Father's Day For Father Figures

My Father's name is Herman, as was his father before him.

Herman Jr. he was called in Mississippi and Memphis and all points north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. He is Herman the Second in business ventures, and Herman the Maestro to his buddies, even though he is shy to sing and tone-deaf. He got the nomenclature because of a born-too-soon- predilection towards picking the best music for any gathering, private, public or anything in between. He is Herman the Fat to his brothers and cousins even though in old age he is anything but.

By the time I got to him, he was ten years older than sliced bread as they say where he's from and had no patience for small and fragile babies, especially boys, who were, nay are, squeamish around live fish hanging from hook, line and sinker or deer caught in the scopes of rifles. He became my dad and I his son when he was old enough to know better than to force manly pursuits on children and young enough to not to care, but time and times and events and the world somehow got in the way of what I am sure woulda', shoulda', coulda' been a beautiful patrilineal story in more than name alone. That beautiful story missed us by days or decades or the world in which we live and I am sorry for it.

I've long since stopped looking for the magic in the mystery of fathers or in those figures who presume to be. I was deluded into thinking that dullness of dad jokes made up for the coolness of cats like my own papa who preferred the Cowboys of Dallas to the Indian Mughals and their illustrious histories that captivated me as soon as I saw a globe or map that I took to the sportsball games. We do have some things in common, but my being an ersatz academic full of esoteric knowledge or the pursuit thereof is not one of them. I am an adventurer with an insatiable thirst for wandering, he prefers home and his own known world. Where I sometimes talk to much to avoid the silence in some company, my father would prefer not to speak if he can at all help it. He is odd where I am queer. We are night and day.

I left for The Saint Paul's School, a boarding school in New Hampshire at the age of 14 and didn't seek the sorely needed paternal figures in my life, so much as they found me. Most were much older men of course, at least older than me - the pre-requisite - usually teachers, who sufficed and even exceeded the roles that neither they nor I knew they were fulfilling, and I am as grateful as if they shared my own blood.

The age old African proverb says, “It takes a village to raise a child.” In some cultures, boys are embraced by the entire community of men on their way to adulthood and this is a path that many embrace unwittingly.

Father’s are a funny thing. You never can tell what they will teach you, but as I am going to be one soon, I try to think of the lessons I have learned from my own, biological father and those who get the title from experience. I am happy that I will not have to teach my son how to be a black man in America. It is a daunting and unanswerable challenge that no one, save for future generations of Barack Obamas or Cornell Wests should, would, and could achieve. I am lucky enough to have a daughter on the way. There are things she will have to learn. But the things most important for her, I am not tasked with teaching. The lessons I am inspired to teach her are only those that I have learned and taken to heart. Things like how to treat another human being. How to treat those who love you and whom you in turn love. I get to teach, through example, politesse, ethics and ambition. I get to teach and instill a love of books like Ramona Quimby, Harry Potter, The Bench so that when she is my age she will love books like Where the Crawdads Sing or The Biography of Catherine the Great. I hope these lessons that will make her a better girl and an even better human and perhaps a great woman. Thank god, I won’t have to teach about colors of ribbons or paints or flowers or, dear lord, Roe vs. Wade. One can hope, isn't that what children are for at the end of days.

In the absence of my own father's wisdom, whether from proximity or taciturnity, I have recognized the near mythical figures, so often teachers, some full of wind and some full of piss, that became mentors to an erudite but restless teen, rapscallion know it all adolescent and even now a middle-aged dilettante. Most profoundly I am grateful to David Newman, my English and Drama teacher at the prep school so far from home. He taught me the respect of the English language, and he is why I love to read Marlowe and Shakespeare to this very day. That he instilled a very large part of what makes me a whole person is a debt I could never repay. Over the four years he was a major part of my theatrical and language education. I saw him overjoyed at a particularly brilliant essay or monologue performance and I became eager to please as any son would. I saw him angry at my disregard of study of King Lear for an upcoming Julliard audition and I felt the heat of embarrassment from his disappointment as any son would. I saw him as proud as can be in reading reviews for my performance of Firs in the Cherry Orchard by the Director of the Moscow Arts Theater and knew I was ready to take on my calling as any son does. He counts as a father figure even more so as a chaperone when I went to the UK for an exchange at Eton College.

When he saw me jealous that the Etonians excelled at Marlowe's Faust and we delivered swears and curses from Mamet's American Buffalo, he taught me how to have respect even when feeling defeated, something most boys learned through sport. I learned sportsman-like conduct through Mamet because of Mr. Newman. Another fact that places him in the pantheon of special father figures was how he treated women and yes how he treated girls. David Newman, to my teenaged eyes, knew how to admire a woman for her truest beauty and to have her do the same for you. This does not mean his ex-wife would agree, but to seventeen year old me David Newman had game and swagger with the ladies, and adored girls as those to be respected not coddled. That time in England, He taught me how to have a pint or a gin and tonic and enjoy the buzz and bonhomie in the company of men with scholarly pursuits and women who were academics as well as beauties. Where he lives today, I couldn't say, except in my heart and fondest of memories.

