Since I spent time whining about the book that I didn’t like, I figured I should talk about the one I’m reading now, which I like very much. It’s called “Why Girls are Weird” by Pamela Ribon, and it’s way more like the type of chick-lit I’m partial to. To which I’m partial. Whatever. It’s sweet and funny with just a little bit of very mild smut. I’ve laughed out loud many times, and oh, did I cry when the lead character’s (Anna) dad died.
Specifically there was a passage where Anna lamented that she didn’t really her know her dad, and he didn’t really know her. They mostly communicated through her mom. That’s hits so close to home for me.
When I made my Mother’s Day call this morning, my dad just handed the phone to my mom, without even picking up to say hello. It was understandable today, I guess. I imagine my mom just hands the phone to him when I call on his birthday or Father’s Day. Normally when I call, if my dad answers we talk about the weather for a couple of minutes, and maybe I’ll tell him stories from work, then he says, “I’ll get your mother.” I don’t ask for her– he just hands me off. It makes me sad when I think about it. It’s not that I think he doesn’t want to talk to me. It’s that he thinks I don’t want to talk to him, that I’d rather talk to my mom. He’s certain that I’d never call just to talk to him, and I wish he didn’t think that way.
The reality is that he’s right that I don’t call to talk to him. Not that I don’t want to talk to him, it’s just that I can only talk so much about the weather, you know?
The further reality is that there’s a lot we don’t know about each other. I know the basics. He likes John Wayne movies, and his favorite one is The Quiet Man. He worked hard to take care of his family, doing a job he didn’t like, but it paid the bills and kept us comfortable. I don’t know what he wished he had done for a career. I know he traveled the world when he was in the Army, but I don’t know any of his stories from that time.
I do know that we’re alike in many ways. We both love cashews, we sing all the time, we’re sometimes quiet observers. We keep a lot inside. I have his eyes, his nose, his big toe.
We’re very different, too. He doesn’t swear, I’m much sillier than he is, we’re political opposites.
We’ve never fought. He yelled at me once in my life. It was only a few years ago when it happened, and I had to fight back tears, because he had never yelled at me before, and I didn’t know what to do with it, how to react.
Shit, this was supposed to be about a book, and if it wandered off subject, it probably should have been about my mom on this day. Oh, that’s right. The book made me think about my dad. That’s how I got here.
I get to see my parents in a few days. Maybe I’ll strike up a conversation with him about his formative years, get to know him before one day, hopefully in the far distant future, I receive That Call and end up regretting how little I really knew about him.
