When he was 18, his father dropped dead of a heart attack. On Olney Avenue in Philadelphia, the world no longer included school in South Bend. And in spite of a tight-knit Irish Catholic family, he took it on his slender shoulders.
My dad was a tinkerer. When we renovated the house down the shore, he told me about his grandfather’s hardware store, and pointed to the tools that had skipped a generation to him. It might have been around that time that he mentioned why his grandparents bought it. That house was, and remains, linked to his own dad. They bought it that summer for the family. Maybe as a celebration.
Tinkering and his logical mind brought him to engineering. He traded Notre Dame for the Main Line, and ended up with a Ph. D in physics. He also met the woman he’d fall for around that time.
She wasn’t the easiest of people to deal with. Demons in her head have continued to fuel her creativity, and keep her from being truly happy. He married her because he loved her, and they eventually moved in together in Texas in the 1980s.
It’s not relevant today, but he can’t conceive. But both wanted children, so in that delightful time period and locale, in vitro fertilization was the pick. Some Baylor med student made some beer money, and the one concession was that he would pick when he told me.
When I was three, she could celebrate sobriety and he could celebrate having bought not one, but two homes in two different states. A man who disdained cars, he bought new ones to keep his family safe, even if that was a bit irrational.
There wasn’t much to want for growing up. I look at his spending on electronics, flying lessons, his cars. It probably added up to maybe 1/10 what the household spend was. Instead, we went on vacations and bought clothes and I amassed books.
Distance was a bit of a thing, given that he still was trying to figure out how he wanted to tell me he wasn’t my father. Parts of it probably came out when the shore house was leveled by flooding, and we spent that summer working on it. But I was 12, and already annoyed with adults.
He told me when I was 14, and dealt with an angry, confused teenager about as well as one could expect. Through that time, he still put money towards my college (which would be free), and psychiatric bills and vacations and all the amenities of upper-class New Jersey life.
He stayed in a corporate job he wasn’t fond of until I graduated. I paid $20,000 of the $150,000 or so that it cost. And he continued to support both of the people he loved, even as it became clear we suffered from something that couldn’t be fixed.
Dad falls asleep on the couch by 10, but when I call him with a panic attack, he’ll spend an hour or more in the garage, where he can’t wake up his wife, his arthritic knees locking against the cold. The dog expects to be, and is, walked early the next morning, regardless.
If you Googled his name, you might find that he’s number one in his field, someone the government counts on to educate us about a new field of lighting. In spite of the small fact of genetic material, though, he’s been my father for more than a quarter century.
And if his story of caring for people, of striving beyond material things, of pushing past the breaking point with two people with troubled souls, I get it. I promise. He’s not unique, I don’t think. I just haven’t learned more about the difference between being a man and having XY chromosomes from anyone else.
P.S. He luuuuuurvess lighthouses. I have no idea either.
