Happy Birthday, Dad

Today would have been my father's 91st birthday.

Dad was quiet. He was always smiling and pleasant to neighbors and customers. He taught adult Sunday school and for many years was a big part of our church's lay ministry. He belonged to the Masons, the Gideons, and the Westinghouse Square Club. He fixed our cars and he loved to travel. He worked three jobs at one point, selling insurance, driving a delivery truck and working as a security guard at a retirement home.

Dad was a battering ram. If that seems to contradict the man above, it may or may not. He could draw blood with his silence. He punished us time and time again by his withdrawal. There was a rage that simmered beneath the surface of the smile he gave to others, a rage that was reserved strictly for us. His words spoke of rules and behavior and discipline; his existence spoke of war.

My father was a man conflicted. He existed with one foot in religion -- a true legalist if there ever was one -- and the other in flesh and excess. He studied the racing forms with as much zeal as he studied the Scriptures. He worked to exhaustion and gambled the fruits away. He gave us piggyback rides and took us ice skating, and then he didn't. He made sure we went to church and got a great education, and then he didn't. Inconsistency and duplicity were his most reliable qualities. He wanted riches, worldly or otherwise; they eluded him. He wanted a perfect life, but had never properly identified the one he'd been given.

I wrestled a great many years with this contradiction I called "Dad." That battle left me feeling as schizophrenic as he must have felt. It also helped me understand. I know my father is with Jesus; he believed in Jesus and His work at the cross, and taught it to anyone who would listen. That may have been part of his pursuit, that by seeing it take root in others it might also take root and grow new life in him. Every encounter my father had was a way of getting something for himself. An imperfect being, as are we all. His battle left him never truly happy and never truly free. At least in this world.

And that is the lesson of my father's existence: life is about relationship. The moment you choose to exist alone, you die. It's hard to imagine what he would have been like at the age of ninety-one; but I suppose the best indicator is his condition the last time I saw him. He was frail and appeared tired. He once again pushed me away. Even in his last moments he would not fight to live.

Happy birthday in Heaven, Dad.