My Father's Daughter

My father is a natural storyteller. When I was a little girl, he would tell one about his first NHL mentor posing the question, "Jim, do you want to be someone or somebody?" I spent my youth pouring over the syntax of that sentence trying to figure out which one to be.

James Francis Loria grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, one of seven children to a single mother. His daycare was arboreal: tied to a tree for hours due to the mischief he and his twin brother would create while my grandmother worked. He dreamt of working in the National Hockey League. His beleaguered mother bemoaned this pipe dream, lamenting the brutalities of life and his lack of potential. My father repeated kindergarten and went to a vocational tech high school: his blind ambition and ability to dream big superseded his intellectual acumen.

As a young man, he worked for Sears Robuck to earn enough money to subscribe to every sports hockey magazine. He labored over players' statistics and wrote letters to every NHL coach advising who to draft. Giving up was never in my father's vocabulary, and his decades-long career began when someone on the receiving end of his yearly missives decided whoever this kid was, he was worth meeting. My father's sports career would span six states and multiple hockey leagues throughout my childhood. Always by his side was my mother. Stories about my father seem more reminiscent of a feel-good sports movie than the truth, and, often, his soft-spoken humility lends them even greater sentiment.

My parent's love story is my favorite. They met through a letter. My mother was tired of her college nursing major and, mirroring my father's pen-to-paper drive, sought advice from NHL teams on pursuing hockey journalism. She had grown up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and naturally loved the sport. As fate would have it, my father worked for the Washington Capitals and was responsible for collecting the mail the day her letter arrived. He was drawn to her beautiful handwriting and took it upon himself to open and respond to her inquiry. When my mother received this note, his kindness and generosity pouring through his words, she knew she had met the man she would marry. My father felt the same upon receiving a personalized response, and both told their respective families about the other. Naturally, everyone thought they were crazy. It seemed like an impossibly terrible idea, even in 1981, to drop out of college, move across the country, and marry a man that was physically a stranger. Of course, neither listened, and my mother's perfect penmanship laid the groundwork for my very existence.

In my twenties, I became estranged from my parents. I was a lost sheep, burdened by the desire to be the perfect daughter and an uncanny ability to make myself suffer. By 35, I had fallen deeply into the darkness of addiction and was on the verge of complete self-destruction. I boarded a plane to visit my parents for the first time in four years and never took the return flight home. What began was the summer that saved my life. On one of my first days home with them, an adult child in need of parenting, my mother urged my father to tell me the story about "that basketball player." He began reading me a series of texts in which said player extolled his wisdom, kindness, and mentoring. He referred to my father as a brother. It reminded me of my father's inescapable warmth—his ability to nurture, guide, and inspire. I imagined the text-message writer to be a high school hopeful, someone with grit for the game riding the same dream waves my father crested. I asked him who had sent the message.

"An NBA player named Chris Paul," was his response.

To tell the story of my father and his decades-long career in sports is to see the best in myself. As a child, he made the banal seem divine, all in the way he could spin a masterful story. He preached the power of self-belief and never backed down from pursuing his passions. After hearing one of my father's many stories, my son came home and exclaimed, "Mom, did you know Grandpa taught the President how to shoot a hockey puck?" Story 347? I'm very familiar. As I progress in my recovery, building the life of my dreams, I stand firm in my desire to make my father proud.

I want to be someone.