Atomic Elroy

is twitter… a chat room where everybody just talks, no listening?
Is facebook just craigslist with pictures?
Enquiring minds want to know!

Today is Father Day in the US. I’ve been a father for 31 years. Yet, I barely knew my own father. My father died in 1992, of a heart attack. I never found out until 2004. These facts may seem strange to some, but it was typical of the relationship I had with my father.
My father left my Mom, myself, and my 2 sisters in 1960 when I was 6, we lived in Nashua NH. at the time, I had a bad case of Scarlet Fever right when all this was happening, so most of my memories of him at the time are more akin to hallucinations than memories. He was a radio ad salesman, and was gone most of the time. He had been involved in that small town, post war show biz thing that involved beatniks, artists, jazz musicians, and such. Besides working in radio ( as both ad man and announcer/DJ), he was a Trumpet player and a Stage Magician. I really didn’t know my father that well, yet his legend even as tainted as it was coming from my mother was seductive. It’s his genes that must of manifest my life in the arts. Even later when I tried to reconnect in 1972, when I had asked to live with him while I tried to get a HS diploma, he was gone most of the time. He lived in one of many childhood homes that belonged to my Grandmother in Cape Neddick Maine. Which was quite weird to go back to a house you lived in 14 years earlier as a pre schooler to finish school. That ended disastrously with me hitch hiking back to Colorado, and the fault not on his part but on mine. My memories of my father are infused with my Mother’s hatred and anger to the man who abandoned her and their children. For some reason I had always been able to differentiate between my Mother’s perspective and reality even as a youngster. I never had the emotional attachment to manifest anger towards him, It would be like hating some one you never knew. I understood my Mother’s malice yet could never join her in it.
I never learn of my father’s death until after my Mother died in 2004. One of my sisters was trying to contact him when she learned he had died 12 years earlier. So In one sense I lost both my parents at the same time, because even though I never had much contact with him, subconsciously he was still my father to me, and as long as I conceptualized his being alive, he was to me. Interesting how perspective and perception can be the engine of reality.
After I returned to Colorado in 1972 I only attempted to re-connect with him on two separate occasions. One when my first child Heather was born in 1978 I sent him a letter telling him he was a grandfather. His reply was written on an old flyer for his stage magic/comedy act. On which he barely remarked on his granddaughter’s birth, yet told me of his marginal show biz career. From this I learned the adage’ never believe your own publicity’, or at least don’t let it get to your ego. The second time was when I was in therapy, I had been urged by my therapist to write a letter to my father to forgive him for any ills perceived or real. I did so, and it really made me feel better to express my emotions in his direction. The letter was returned to sender. Which had I been a bit more of a sleuth, It may have been an indication of his demise.
I look at my father as someone who made choices he could not support emotionally. As someone who could not live up to the responsibility of his actions. As a flawed human, who screwed some things up and made little to no effort to rectify them. But also as someone on some level who was trying to do the best he could. This does not excuse him for his lack of love he showed me, but i can rationalize his actions on one level.
This was his greatest gift to me, his bad example. I learned how to be a loving father by trying to avoid the mistakes he made, some I did some I didn’t. I did learn from those mistakes as I assume he did. I even made agonizing choices that were mimicking his actions on some level, that I knew were the right things for me to do at the time, which believe you me, was quite difficult. As difficult as it has been to be a father without one, I still cannot feel ill will to his spirit on fathers day. So Instead of hating my father as my mother would have wished, I love him, for what did for, and to me. The lessons he taught me in absentia are the most powerful I have learned in my life.

Happy Father’s Day, David E. McElroy… RIP.

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