I miss my late father most of all around this time of year.
He died right before Thanksgiving 1985, when I was 17. It’s odd in a way that I miss my father. I think a mixture of the idealized recollection of my father along with the loss of any chance to have an adult relationship with him. My dad was not easy guy to know. He worked and then he came home to watch TV. I knew my father in the last 17 years of his life.
As my siblings sometimes say to me, the father they had was not the father I had. My father made sacrifices that made life harder on him. He did not have to send all of his children to Catholic school. As he aged, the politics and the ebb and flow of corporate America in the 1970s/1980s gave him a harder path to navigate in order to make sales. The burden placed on him, as the sole wage earner, so that my mother could be home with the children, was a tough one I imagine. I look back at all he and my mother did for us and I marvel. Add to all that stress and responsibility, the fact that 10 days before I was born, my brother Arthur Kevin O’Shea Jr (yep, named after my father) died of a brain tumor at the age of 14 and if you’re me, you start to understand why my father was emotionally detached and distant.As the authoritarian figure in the family, he and I never connected. I never once went to a baseball game with my father. Don’t get me wrong. My parents loved me. It was just assumed they loved me and never voiced directly. Food on the table, roof over the head is the greatest display of love by the greatest generation. And I respect that.
Looking back, my father and I connected really well once and it was because of a David Lee Roth song. No really. In 1985 my father was in (what was ultimately the final year of) forced retirement due to his compromised health after suffering congestive heart failure in 1981. I thought he was taking a nap one summer afternoon as I was walking down the hall and singing part of Roth’s 1985 cover of Louis Prima’s Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody. Suddenly I heard my father singing the same song, but much better. I had never heard of Prima before (and honestly my father did not explain he originally did that particular arrangement), but my father pointed out the song had been popular when he was younger.
My father never spoke of his youth, he never spoke of his days in the military during World War II, he never spoke of meeting my mother, or courting her. My father was not a talker. He was not a storyteller to a great extent. He saved his words for the workday, when he had to sell and speak for a living. So to get this slim connection to my father’s past, to know a song he liked and that I liked. A slim shared connection.
I hope no one reads this as an unflattering recollection of my father. Far from it. At the age of 40, I have a far better grasp and appreciation of what my father was emotionally and intellectually capable of giving me. My father always gave his all and tried his best. He and my mother instilled in me a moral clarity and compassion that has served me well. My father was the best any child could ask for, no doubt.
My son, who is nine, benefits from the lack of stories my father told me. Now I tell my son too many stories about myself. I daresay sometimes I bore my son with the number of stories I tell him. But I hope someday he’ll appreciate the tales.
I know he appreciates one lesson I took from connecting with my father. Since he was a baby in the car seat, I have played music for Colin. I try to get him to appreciate the history of pop music. For example, when Rascal Flatts did a cover of Tom Cochrane‘s Life is a Highway for the Cars soundtrack, I made sure he was aware of the original version. With time, he enjoyed the harmonica solo from the original almost as much as the guitar solo in the cover version. I share music and hopefully a great deal more with my son.
The other day, my son was listening to a song in the car. And out of nowhere, he said to me: “Just listen to that drumline.” It was not a big connection, per se. But it was a moment that I expect I will always cherish. A good life is full of little moments, I’ve come to realize. Fail to cherish them and it’s a blown opportunity.
This post started out as a request from my son to write about him. I don’t think either of us expected it to be more about a post about my father. But my son indirectly benefits (and indirectly exists) because of my father, so I think he’ll be OK with this blog post anyway.
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