My dad was in his forties the first time I saw him cry. Jack Buck, the favorite baseball announcer he’d faithfully listened to since he was a child, had died. As I quietly watched him from across the room, it was impossible to discern whether his tears were for the broadcaster he never actually knew or the father whose absence created a void that Buck’s comforting voice on the radio helped fill.
It would be years until I saw him cry again, and once more the occasion was the loss of a surrogate father. My maternal grandpa, the man who’d been so important to me, had been in my father’s life since he was a teenager. Though they couldn’t have been more different — my dad was a jock, a hunter, a “goy,” as Papa called him, and a man who prided himself on cutting his own yard and changing his own oil, things Papa paid other men to do for him — they couldn’t have loved each other more.
For months after Papa’s death his eyes would shine with tears, his voice strangled as he tried to talk about his father-in-law. “He was the closest thing I had to a dad,” he said simply. “He was there for everything. He watched me grow up.” All the things about Papa that he used to complain about, like his constant channel-changing and daily phone calls, were irritations he immediately missed.
Father’s Day was an odd occasion in my formative years because we made presents for Dad at school, and Mom took us to pick out gifts and cards, but it was never a day my father seemed to enjoy. He turned distant and snappish, when normally he was jovial on weekends. My mother reminded us not to take it personally: “It’s a day when he misses his dad,” she said. Dad never spoke about his father and my brother and I knew better than to ask.
The story of my grandfather’s premature death came into sharper focus gradually, and only once we were older. It wasn’t something kids could understand, my parents thought, and they weren’t incorrect. It took my dad a long time as an adult to begin to understand it himself, though he was in his late teens when it happened. As I learned more about his father, a brilliant but troubled man who flew spectacularly off the rails, almost in slow-motion, for years before his death, I began to reconsider every opinion I’d ever held about my dad.
Two of his qualities that always bothered me the most, his eagerness to please (even when it was a fool’s errand) and the crushing disappointment that haunted him when he felt he’d failed, began to make sense. When I met Crankenstein, who grew up in a similar environment with a father who shared many of my grandfather’s same issues, I gained a greater insight into the stress my father lived with for most of his early life and how difficult it is to shake free of it.
But there were other, more important patterns he broke, which I never fully appreciated until I met my father-in-law, whose dad battled many of the same demons as my grandfather. My father-in-law’s response to it was to emulate the parent he despised. My dad’s response was to do everything differently. He didn’t want his kids to share his scars.
My father got a raw deal as a young man, losing his dad and having to put his own dreams on hold to assume the responsibilities of an adult. But despite his terminal case of people-pleasing, he was willing to step up to the plate and make tough decisions when my mother couldn’t. He’s the one who authorized the risky childhood operations my mother was afraid would be botched, procedures that gave me a new life.
On several occasions in my twenties and early thirties, he tried to talk sense into me about my then-partner. “She’s a pig-headed, ignorant know-it-all,” he warned. “You’ll drive yourself crazy trying to build a life with someone like that.” He didn’t know the half of it. Much later I learned that everyone in my family had felt the same way, but he was the only one with the balls to (uncharacteristically) risk rancor by telling me. And when I ignored him, he accepted it and continued treating her with kindness.
He immediately approved of Crankenstein, with whom he shares a goofy bond — they exchange bear memes (about bears found in nature, sadly, and not leather bars) — but a deeper bond, too, rooted in more complicated things. They know what it’s like to have shitty fathers, something I never experienced. “I love your dad,” she often tells me after getting a message from him, and I know that one day she’ll cry for him the way he cried for Papa.
Now he’s a grandpa himself but he’s forever fixed in my memory as the wiry, baby-faced 20-something who paid closer attention to Saturday-morning cartoons than I did. The dad who came home from work in the evening, put on his headphones, and cranked up his favorite prog-rock bands (even when they deviated from their usual geekiness) so loudly we could hear it over the TV. The dad who told me and my brother that our Big League Chew turned him into a werewolf before chasing us around the house. And the reason I’ll always get teary-eyed when I hear Jack Buck’s most celebrated call: “Go crazy, folks! Go crazy!”