My Father

I never really knew my father, not in the way a son should know his father. I knew who he was and what he stood for, I knew what he looked like, how his voice sounded and what he did for a living. But, I never really knew my father as a man. Who he really was inside. He died from lung cancer when I was ten year old. I never got to enjoy things that most boys got to enjoy with their fathers.

I never had him teach me how to play baseball or fix a car or how to ask a girl on a date. Oh sure, I had other family members teach me these things, but I still feel like I was somehow cheated out of a piece of my life that I will never get back. Those precious memories that stay with a person for the rest of their life. Although I never really knew him, I miss him. I miss the moments we did spend together. The times we built kites together and flew them in the playlot at Wm. P. Gray Elmentary School. The times we went to the movies in downtown Chicago on my half days of school. How he would always take me to the Treasure Chest Magic Shop and tell me I could get one magic trick. How he would say to choose carefully as if it were an important world changing descision. Looking back, maybe the magic mexican jumping beans were not the greatest choice. I can still remember him taking me to his work - a police station and how I sat in awe looking at the jail cells. I remember his bushy eyebrows that felt like little wires. I remember all the silly little things that really don't matter, but to me somehow they do. Maybe because that is all I have, are those silly little memories.

When my father passed away in 1969 I was never allowed to see him in the hospital, nor was I allowed to go to his funeral. After all I was only ten years old and my mother said I was a sensitve child. She was probably right, maybe it was better for me to remember him the way he was in my memory and not see him in that condition.

This is just something I wanted to get off my chest and share with everyone. Remember your father and remember you can lose him or your mother at any time without warning. Keep the relationship there for the both of you. Father's take care of your bodies, you have a responsibility out there.. your child.