Volume 5, Entry 7: Inheritance

Misunderstanding my dad

My dad always came home late while I was a kid.

The first company he worked for stationed him at a plant about 25 minutes away from our house. Depending on traffic along Franklin Blvd, that commute probably takes twice as long if he observed a traditional 9-5 workday, something I know now from getting caught in it along both directions as an adult. I didn’t get that as a kid, though. Other kids’ dads coached my baseball and soccer teams, and my and Matt’s moms ran our Cub Scout troop. My dad had to work.

When things are always a certain way, there’s no cause to question them, so I didn’t. My dad had to work, and he worked really hard—and for long hours for a company every kid ate products from. Describing my understanding of this connection between his work as a managing accountant and the pantry staple hawked on TV as pride misrepresents how all this struck me, but I did connect them in a way. Or at least I understood there was a connection.

Over time, I learned that his devotion to his job didn’t click with everyone. The carrying voices of my mom and her friends delivered this lesson the loudest: they would decry his absence with tones of frustration and disappointment. Calling it an absence never dawned on me; he was at work. That’s what dads did. Later on, I could understand the complexity behind these complaints: I get, for instance, why everyone but my mom laughed when his surprise party planning with her best friend led her to wrongly suspect an affair, and I recognize how the prescriptive gender roles poorly served two bright young adults. But then? I ate what landed on my plate.

My father was an absent father. It was like when I read about moas and couldn’t stop thinking about these huge hairy birds running around New Zealand. They were here, but now they’re gone? How? Why? What animal was next? The thought was everywhere when that same company he’d served his best years to in a ceramic bowl with a platinum spoon started jerking him around. The noisy agitating to be home grew louder just as the big wigs started grousing for more from a person who’d already given his all.

Two jobs later, after a one-year SoCal detour entered the past tense behind a return to Elk Grove, I saw a change. There he was in a blue flex-fit Expos cap, coaching my little brother alongside a future MLB draft pick. There he was, pulling out of the driveway on a Sunday to hit a soccer clinic so he could find three days a week to coach my team, the three-sport high school superstar adding a new game to his bag of tricks. Sure, he missed weekday promotions and a few choir concerts, but he became present. He’d work late into the night on his laptop and get up even earlier to beat the traffic and maximize the to-his-standards truncated workday in Modesto, but he was there. Consistently.

Still, the chirping never stopped because more than half of my dad’s day was elsewhere. No matter that he made good money or savvy investments, that he became a whirling dervish of chores and a handyman extraordinaire on the weekends while squeezing in time as my assistant coach and brokering peace with the local umpiring association. He was still at work a lot. Too much, my mom would mutter and her friends would say with sympathy in their voices.

When the frustration boiled over, as it still tends to in our family, the accusations careened wildly between aging walls. Your sons barely know you, he was once chastised. You love that company more than your own family.

This was, unfortunately, the worst stuff for me to hear. The first because it was true; he never countered that claim. I didn’t know him, not even while coaching with him or being coached by him. He never made any sense to me. He just worked and worked and worked. When he was finished with one project, he found a new one to work on. He wolfed down Wall Street Journals and stared at stock trends, preoccupied with investments. He didn’t resent the solitude of his long commute; he listened to the radio without knowing any songs. He was fair—too fair—to everybody. He picked up the phone constantly, sometimes even at 3:00 am when the crew in the Philippines needed help. He once asked me for help with a tricky spreadsheet problem he was trying to fix before an antiquated payroll process became an issue.

But the second criticism stung as well. Judged only on actions, which was the only avenue to judgment I could offer since we never talked, my dad really did love that job. Even when I began teaching and understood the pull of work and expectations—both internal and external—I still couldn’t wrap my head around it. When I felt pressure to work longer, people motivated those efforts, not the bottom line. A faceless corporation received all of my father’s affection, from what I could tell. Phone calls to his office found a chatty man absolutely thriving; at home, he was a husk of a human who collapsed in front of the TV but never caught enough of it to remember character names or storylines. Off the clock, he performed with dutiful professionalism, but while at work, he fired on all cylinders for…for what? Money in the pocket of his boss? Superior stock shares for some CEO? Only a cynical Scrooge would invest so much toward other people’s money while forever obsessed with his own.

