Who's Your Daddy?!?

I have not been in the mood to blog for a couple of weeks.  Just too tied up in my own thoughts to make myself accessible to the world.  Today I have been thinking about my parents, about all of the things for which I blame them.  Everyone has problems, large or small, with the way they were raised.  Perhaps they were neglected.  Perhaps they were controlled too much.  Perhaps their stories are too sad to even contemplate.  When I look back at my childhood, I realize that my parents were seriously messed up.  They made a lot of parenting mistakes.  And I realize, too, that I was an especially sensitive child.  At some point, however, every adult must deal with the history he or she was given.  It is important not to turn your back on your past, but to acknowledge it, examine it, understand it--and to make some conscious decisions about how to formulate a future filled with beauty and peace, as well as a healthy dose of compassion for those around us who are surely struggling, too.

A couple of weeks ago, my stepfather sent word to me that the man I have always thought was my real father was in fact not my father.  I was shocked by my reaction to this news.  I despised my stepfather and never knew my real father, but I have always carried with me a dim sense of reassurance that somewhere in my past there must have been someone my mother loved who was worth loving.  I now find out that while this may be true, I will never know if she loved my father, if he had a chance to love me, if he even knew of my existence.

Evidently my mother had a real knack for picking losers.  Maybe my father was the one decent man who got away.  Maybe it doesn't matter.  I have come to think that each person must be his or her own parent.  We must nurture ourselves, guide ourselves, and always be there for ourselves.  Only then can we be mentally and emotionally healthy enough to offer anything to anyone else.

I am writing about my parentage today, not merely to analyze my still emerging feelings about it, but to preface the story I am posting below.  I wrote it a couple of years ago.  It is based partly on my own childhood and partly on a story that my husband told me.  I have never felt like the story was finished.  I just didn't know where it needed to be changed.  Today when I look back at it, I realize that one of the problems with the story is the distance I maintain from the reader throughout the story.  It is as though I am protecting myself so carefully that the story can't connect with the audience.  So I am going to post it and work on revision.  I am going to hold myself accountable for fixing the story... and simultaneously, I will work on fixing those aspects of myself that I have conveniently blamed on my parents in the past.

TOUCH AND GO

I had the dream gun in my dream hand last night, but the scene didn’t lend itself effectively to death.  The sensation was like falling off a building and waking before making the ground my final home, and I sat up, wondering how I could have botched the landing again.

**********

            “Charlie-Lima-Bravo, this is Juliet-Alpha-Bravo...”

“Charlie-Lima-Bravo here,” I answered matter-of-factly into my walkie-talkie. 

Even though he hated being called "Juliet," Bubba was a stickler for authenticity and insisted that we use our real initials as our call signs.  And since I didn't really mind being called "Charlie," I didn’t argue with him about it.

“Request flight level three five zero.”

            “What?!?!”

            “All you have to say is ‘Roger Wilco.  Level three five zero approved. Over.’” 

“Okay.”

“Then say it!” As his exasperation reached new levels, Bubba forgot to mimic the droning tones of a seasoned pilot.

“Roger.  Wilco,” I repeated tonelessly.  “Level three five zero approved.  Whatever…”

**********

I was never very good at flying.  Not even when my brother and I played airplane in the narrow utility room (a.k.a. the fuselage) attached to our garage.  But that’s understandable because I didn’t get a lot of experience at the pretend controls since he always tried to make me be the air traffic controller or the stewardess.  Years later when I took flying lessons, I was so short I had to sit on a Houston phone directory (including the yellow pages) and no matter how hard I tried to pay attention to all of the instruments and controls, I always became distracted by things like wing-level clouds, rivet patterns, and the delicious, light-stomached sensation of dropping a few feet without warning only to be caught by an invisible cushion of air below.  As a result I usually ended up crabbing through the sky, able to guide my plane to the desired destination, but arriving there slightly skewed.

            My real father was a real pilot.  But I don’t remember him.  I’ve only heard other people’s accounts of him.  Most of the stories indicate that he too was not a very good pilot.  Like the tale I heard about the time he was flying drunk and clipped his wing on the towering, burnt-orange runway lights at the Pounds Field airport, right where the planes come in from the north over the old Dallas Highway.  It’s been 20 years since he died, but every time I pass that way, I can’t help but scan the metal structure, looking for some sign of his previous existence.

            My parents were divorced before I was old enough to form memories.  And since my family devotedly maintained a façade of perfection, I never asked my mother about the mysterious holes that dotted the surface of my history.   Of course, I was curious about my father. And though I’ve never seen a photo of Billy Jack, I’ve always had a vision, if somewhat blurry, of what he looked like.  In my mind he was a big man, not overly muscular and not too tall.  He had straight dark hair, and I imagine his eyes were hazel.  My mind usually dresses him in khakis and a white t-shirt, and I’m always trying to freshen him up a bit, you know, to sort of shake out the wrinkles and make him a little snappier, maybe give him a more stylish hair-cut.

            But this all sounds perhaps a bit too romantic.  In reality I had no more desire to see Billy Jack than Mamma did to let the Fuller Brush Man in our front door.  I had grown up terrified of the notorious door-to-door salesman because every time he rang the bell, Mamma refused to answer the door, and kept us quiet so he would think no one was home.  And I was even more afraid of Billy Jack. You see, I had heard stories that I was not supposed to hear, but that my grandmother couldn’t keep herself from sharing with me. 

