Doing the Eddie Spaghetti

The above poem was written by me when I was around 12 years old. I sanded down the wood, stained it, shellacked the poem to the wood, and gave it to my dad for Father’s Day. It’s not the greatest poem, but I’m sure it meant the world to my dad at the time. He kept it with him for eighteen years, and it was given back to me by my stepmother after my dad passed away almost twenty years ago.

It’s funny to me how a person’s perceived negative traits just seem to fade away after that person has passed away. At least that’s how it was for me after my dad died. I grew up a daddy’s girl, so losing my father to cancer almost twenty years ago was one of the hardest things I have ever had to endure. He wasn’t perfect, not at all, but as an adult looking back on his life and how he was as a father, I know he gave us what he could, and he tried his best.

I remember seeing a coffee cup at some roadside touristy gas station when I was kid that read, “Any man can be a father, but it takes a special man to be a daddy.” These words that were printed on a souvenir cup have always meant something to me and truly represent what separates my dad from being just my father, he was special, he was my Daddy.

***

A couple of months after my dad got back from fighting in the Vietnam war, he was set up a blind date with my mother. A couple of months later, I was created in my mother’s womb and a few weeks after that, my parents were married. I found out years after my father passed away that my dad was a huge Elvis fan. According to my mother, he would serenade her with Elvis songs all the time. I mean, who could resist that level of charm? While I do remember my dad having a decent singing voice, I can’t help but smile at the thought of my dad imitating Elvis. I have no doubt that was a sight to see.

My parents separated when I was five years old. I use the word “separated” because my mother and I found out a few years ago, after she suffered from a stroke, that my dad never filed the actual divorce papers. My mother remembered signing them, but he never filed them, so technically, they were never divorced and had actually been married for almost 30 years. He even remarried another woman years after their supposed divorce. Years after my dad passed away, he still seemed to irritate my mother with his legendary procrastination skills. I could almost hear him laughing when my mother and I found this out.

So, aside from my dad’s ability to burrow under my mother’s skin like a thorn, he was an amazing man. He was charming, very funny, and friendly to everyone he met. He was the type of person who has never met a stranger, and people loved him. But, for all his great attributes, he was also the kind of person who kept all the ugliness from his past locked away. He kept the years of abuse from his own father and all the atrocities he had witnessed as a soldier in the Vietnam war squashed deep down inside and he never dealt with the trauma of his past. There were only two stories my dad ever told me from around the time he was in the war, and other than those two stories, he never talked about the war.

The first of these involved the beginning of his enlistment in the Army. My dad joined the army with his childhood best friend. After graduating bootcamp, these two young soldiers were sent to California to await being sent to war. Apparently, my dad and his best friend decided (while drunk) that they had made a terrible mistake and came up with a plan to go AWOL. Their Sargent found them the next day, they didn’t get far, and told them that they had two choices; get back to base and be on the plane to Vietnam or spend the rest of their lives in an Army prison. Obviously, they chose the first option. I found out years later from my dad’s sister that the best friend my dad joined the Army with never made it home from the war.

The second story that he told me occurred after he returned to the states from Vietnam. After getting off the plane, my dad was jumped not far from the airport by war protesters. He was robbed, beaten, and called atrocious names. This thought angers me to no end and while it does help me to understand why my dad didn’t talk about that time in his life, it also creates such a deep sadness within me to believe that someone I love so dearly ever had to endure that kind of pain.

So, yes, my father suppressed the pain as best he could, and he hid it all behind a smile. The problem with this type of coping mechanism though is that there is a tendency to suppress not just negative emotions, but the positive ones as well. As a result, I never truly knew if my dad was proud of me, and I never really knew him. I wrote about this in the music challenge as well and noted that Reba McIntyre’s, The Greatest Man I Never Knew summed up my memory of my dad as perfectly as a song could. My dad loved to write poetry. I remember reading it as a child. What I didn't know until after he was gone though was that he entered a poetry contest and won. He also loved philosophy, Khalil Gibran was his favorite, and he always wanted to learn to play the guitar.

Because of this side of my dad’s personality, I learned to not close myself off from others, to not to let things fester within myself, and to speak my mind. Nothing good comes from keeping all those feelings bottled up inside, it is nothing but poison to the soul. After my dad passed away a realization hit me, which made me come up with my own motto.

– Too many moments are wasted thinking about all the things you should have said. Don’t live for those lost moments, live for the ones that won’t leave you speechless.

***

Despite the many times my dad was late picking us up for the weekend. Despite the times he just didn’t show up to get us for the weekend, and despite the times he didn’t show up for what now seems like such small things, like my dance recitals or my high school graduation (because that’s not a big deal, haha). Whenever I needed my dad and I mean really needed my dad, he was there.

I spent a lot of time in the hospital when I was fifteen. My mom lived about two hours away from the hospital and my dad lived about an hour away. They both had to work, so the only time I would ever really see them was on the weekends and maybe a night here and there during the week. I remember one night in particular after a really bad day. I was in a lot of pain, I couldn’t keep food down, and I had fallen during physical therapy. I was scared and I was really starting to get depressed with my circumstances. Even though it was late in the evening, I called my dad while crying uncontrollably and asked if he could come see me. Without question my dad was in his car and made that hour-long drive to see me right away. He spent the whole night with me in the hospital that night and the next day he went to get me ice cream (we both love coffee ice cream) and spent the entire next day with me as well.

