My father…

Posted on by

Back when M*A*S*H was still on the air and my father was still alive, there was one show where Hawkeye spent the entire episode trying to get a telephone call through to his father in Crabapple Cove, Maine. If I remember correctly, the old man was about to undergo major surgery, and Hawkeye (a surgeon who knew just how badly surgeries could go wrong) was terrified that his father might not survive. He finally gets through to Crabapple Cove and talks to his father a bit, but when it’s time to hang up, Hawkeye will not let his father go until he can say ‘Dad, I love you.’

My relationship with my father had been contentious most of my life, and I couldn’t tell you the last time a word of endearment had passed between us, but in sobriety I was trying my best to make amends, and Hawkeye’s words inspired me. We didn’t talk often (the show went off the air in 1983, when long-distance telephone calls still cost a lot of money) but whenever we did, I would not get off the ’phone until I said the words ‘Dad, I love you.’

At first, he was embarrassed, and he’d mumble ‘Uh… God loves you,’ but I persisted.

After a while, he could say ‘We love you,’ but I didn’t quit.

Finally came the day he was able to say it back to me: ‘I love you.’

I’m crying as I write this. Yeah, I’m a big softy who cries at movies and Kodak commercials — so, sue me! 😆 — but I’m crying just thinking about how much our relationship was changed by those three little words. He became my Dad again — a title I hadn’t accorded him in over a decade — and we grew closer and closer.

My father died in February of 1997 — the cigarettes he’d smoked his entire adult life finally caught up with him, and robbed us of precious years — but we had nineteen years more than we would have had, if not for AA’s Ninth Step and a sitcom set in a war zone.

My last words to him were ‘Dad, I love you.’ I’ll let you guess what his last words to me were. 😎

So yes, say it now, say it often, say it to those who matter most in your life, and never quit saying it.

I love you.

My father served as a navigator in the Army Air Corps during World War II. Here he is on a military-issue Cushman scooter at an airfield in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Eight years later he had married my mother, and they began doing their bit to increase the postwar Baby Boom. The infant in arms is my older brother, Lee.
Forty years later, 1 May 1993, I got to take my father and younger brother to an antique motorcycle show in Hanford, California, the day of my younger sister’s wedding. He’s standing beside an Indian like the one he rode after the war. He told us he won the money for the Indian playing poker. and I don’t doubt that. Author Nelson Algren, in his 1956 novel, A Walk on the Wild Side, wrote ‘Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are greater than your own.’ Dunno about the rest 🤷‍♀️ but my father’s nickname was ‘Doc’, and he had one of the greatest poker faces you could ever imagine! 😎
Here’s my father seated on a Cushman scooter like the one he rode in the service. He stopped riding before us kids came along, but he never got over his love for motorcycles. It was something we shared during those happy years together.
There’s my Dad on his Cushman, and me on my shovelhead fifty years later, at Shiprock, New Mexico. I didn’t see it at the time, but a few years after the Shiprock photo was taken I realized how alike we sat our mounts. He’s been gone for twenty-six years, and I miss him.