I spent a lot of time with Nanny when I was young, and while I can’t say we were close, we understood each other.  I understood that she liked having me to keep her company, but also that she resented the fact that Mamma spent a lot of time traveling with my stepfather instead of taking care of her children.  Her understanding of me must have included some recognition of my curiosity about my real father because she would occasionally offer me an unsolicited installment about him. This was usually something almost unbearably frightening and told in a huskier than normal voice that seemed ever on the verge of slipping slightly out of control.

            “Your mother came in one day carrying you on one hip and James Allen on the other.”  (She always called Bubba and me by our full Christian names.)  “It was in the middle of August but she was wearing a turtleneck sweater.  And not one of those lightweight ones either.  A thick, black turtleneck sweater.”

            After a pause, which could have been for the sake of effect or an indicator that she was truly overcome, (I tend to believe it was mostly for emotional manipulation since this was not the first time she had told me this story) she continued.  “I could tell Glenda had been crying.  And she wanted me to keep you kids for the weekend.”  

Nanny was scraping potatoes in a bowl of water, and at this point in her story, the rhythm of the blade against the wet brown skins grew silent as she shook her thin-from-too-many-sharpenings paring knife in the air between us for emphasis. 

“I didn’t come right out and ask, (her jabbing knife marked the meter) but I knew what that shirt was attempting to hide.”

She looked at me as though there was no need to finish the story, and she was right.  I already knew the ending, but she couldn’t help herself, so she continued.

“I’d seen the bruises before.  Finger-shaped bruises… wrapped clean ‘round her throat…”

Then, as though she hadn’t given me enough to chew on, Nanny cut a coin-sized sliver of raw potato and thrust the pale, transparent offering in my direction.

**********

Every Saturday morning Bubba and I parked ourselves parallel to each other in front of the TV and waited for Sky King’s twin engine Cessna, “The Songbird,” to blaze across the screen “from out of the clear blue of the Western sky,” bank sharply away from the camera, and climb toward the heavens.  We were drawn to the heroic main character as predictably as dust particles were attracted to the surface of the TV screen.  The magnetism was understandable.  Sky was one of the good guys.  With the help of his niece, Penny, and his nephew, Clipper, he used his skills as a clear thinking pilot to assist local law enforcement agencies each week as they tracked down a variety of smugglers, bandits and spies around the fictitious town of Grover City, Arizona.  Though my brother and I never came right out and admitted it, we longed to have a real-life hero of this same caliber in our own lives.  

But things are not always the way we imagine them to be.  A few years later my grandfather heard that Sky King was making a guest appearance with the circus at the fair grounds outside our town.  I was ten and Bubba was twelve, and though we hadn’t watched the show in a several years, we still had lots of adventure-filled memories and were eager to see this larger-than-life figure in person.

I had been to the circus once before.  It had been in Dallas and it was an elaborate three-ring show that we viewed from up high in the padded seats of a comfortable stadium.  But the Carson and Barnes circus was a completely different experience.  The make-shift arena offered only one ring formed of gray boards placed loosely end to end, and the seats that surrounded it were splintery wooden bleachers jammed so close together that no one could walk between them once they were filled with curious spectators.  When one of the plodding elephants circling the perimeter broke free of its trainer and wandered into the stands, I was ready to leave.  But we had come to see Sky King, so we waited. 

I think I had imagined that Sky would zoom out of the skies, make a dramatic landing, and shake hands with each of his adoring fans.  It never occurred to me that he was really a middle-aged actor named Kirby Grant who was rapidly nearing the end of his career.  The others in the audience must have also been unaware, because when Sky King entered the ring on a wave of anticipation, dressed in a dapper white cowboy suit, the crowd went wild.  As he began to entertain them with his sharpshooting skills,  they were satisfied that he was still a star and that his smile was almost as bright as they had remembered.  But during the finale things fell apart.

I have to admit I was watching the audience as much as I was paying attention to the show, so I didn’t realize at first what was happening.  Sky had been shooting balloons out of a clown’s hand when the atmosphere became suddenly and uncomfortably quiet.  In their excitement, the circus-goers hadn’t been willing to acknowledge that their hero wasn’t using real bullets.  The clown had been doing a pretty good job of pinching the balloons in synch with the gunshots.  But then one of the balloons failed to explode.  At first the crowd thought Sky had missed.  Then they saw the clown frantically trying to pop the balloon.  Within a matter of seconds cheers turned to restlessness, then  restlessness turned to booing.  I will never forget the look on Kirby Grant’s face.  He retired from the circus later that year.

In the following years, Grant spent much of his time raising money for a variety of charities.  His health declined, but even after suffering a massive heart attack in 1978 which resulted in the suspension of his pilot’s license, he continued serving the public and making appearances. 

Grant was killed in a car accident on October 30, 1985.  He was on his way to watch a launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger at Cape Canaveral where he was to be honored by the shuttle astronauts for his achievements in encouraging aviation and space flight.

Earlier that same year the other pilot from my childhood died.  I hadn’t actually seen my real father since I was three, but he had been in touch with Bubba, and I had heard stories from my brother about how Billy Jack had stopped drinking and was trying to turn his life around.  Then one day he was at the lake with some friends; he was playing catch in the water with the kids when he had a heart attack and sank under the surface.

Over the years I have learned that imaginary figures and fictional situations can’t ever really fill an empty heart, and the plot lines of our lives are seldom as simplistic as we imagine them to be.  Sometimes I feel guilty that I had more compassion for Sky King than I did for my own father.  But I have also learned to be gentle with myself.  Perhaps life really is no more than a series of touch and go landings, and no matter how much we practice, we just keep getting bounced back into the sky to try again and again.