I’ve been thinking about the odd way my father loved me.
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I’ve been thinking about the odd way my father loved me, and wondering how your father did - or didn’t - love you.
As I watch my son and son-in-law father their children, it’s as if they’ve read some manual on How to be a Proper Father that evidently wasn’t available when I was born. They spend one-on-one time with each child almost every day, they carefully encourage their educational and social development, the set age-appropriate and adjustable boundaries, and they bathe them in affection. None of these litter my memories of life with my dad.
When I think about how I was raised, I naturally focus on my own experience as my parents’ child. But to more fully understand my childhood, it’s also important to consider the personal and social forces that bruised, blessed, and thereby sculpted my parents, all of which affected how they loved me - or didn't.
So before I tell you more about how my father raised me, here are bits and pieces about his growing up which help me understand the ways in which he treated me.
He was born in 1906 in a Boston suburb to working-class immigrants from County Clare in the south of Ireland. His mother died when he was eleven, and his father quickly married a woman my father hated to the same degree he felt she hated him.
He left high school before graduating and enlisted in the Navy after World War One, but was soon discharged (somehow honorably) for drunken and disorderly conduct. He careened through his twenties at odd jobs around Lowell, Massachusetts, where he’d settled, and eventually got crushed by the unemployed poverty of the depression.
Wilshire Boulevard in 1930’s Los Angeles
Finally, in his mid-thirties, he hitchhiked to Los Angeles and joined his brother’s business, selling newspapers and magazines (and, on the side, booking bets on horse races) at their newsstand on the corner where Whitley Avenue dead-ends into Hollywood Boulevard.
I was born in 1941, his first and unexpected child, for whom he honorably married my mother. In the following twelve years, they had five more children, one a still-born twin of my eldest sister. Again, little money, too much drinking, gambling to supplement his meager newsstand income, all of which got worse as I moved into my teens. I learned early that I was physically and emotionally unsafe around him, so I kept my distance and instead clung with fierce devotion to my mother.
When I was nine years old, we moved into a rented house in Hollywood that was surrounded by the buildings of a large church. On my second afternoon in our new back yard, I heard balls bouncing on a hardwood floor. I discovered, ten feet from our back gate, the open door of a gymnasium and, sneaking a peek, saw a dozen teenage boys playing one-on-one or three-on-three basketball games at the several hoops on the edges and at each end of the gym.
A guy whom I remember now as Bill bounced a ball toward me and I took my first-ever shot at a basket, which he caught at its apex, two feet shy of the hoop. I was soon in love with basketball, perhaps because the gym was also a respite from the large house in which I lived with my mom and dad, my grandfather, my three sisters, my brother, a family friend who was down on her luck and, for a while, my aunt and uncle and their young son.
I escaped this chaos every day after school and every night after dinner, and soon got a jersey with a red number 10 on the back when I joined a team of ten-year-olds. The church’s youth director coaxed me to join these other gym rats not only for basketball but also for Sunday school classes, where I found a faith that led me eventually into the Christian ministry and now, as a psychotherapist, into a layman’s devotion to Jesus of Nazareth and into a very progressive Episcopal congregation we’ve been a part of for 40 years.
I was eventually captain of my high school team; we never won the L.A. City championship, but I compensated by falling in love with and eventually marrying the head cheer leader. By the time I graduated from college, I had spent as much time on basketball courts as I had in school classrooms.
It took me a long time to realize the connections between my father, basketball, and church. I recognized decades ago that my father got up early and stayed up late, working at whatever his current job or jobs were, to feed and clothe us and to find a new place to rent when we could no longer afford where we were living. I learned from him what became a pattern in my own life, and still is: get up early, grab the handles of the plow, dig in and get stuff done until, like the day, you’re worn out.
But it was years before I realized the other thing gift he gave me. The thing that pushed me through the back gate and into the open door of the church gym was my love of sports, which I inherited from him. From the time I could throw a baseball, he played catch with me. When I was five years old he bought me an overly expensive mitt that lasted me through high school. He took me to Hollywood Stars and Los Angeles Angels minor league baseball games, boxing and wrestling matches at the Hollywood Legion Stadium, and Rams football games at the L.A. Coliseum; by the time I was twelve I could read a racing form and would place my own bets with him when we went to Santa Anita or Hollywood Park on a Sunday afternoon.
Santa Anita Park in 1950’s
Only in the last few months of his life, when he was terminally ill, did I kiss him on the forehead and tell him I loved him; only after I did that did my dad tell me for the first time that he loved me too.
Sports were the way my father loved me as his child, so not surprisingly sports were where I first found my self-confidence, developed my earliest and in a few cases life-long friendships, and stepped into an unending stream of pleasure.
Hoosiers, 1986. Orion Pictures
My wife grins, shakes her head and leaves the room when she sees I’m once more watching the movie Hoosiers. It's set in 1954, two years before I started playing high-school basketball. It's stitched into my psyche not because it’s a great movie but because, each time I watch it, it reminds me of that church gym, our high-school’s gym, the girl who cheered me on there, and all the gyms I’ve played in since.
But more, it reminds me of my dad. He died in the mid-1970s, but every time I'm in a gym or watching a basketball game, I’m reminded that his love of sports rubbed off on me and lives in me still, the most tangible of his love’s legacies.
That's what I've been thinking - what was your relationship like with your father?
Blessings,
– Rick