You can learn so much about a person from their actions. It’s why writing fiction challenges me: I agonize over the cohesion of my characterization. Every action needs to have an origin, every word needs to make sense in context, or else my fictional being won’t make factual sense. People aren’t characters, but the same axioms govern my actions: I want people to see the person I want to be. My whole being gets put out there because, if you’re going to judge me—and you are—you might as well have expansive data to generalize from.

From the actions I saw, my dad was a workaholic, a reluctant father who put everyone in the world before himself and his family. He lived to work, money motivated him, and his silence made him a stranger to all who knew him. As cold and calculating as his ten-key, he was an emotionless fitness freak whose closest family connection was the late family dog. On those rare occasions he attended a Challenge Day or teared up at an awards ceremony, those events were outliers. They were blips on an otherwise steady stream.

How did I understand my father? As my polar opposite.

When he finally retired in 2018—officially, I mean, ignoring the months he spent afterward advising his former team over the phone—the people at the plant threw him a retirement party. His boss hosted it at his villa (not an exaggeration), and supposedly, every person would be there, finally giving me faces to the names I’d been hearing for two decades.

I expected a subdued affair. Cake and appetizers. Lots of handshaking and polite conversation. The sort of things you expect from a retirement party for an accountant at a multinational food company. His adult life had been spent on sterile, heartless business; why would I expect anything more from an event celebrating this stoic dude I’d lived with without knowing?

When every person’s face lit up meeting Tom and me, I was surprised. They knew details about me like they’d read the back of my baseball card. Every person’s voice sped up a little bit, their giddy excitement over putting my face to a person they felt like they already knew.

When people sat down with us, they spoke like we were at a family reunion. Their casualness and comfort conveyed a shared history: all of us were brought together by this one great guy. To be disoriented, mouth agape, while holding a grape on a plastic fork is an experience.

When it was time for toasts—yes, just like at a wedding—every department spoke. But these weren’t retirement party speeches but also wedding speeches. There were tears! Everyone had a story about this fair, generous man! There were times he processed payroll by hand when machines went down to make sure teams sweating over crops took home due compensation. There were kindnesses and support offered when loved ones fell ill. There were gentle jokes about this man’s wholesome warmth and devotion, not to the company but to them, the sacrifices he made and financial miracles he performed to serve them. These people adored my dad. They loved him, all forty of these random ass adults from a condiment and fruit cup manufacturer.

And when it was time for shots, they cheered like he was Patrick Mahomes on the Super Bowl pedestal. Everybody wanted to pour him one and gulp one down with the man. It took three rounds for every eager drinker to circle with him and shudder down tequila. They laughed and clapped him on the back. They hugged him, but not those cursory hugs you reluctantly grind out with great aunts you’ve met one time. These were bear hugs, Challenge Day-certified hugs. A few people, one a big burly man with callused fingers and muscular shoulders, lingered to whisper something to him, almost hesitant to let him go. He was their guy, their buddy, their champion.

Learning that much about my dad at dusk while a two-hour party stretched into hour four overwhelmed me so much that I couldn’t even find room to be jealous.

*****

One night in Modesto shouldn’t unlock a rich tapestry of understanding. Human complexity contains too many multitudes for a single skeleton key to open every door. What one moment like that retirement party can do is recontextualize the accumulated details that appeared before it. A powerful moment of understanding like that becomes an octopus of interpretation, stretching its tentacles into the past and bridging disparate slivers of self into a singular organism. Suddenly, that stale corporate slogging stealing years transforms into an avenue for serving others. Out of nowhere, the aloofness, the disengagement, and the exhaustion after work become essential recharging. All those spreadsheets and payroll records were demanding work, but the emotional labor of caring, listening, supporting, and running through walls for those in your stead add up. They finally make sense.

His team was my students; his goal, like mine, was to perpetually make their lives better to the highest degree he could muster. No wonder he takes to Challenge Day and Diamond Day so naturally: it gifts him the space to listen and give after he spent a career doing the same. He has practice caring about relative strangers like they are family.