When I was 19 years old and 5 months pregnant I decided I was literally going to drive cross country (from Massachusetts to California) to elope with my now ex-husband because I just couldn’t handle the wedding planning with my soon to be mother-in-law. My dad stopped me and said he would take a couple of days off work to drive with me because there was no way he was going to let me drive that distance by myself. Years later when I didn’t feel brave enough to leave my ex-husband, it was my dad who stood by my side and helped me to find the strength that I needed to find happiness on my own again.

I was and always will be my daddy’s punkin’! So, no, he wasn’t always there for what I perceive to be the little stuff, but when it mattered most, when I needed him most, he never let me down. This helped to shape my idea of what love should look like. I don’t need to have someone in my life, but any man that I choose to be with had better understand that if he isn’t there for me when I need him the most, those moments when I am at my worst and truly need him, then he isn’t the one for me. I am very lucky to have found that person and he has stayed by my side for the last 18 years. He never met my dad, but I think my dad would have really liked him.

I had a dream about my dad once. Well, I have had several dreams with my dad in them, but there was one in particular that really stuck with me. I remember we were sitting by a stream, or some small body of water and we were having a picnic. I knew in the dream that he had passed away and that he was just visiting me. In the dream he told me that he finally met Elvis and that he was finally learning to play the guitar. We talked about a couple of other things as well, but I don’t want to get into all of that. Eventually he told me that it was time for him to go. I remember waking up and wanting so badly to go back to that dream, and I remember the overwhelming sadness that overcame me because I missed him so much. In all honesty though, with the timing of when this dream occurred, this was just another time that my dad was there for me when I needed him most.

***

So, the best thing about my dad because this is all been so difficult to write, and I need to find the lighter side; my dad had a wicked sense of humor! I use the word wicked because we are from Massachusetts, and well, that word is just a staple in that part of the country when it comes to describing something major. My dad’s laugh sounded just like Eddie Murphy’s. If you are familiar with him then you know Eddie Murphy’s laugh is like a loud inward snorting type of laugh and it is unique. If you got my dad laughing, which wasn’t that difficult since he was always doing or saying something silly, he would start snorting. A great memory of my dad’s silliness was a crazy dance he would do that he called the Eddie Spaghetti and when he did this dance, my brother, sisters, and I would be rolling with laughter until my dad would have to stop because he would be laughing/snorting too hard to continue.

He was always playing pranks or trying to embarrass us kids. As an example, he would tell the waitress that his son wanted her phone number because he thought she was hot, or his daughter wanted their number if it it was a guy waiting on us. As a kid, you never wanted to be the one to be sitting beside him watching tv because if a commercial came on, you were sure to be smacked upside the head (in a loving joking way, not an abusive mean way) and then he would blame it on someone else. Yet, we would fight over who could sit next to my dad because we all thought we could outsmart him and get away from him before that inevitable slap upside the head. We rarely could.

I remember my brother brought a girl to my dad’s house once to meet him. I think my brother was around 16 at the time. My dad grilled this poor girl for at least 15 minutes asking if she cooked, did she clean, and if she could iron his shirts for him and so on. I had to leave the room I was laughing so hard, but this poor girl just stood there looking shocked and didn’t know what to say, and what’s worse is my brother just stood there letting this girl endure the torture.

Like I mentioned previously, when I was fifteen, I was in the hospital a lot having several surgeries. During one of my surgeries, they put rods in my back. After this surgery, when I wasn’t looking, my dad and my brother used to try to see if magnets would stick to my back, and then of course there was the time that my dad tried to convince me that because of the metal in my back if I held on to the tv antenna he would be able to get better reception while watching his beloved Patriot’s game. What’s worse is when he asked me to adjust the antenna when the game was on, the reception did get better and when I walked away it went back to being grainy. He even tried to bribe me with like a dollar or something like that if I agreed to stand there holding those rabbit ears (the tv antenna for those of you too young to know that there was a time when tv wasn’t hooked up to cable and we had to rely on antennas to watch the few channels we could get) so he could finish watching his game.

There are so many instances in which my dad would embarrass us and for as horrible as he was to us in that respect, it was so hard to get one over on him. My youngest sister did once though. They were at a high school basketball game and there had been a raffle. When they called out the winning numbers, my sister told my dad that she had the winning ticket. She did, but that wasn’t the ticket she gave him, she gave him a ticket with the wrong numbers on purpose. In front of a crowd of people, my dad excitedly ran down the bleachers and headed to the middle of the court to proudly hand his “winning” ticket to the announcer. The raffle announcer looked at the ticket and then told my dad that the numbers didn’t match. It wasn’t planned, but made the whole thing that much better, when the announcer then started to harass my dad about trying to steal some prize and chastised him in front of everyone. My sister said she almost peed herself, she was laughing so hard. That was probably the only time any of us kids ever really got one over on him and I so wish I had been there.

I have so many great memories of my dad and the good memories outweigh the bad ones astronomically. The most important lesson my dad taught me - no matter how bad things might seem in life, the greatest medicine, the greatest way to make it all better in the moment is to laugh! What I wouldn’t give to just sit and laugh with my dad just one more time.

Thank you, Daddy, and Happy Father’s Day!