Initiative and Fatherhood

Nothing terrifies people like initiative. 

That they meet something like 

a reasonable expectation.... 

I was told my father 

suffered from a great deal 

of illness in his youth, and 

that this informed 

his bizarre moodswings in later-life. 

By plain account he was an old father. 

Born in March 1943, Philippine Province of America, 

he'd endure to the 1980s (the Brooklyn 

Phone Company because I don't care for 

the other name for it) until fate brought him a 

wife, and a son. 

I remember he was happy in Brooklyn. 

My four-year-old's memories of this 

robust, brown goliath telling me over 

and over I was the best: Oh, 

initiative or no initiative 

he will always be allowed to stay. 

Even through the toxic instability 

of his invisible hatred for my 

hateful mother, even through the 

3 a.m. mornings when he woke me up 

in my single-occupied bunkbed 

to aggressively tell me to go outside 

of our house in Upstate (Kent Cliffs) New York, 

bewildered what a 5-year-old should do... 

When he chased me out of his clothes 
through the dawn hours -- never touching, 

molesting, hitting -- one too many times, 

my halfsister Natalie (from my mom's 

first marriage) called the police and 

that was that. I had a statement taken 

in what felt like an interrogation of an 

hysterical nothing and Richard Sr. was 

ordered out of his own home for a time, 

down the street of Kent View Drive 

to stay with my Aunt Laura and Cousin Bobby 

in the house Laura and Betty's (my mother's) father 

started building after returning from 

World War Two and getting married, having children. 

I visited him there and he was delighted to see me 

and I was delighted and unfearful to see him. 

We made it work for a time. 

I think my being a delinquent with Bobby got under his skin. 

Years later, after I dropped out of high school, began 

a full-time job in a factory, quit a full-time job in a factory, 

went to community college, dropped out of community 

college, and somewhere in there I got a job at Ames, 

went to Grand Union after they went bankrupt, went 

to P.A.R.C. for a year and a half after that, before leaving 

to Nevada, a family member there, to relieve the depression 

of living in 2003/4 New York. 

I always welcomed his company, but 

he only rarely knew what to say. 

This strange man who used to set 

notes around the house for my mother 

or whoever took the initiative to read them. 

This man with two brothers he hardly spoke to, 

this man with two brothers who hardly spoke 

to him or each other. 

This man I visited in the hospital in 2009 

after some schmuck drove him over with 

their car while he was riding his bicycle 

to the store... 

This man who in the last year of his life 

before he died of complications after 

his last heartattack, thought to mend 

the fray between he & his son. 

I have this photo of him from when maybe I was one-year-old 

and it's me and my sister Natalie and him with some kind 

of low-rent fishing pole, and he's got this look of fearless atheist 

determination in there. 

And nothing seems less terrifying than initiative. 

****