from when I was 13, when my parents got divorced until I left for college, my brother, sister and I would watch for him through the living room window. When he pulled into the driveway, we’d shout “Bye, Mom!” as we shut the front door and ran down the steps to his car.
Mainly what he wanted to do was have a long breakfast at a cafe with comfortable banquettes and bottomless coffee. And talk, except he would say “visit.” A lot of the time we fidgeted and complained about the restaurant (“Why can’t we go to McDonald’s?”). He would laugh and joke (and smoke) and sing little snatches of some song or other: “You are my Sunshine,” “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” or “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”
I always knew he loved me, whether he said the words or not. From his first enormous, all-enveloping hug, to the sad laughter at goodbye, he simply radiated love as pure as Gene Kelly swinging on a lamppost.
Maybe it was easier being a parent who didn’t have to clean up each night or make sure the homework was done. But mostly I felt he would have relished the opportunity. As it was, he struggled to find a way to teach us anything — to be what he thought a father should be. To not be a failure at that, too.
Like the time years before the divorce, when he caught me stealing a few nickels from my brother’s coin collection. He didn’t yell or get out his belt, but he looked at me with an expression that seemed to have a dent in it. Puzzled and surprised. As if he thought he was sure he knew me but couldn’t help wondering whether he’d missed something. Then he opened his wallet, took out a $5 bill (at a time when my allowance was 25 cents a week) and slid the banknote underneath the green cardboard coin album in the bottom drawer of my brother’s pine dresser. He pushed the drawer closed with his shin.
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“I want you to know that money is there. So next time, if there is a next time, you get the urge to steal something from your brother, you take this instead. If you’re going to steal, I’d much rather you steal from me.”
The way he said “steal” made me want to crawl under the bed. But he didn’t linger over it or bring it up again. By that afternoon he seemed to have forgotten all about it as he hit grounders to me in the backyard. I hustled extra-hard for every ball. I wanted so much to pound out that dent if I could.
Being a twice-a-month father meant he was always too eager to please. Even when we did things that really annoyed him, like bicker with one another or pick our noses, he couldn’t be a disciplinarian. We always had the terrible emasculating power to say we didn’t want to see him. He couldn’t risk that.
He was determined to stay in town so he could see us but struggled to find work. The construction company he had with my grandfather had gone bust about the same time as the marriage. So he took a job operating a huge crane at a scrap metal yard near the Tacoma railway station. On the end of the crane was a massive magnet strong enough to lift a car or two. He wielded that magnet like a surgeon’s scalpel, delicately filling and emptying barrels of scrap metal. The yard was as clean as a hospital operating room, so the laborers had nothing to do except drink coffee, play gin rummy and admire his work.
His skill, tenacity and humility were lessons in plain sight, but they went right over my head. Among the things that made no sense to me was his irrational generosity. Every day — literally every day — he would buy the same guy lunch down at Barnacle Bob’s cafe, where I washed dishes one summer. The guy never once offered to pay.And my father considered this a kind of challenge, a sort of experiment at the frontiers of some new area of scholarship: the etiology of selfishness, or maybe the epidemiology of ingratitude. But he had more than a clinical interest in his deadbeat lunch companion. He wanted somehow to cure him, to make him see. And in telling me about it, my father seemed to want me to affirm this philanthropic journey, maybe not quite fall in behind him on his long and thankless pilgrimage along the ancient, rubble-strewn Camino de Saint Robert de Barnacle, but at least acknowledge its spiritual worth.
I’m sure he felt like he was never in our lives.But I remember plenty of times he was there, all right.Once my old VW Beetle had a bad shock absorber. He said, “Sure we can fix that. I’ll get a new one and you bring the car over.” We jacked it up in the carport. Bookish, skinny and impractical me stood to one side as he pulled off the old shock absorber and held the new one in place.
“Now,” he said. “You tap it on with the back of the ax. Just give it one good knock.” And I swung the ax and hit him square on the thumb. God only knows how much it hurt. He just looked at me, then closed his eyes and said, “Maybe we should go inside for a minute.”
I wonder where that kind of love comes from. Love that is as long and as wide as the Nile. That nourishes everything it touches. Love that floods its banks at will. And when it storms, blows the dogs off their chains.
Burr Henly grew up in Tacoma and has written about architecture for Seattle Weekly. A graduate of Yale Law School, he lives in Sydney, Australia.
