2010 marks the 100th birthday of my dad (1910-1992). He checked out right before Clinton was elected. Dad would have LOVED Clinton. Unfortunately, dad and I never got around to having adult conversations about presidential blowjobs and such, but I'm sure he would have been amused. The Bush administration would have killed him, I'm sure. I like to believe that my dad would have taken to technology. He predicted the Internet in a way. He told me once that I'd be able to listen to any radio station in the world and that I'd someday carry a box that would tell me anything I needed to know. He predicted the end of paper maps and newspapers, too. Still on Dad's list: the end of white people. The end of food as we know it. Wars over water.
Dad was a little too ahead of his time. He had all the scars of a depression kid but was also extremely liberal. He enlisted in WWII even though he didn't have to because he "didn't want to miss the show." Indeed, he claimed the war to be the most fun he ever had in his life. He majored in physics at Tulane but spent his life in rote business jobs. He worked for Bugsy Siegel in LA briefly during the '50s. He sired, 34 years apart, two oddball children. Indeed, we are the end of dad's line, as Older Brother does not have kids and I shall not either.
His first wife was 12 years his senior, his second 35 years his junior. He was the youngest of 13 kids in a large Catholic French-Canadian clan. They owned a pharmacy in Waterville, Maine, where my father worked until he made his Maine jailbreak (seriously, Maine: you're creepy as hell and every time I visit you I feel the ghosts of my ancestors) when he got accepted to Tulane. A priest messed with him; he became a lifelong atheist and raised me to be one as well. As such, in our conversations about his inevitable death (we talked about this when I was maybe 8. Probably fucked me up but at least he was honest) he told me that when someone dies, they are dead. They are gone. They live on in the memories of others and then when those people die, you're gone. You get a Warhol 15 here in the universe and that's it. So when people suggest my dad is in heaven, I get kind of pissy. No he's not. He's nowhere. He's just dead.
The things you say to 8-yr-olds tend to stick.
My memories of him include his hatred of Reagan. He often yelled at the TV, "you're an idiot and you weren't even a good actor!" He also ate a lot of Le Menu frozen dinners and kept the hard plastic plates.
He got a little scary towards the end of his life. He refused to bathe and he was relentlessly negative about everything. I was a teenager going through my own shit, and my old daddy made me very angry. Having an elderly father in your teens is enough psychic abuse; having one who told you that life is shit is something else. He was lonely and frustrated, though. He didn't want to miss the big show but he didn't want to be in his old body anymore. He lamented often that he wished he could have his brain moved to a younger man's body.
I think that you're either more your mother's child or more your father's child, and I'm definitely more my father's. We look alike and in the short amount of time we had together, he managed to transplant his personality onto me. I suppose that in the great cosmic jumble, there was something about George Daviau that had to live on into the 21st century and I was plucked from the ether to complete his work. I think it was irresponsible of him to take part in having me in the first place--he didn't want to, he knew he was too old, but he loved my mom and couldn't say no.
He didn't fit into society and neither do I. I share his disappointment and frustration with the world and feel helpless to change it. He died because he knew there was nothing to look forward to. He stopped returning my phone calls a few weeks before he died. That really hurt me but at the time, I could see he was finally sparing me from the harsh realities of life. He abandoned me to my crazy mother, leaving me enough money to go to one of those Seven Sister schools we had talked about. "Vassar's coed now, but you could always go to Smith...I think that one's still all women."
I miss him so much.
Posted by Zerd at January 12, 2010 12:06 PM