Within months of retiring, doctors diagnosed my dad with Parkinson’s disease. His current medication helps tame his tremors, but between that and multiple sinus surgeries across these last few years, there’s less pep in his step. It’s always struck me as unfair: the man worked himself to the bone until his mid-sixties only to have his body sputter moments later when he finally found time to relax. He doesn’t say much about Parkinson’s—ever the optimist, he declines despondency for “This medicine helps” when given a platform—but there’s a sadness to him that was never there before. My mom insists it’s neurological disease, but I know him better now: he misses work. He misses mattering that much to that group of people who would treasure the chance to throw down shots with him under the stars.

To say that fact separates him and me might make sense. I resent the time I spend on and at work. The weight of that grinding presses on my chest in a way I don’t think it ever did him; he never learned to value hobbies or downtime while helping raise his three younger siblings after his mom couldn’t walk anymore. I sigh getting in my car to drive several minutes; he whistled cramming into his diesel sedan for an hour on Highway 5.

Truth be told, that does describe me. No matter how much I’d rather be doing something else, when I start on a project, a switch flips in me. Adrenaline fires, but my heartbeat steadies, every completed task an exhilarating victory. The intellectual challenge thrills me; the satisfaction of a job well done nourishes me. When people need me and I find the right words or land just the right compliment, when I go out of my way to see a person or validate them in the tiniest of ways, there’s this part of my brain that activates, and I feel myself solving a puzzle box. A smile or a tear on someone else’s face clicks the thing into place. I’m working for them. This practice quiz or problem set is to serve them. I sleep soundly under the blessed labor of a job well done.

I am my father’s son. You can see it in the burnt red cayenne coating everything I eat and the fiendish devotion to exercise and the compulsive obsession with doing right by others. It’s there in the preference for the silence after midnight in an unstirring house and the magnetic way we light up around, but never pine for, friends and, yes, the way we fall asleep during and cry at the end of movies. It all makes sense once you see it.

The one thing that never translated, the one thing I just can’t find in me, is his fixation on finances. Sure, money made his living, so he had to know his way around it. But he spent so much time on stocks and IRAs and portfolios—time he could have spent on us and money he could have spent getting to know us. My dad is among the most frugal people I know, and now that he’s retired, he still doesn’t spend money beyond a weekly pizza from Little Caesar’s, footing every dinner bills, and funding supplies for every event I host. How can any man be that generous to a fault and yet so devoted to accumulating wealth?

My dad still does my taxes. What can I say? He loves the work, and I’m happy to have professional eyes axing any audits. This last week, he finished mine up and asked me to come over to review the thing and officially submit it.

At the tail end of our check-in, just before putting the thing through, he mentioned that I’d moved up a tax bracket. I asked how, so he showed me the tiers and the threshold for each. With the stipend I’d received for doing Diamond Day and a year of constant video work, I had indeed inched into the next level.

“This is a small step,” he noted. “But you’ll feel it on the next one.”

Squinting at his same-since-2003 screen, I looked at the following number and outright laughed.

“I don’t have to worry about that, Dad,” I chortled. “It’s impossible for me to ever make that number.”

His left hand steadily guided the mouse to close the window. He shook his head as he did.

“Don’t be so sure,” he said, a small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

I snorted. “I made $99 from the book. I know my ceiling, and it ain’t that.”

My dad let out a contented sigh and shook his head again.

“You’ll make it one time.”

I rolled my eyes. “How?”

The edge of that smile returned.

“Inheritance.” He said it with pride.

Once again, I learned something new about my dad, and once again, it made sense out of something I didn’t understand before: just how much he loves me.

And how much he always has.

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This was not the piece I intended to write this week. I started a different one that began at the recent wedding of my friend, Joey; I hit a wall after the groom’s toast four separate times. Baffling stuff.

During each attempt I charted, I kept running into this argument I had once with my dad about work. After my fourth failure to launch, I decided to make the entire plane out of that black box. Three hours later, this piece existed. Those Athena pieces that spring fully formed from my head are often favorites. Indeed: I love this.

Which is to say, I love my dad.