Remembering My Father

I was helping select photographs for my father’s funeral when I found a picture from Christmas Eve.

I was five or six years old.

We always opened family presents on Christmas Eve.

The next morning we would drive to Mangum.

In the photograph, I am sitting on green shag carpet in front of an enormous box containing a mountain tunnel for my HO-scale trains.

At least that’s how I remember it.

Looking back, it was probably much smaller.

Memory has a habit of scaling things to fit the age we were when we experienced them.

The room glows with that particular shade of yellow that seems to exist only in photographs from the late seventies.

The Christmas tree is covered in bubble lights.

The kind with little glass tubes that looked like they were boiling.

I could stare at them for hours.

Standing beside the box is my father.

Smiling.

Probably wearing one of the western shirts he seemed to own forever.

What caught me off guard was not the memory.

It was his age.

Looking at the photograph, I realized he was only in his mid-thirties.

Younger than I am today by nearly twenty years.

For a moment, the larger-than-life figure from my childhood disappeared.

In his place was a kid with a kid.

When you’re young, your parents seem permanent.

They seem older than everyone.

Wiser than everyone.

Capable of handling anything.

You don’t see the uncertainty.

You don’t see the moments where they’re making it up as they go.

You only see your parents.

Years later, looking through those photographs, I saw something different.

I saw a young man trying to build a life.

A young husband.

A young father.

A young man carrying responsibilities that probably felt just as overwhelming as the ones I carry today.

The photograph brought back another memory.

That same green shag carpet is how my family discovered I was color blind.

I spent countless hours sitting in front of our console television building with LEGO bricks.

My father spent countless hours stepping on them.

The problem was that many of the red pieces disappeared into the carpet.

He could see them.

I couldn’t.

Eventually everyone realized we were not seeing the same thing.

For years, that story was simply one of those family stories people tell and laugh about.

Now I think about it differently.

My father wasn’t just raising a son.

He was discovering who that son was.

That realization has returned to me often since getting sober.

It appears in unexpected places.

A few weeks ago, standing in a vote center during the election, I found myself thinking how much he would have enjoyed it.

Not the politics.

The process.

The sense of purpose.

The feeling of being part of something larger than himself.

That was one of the things he loved about the Army.

It was one of the things he loved about Freemasonry.

The break room too.

The stories.

The laughter.

The way complete strangers became a team by the end of the week.

By the end of the election, I realized I felt more connected to some of those people than I had to people I’d known for years.

I’ve thought about him at recovery meetings too.

Not because he attended them.

Because I think he would have appreciated the fellowship.

The honesty.

The humor.

The way people show up for one another.

I even found myself thinking about him while watching the final episode of Euphoria.

The western imagery reminded me of the kinds of stories he loved.

The older I get, the more often this happens.

I encounter a place, a conversation, or a story and immediately know what he would have thought about it.

Not because he is here.

Because I knew him.

When I was a child, my father seemed impossibly large.

Now I look at those photographs and see someone younger than I am today.

The strange thing is that he does not seem smaller.

He seems more impressive.

Not because he had all the answers.

Because he carried the responsibility anyway.

Because he showed up anyway.

Because he raised a child while still figuring out life himself.

I think about that Christmas Eve photograph often.

The older I get, the younger he seems.

At some point, you stop looking up at your parents and start looking across at them.

Not as parents.

As people.