Again, it takes a village to raise a boy to become a man, and there are honorable mentions every step of the way. Another teacher that stepped into the shoes of a father was Lawrence Katzenbach, my English and Essays teacher and debate coach at The Saint Paul's School. He is a standout as one of the figures that I put on a paternal pedestal. Mr. Katzenbach taught me the meaning of words like culpability and crux. He echoed Mr. Newman and my own father when he implored me to hold my head up high no matter the matter and, with my shoulders back, speak in command of the room. He taught me to listen even when I wanted to speak; that it would give me a chance to formulate not just a retort, but an opinion based on the words presented, and to steer the debate, or the conversation, along the course I wanted. It crushed me when I later learned that his own personal life was not the stuff of legend like our debate team, but more of infamy, amongst some of the female students whose allegations, allegations he could not defend due to an untimely death, saddens me as if it were my own father. Like Bill Cosby whose predilection towards inappropriate behavior with women besmirches his legacy, I cannot pretend that I haven't heard and have not been heartbroken and crestfallen on and by their own behalf. The older I get the more I realize that there are very few men, even the most fatherly of figures, for whom this is not true. Bill Cosby made me cry when it surfaced he was not exactly the all-American dad he had pretended to be. William Jefferson Clinton disappointed me. Two examples that seemed to me paternal types for many, even if only ideologically or fictitiously. But because I am a Mama's boy, and a feminist to boot, I acknowledge and proclaim the fallibility and imperfection of my sex and I want, am wont, to do better by the women I love and respect, for which I long or lust, or admire. This must be doubly true a mission for those for whom their sheer humanity requires me to empathize with though they are not dear to me. "Men will be men" is a lesson my biological father taught me first. For that lesson I thank him, so that I would not, should not, and could not be surprised in the days and years to come by the actions of men towards the fairer sex.

An exception for my gender does come to mind when I think of the perfect men, fathers even. That would the very best of a man in full by the name of Russel Weiner. I met Mr. Wiener my freshmen year at Rhodes College in Memphis where I was a member of the Phi Chapter of Kappa Sigma Fraternity. He was a member of my fraternity seemingly a hundred years prior, and he had a slow drawl and a quick wit, though he was short of stature, my god did he stand tall. Our too few meetings in this life, made me want to be a better man. He was a Christian man, something I still claimed in words rather than actions at our initial meetings. Whether it was the way he presented his wife, aptly named Joy, with her violin solos that made me stifle tears it was so beautiful, before our BBQ dinners at his Memphis home or his impromptu visits to the fraternity house that we raced to spot-shine because we knew he would appreciate it, he left a lasting impression that reinforced Mummy's tutelage of giving back to those less fortunate. Because of him I became fundraising chair of my fraternity, locally and nationally. Because of Mr. Wiener, I knew there was a way to treat the woman you called wife, to command and instill the respect of sixty frat boys at her/your dinner tables, because his own soul was so pure they wouldn't sully it with common refrain of beer and parties or any common fraternity diatribes. When we went to his annual dinners for the fraternity, we didn't speak of common things. He singled me out on a couple of these occasions and wanted to know who I was and who my Memphian father was. I told him of Herman Jr, referring to him as Herman the Second, and he acknowledged the work my Dad did as best he could with Dr. King and the Unions in Memphis and told me I'd make him proud one day and education was the key.

Russel Wiener gave me a gift that gives to this day and the fact that he gave southern babies bubblegum and baseball cards tells you what kind of heart he had. I didn't know it was possible to miss a human being you only met ten times, but I shed a tear for him and what he did for me and more so for many others without a need to proclaim it. Russel Wiener did what my own father shoulda', woulda', coulda,' had the ground work been laid. He was responsible for my sophomore year at Rhodes College when the Pell Grant for which I was ineligible and my own parents second split was responsible for the uncertainty that I could attend the Southern Gothic Preppy Ivy "in a league of its own" institution. If there was ever a Christian in this modern world, Russel Wiener was the most Christ-like and I say that with regards to sacrilege and in matters and "affairs" of men. What may I say to a better man than myself? In Pace Requiescat, Princeps Dulcis. I know flights of angels took him to his rest. Though I highly doubt I will be remembered with such encomiums, because of Russel Wiener, at least I know how to achieve them.

To the many others who've been instrumental in making me the man I am and want to be, Richard Rein, Colin Callahan, Coach Craig, David Landau, Tim Russ, Dan Nearing, thank you for your fine example of fatherhood even though you didn't know at the time, you were the men that taught me how to be just that. Thank You.