Shine A Light On Me

There are times in my life when I think of how closed off and hard to reach my dad was. As I begin to age and see the world differently as an adult, I can now consider what my dad must have been going through secretly. From the weight of being in charge of our lives and knowing the world was cruel, it must have been tiring. He never wanted to show fear or weakness to us. As an adult, you’re not allowed to, especially for men.

As I aged, I got the feeling that he feared the gaze of my eyes that would see all the mistakes he’d made. It seemed like he was scared to let me down, to see the things he couldn’t change. He was stuck between all his insecurities, responsibilities, fears and regrets while still trying to be better than where he had come from. I only wish it hadn’t taken his death for me to see him as a fully dimensional person. During my first year teaching while driving all those early mornings in the dark, alone and tired suddenly gave me new perspectives. I thought of him making those endless shift work drives for forty years, more exhausted than I’ll ever know. Everyday he got up into that darkness for us.

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In the last decade of my life there were a few moments I got to see my dad, with age, become wistful about things he probably never expected to miss. Once when I was visiting home in my twenties, he revealed being in his room at night and swearing he heard me and my sister talking and laughing. “It sounded real, I could have sworn it was. I guess that’s what my brain wanted to hear.” It was out of character for him, moments that struck me with surprise. It made me sad that he never shared more. Perhaps he also didn’t foresee the small things he would miss with time either.

Only now begin to comprehend the unyielding torture of being a parent and knowing your child is somewhere you can’t always see and how truly dizzying that must feel. He was always so overprotective, to an absurd degree but now I see why. I can’t begin to imagine the weight of protecting something you love more than anything in the world, forever. Famously, he didn’t like letting me and my sister spend the night at other people’s houses when we were little. After forcing me to stay home from one sleepover invitation he told my mom, “I don’t care if she hates me for a few days or weeks. I’d rather that, instead of living the rest of my life knowing something bad happened to her.” 

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25 years later when I was in my mid twenties, my dad still had the van. It was worn down and the brakes barely worked, even when slamming on them. My dad was not one to toss anything easily aside. He made sure to get as much mileage as possible out of anything he owned and took great care of all our cars. But finally, he had come to the conclusion that the van had to retire.

One Christmas while my sister and I were there, some guys came to the door offering to buy it. My dad said, “Hey man it still works” and the guys exclaimed in disbelief, “you still drive it?” Eventually he had it taken away. Retelling the event of that day to us he said he “shed some tears” as he watched it go, in his typical emotionless way. My sister and I laughed, assuming he was joking. With a lot of time, I realized he probably wasn’t.

When I was living in an apartment with Jon I would occasionally find an email from my dad. Most of them were forwarded warnings about heat stroke, grease fires or recalled shoes that made some women’s feet peel. If he ever typed anything, it would be in all caps and consisted of no more than 3 or 4 lines.

The all time strangest email I ever received from anyone in my life, was from my dad. One day I opened up the email entitled, “HERE’S LOOKIN AT YOU KID.” It didn’t contain any other words or messages but a single picture. I clicked on this picture and tried to understand what I was seeing. It seemed to be a pair of animal eyeballs, staring back at me, laying on some metal utility box with grass in the background. For minutes I stared at this strange and vaguely threatening photo in horrified confusion. I asked Jon to look and he also could only guess that it was definitely a pair of animal eyes… on some metal utility box.

So I called my dad and inquired, “what the heck is this picture of?” He worked at a power plant in Pasadena. There was a vast amount of field surrounding the campus. He’d seen all kinds of stuff out there over the decades from nutro rats and menacing snakes that could stand up to see you better. My dad should have worked in the study of animals considering it was his other main obsession next to space.

 This was the same man who back in the 80’s studied birds so closely he proudly explained how he’d watch them take old dried up fries and put them in puddles of water for a minute before eating them. He was so thrilled by these observations. There were many afternoons of animal documentaries with horrifying inevitable deaths that I loathed. He always said, “if you want to know people and about the world, watch animals.” He was always excited to learn. So it made sense when my dad proceeded to tell me how and why he took that picture. 

He was watching some giant bird taking fish from a nearby pond. He watched the bird neatly dissect this fish, like a butcher. He watched as it meticulously picked it apart and ate it. When the bird was done and gone my dad went over to the site of the feast for closer inspection. He found that the bird had eaten everything, with the exception of two things. 

My dad saw what appeared to be a long vein extracted, and at each of its ends, an eye. It looked like those old toys called Clackers. With a pen in his jacket, he picked up the string of eyes and placed it on a utility box to study. It almost didn’t seem real, especially from a picture. The bird had gone through so much trouble, with surgical precision and left behind the eyes. My dad was enthralled with this discovery. He couldn’t figure out why the bird would go through so much trouble to not eat that part. This was so many years ago. I wish I had saved that email that seemed to encompass all his humor.