He was born on this day, February 14th, in 1956 and died August 17th, in 2009. He was my father, and neither of us ever knew very much about each other. We weren't truly estranged for most of that time, and when I was younger I saw him most weekends, that being one of the terms of the divorce my parents went through.

I know very little of his general biography. I never felt inclined to ask him about it, and my mother generally tried to avoid speaking about him to us because she didn't want to be seen as "poisoning us" against him. Around his family, he was given broad social control, or at least held it in the presence of his generally cowed relatives that we saw interacting with him. Stories of his past were not brought up very often, and when they were they were met with his criticism for their inaccuracies or the failings of the other actors in the story to be any better than himself. So there wasn't an atmosphere conducive to learning about him, and I rarely found myself wondering about how the things that were came about as they were. The requisite allegations of sexual abuse (perhaps I am kidding myself when I say that they, allegations or otherwise, are common in most families?) that I heard mentioned at times were of course incredibly tabboo subjects, and the prevailing attitude of "let's not talk about why certain members of the family are only around during large family gatherings and never seen otherwise" may have contributed to a general cultural unwillingness to delve into the past.

What I do know about him I will now try to put down in writing, as a first step toward fulfilling my promise to myself at the time of his death. I will try to be factual, but all I have are snatches of anecdotes I heard and remember hearing and other glimpses. His surviving family members or his widow could presumably help to fill in many of the gaps in my knowledge, but as yet I am not so motivated that I will break my general silence to his family in order to get it. One of the problems with my little project is the dislike I hold toward both him and his (my) family, if not outright contempt.

As such, my objectivity is limited, and this will largely sound, I predict, less like a eulogy than an excoriation. The promise I made was focused on a more fair treatment than that, and years down the line I aim to mold, edit, and continue to write on the subject until I am satisfied that I have arrived at, if not a paean to a man who did some things well and others poorly and died relatively young, then a portrait that shows him as the human being I suspect was present all along beneath the layers of self-doubt, fear, and unwillingness to listen that characterized the majority of his behavior. I owe him that much, to try to understand him and to tell of him to others after his death, and hopefully to arrive at a better understanding of myself along the way. In this way, I will bring us closer together. After spending most of my life pushing him away, going so far as to stop speaking him entirely in what turned out to be the final years of his life, even when I had strong suspicions he wasn't going to last much longer, this is the only option I have to attempt any kind of reconciliation.

All that said, short of the narrative of his death, I am a bit short on material at present. That's what I get for going off on this project half-cocked. I'll rattle off what facts I can recall outside of that, since that will be it's own post. Stylistically, I wonder if I should have lead with that.

He grew up in southern Oregon, in the general neighborhood of Medford. I don't know the names of any schools he attended there. He played trombone then, and still had the instrument years later. I do know that he wanted to play football, but his parents, my enigmatic (and also early to die at age 56) grandfather and now-nearly dead grandmother, refused to allow him to play because it was too dangerous. According to my mother, he resented them for that decision well into adulthood. He took a lot more interest in me during the two years of high school that I was on the football team. Instead of football, in high school he ran cross country, played basketball, and may have played tennis in the spring. Or he did track. I know he and his sister both would take me, my sister, and two cousins to play tennis at times, and he seemed to know enough about it and have enough equipment for it then that I presume he played in high school or else picked it up early on in his life afterward.

His parents were church-goers, and thus so was he. One anecdote that filtered down to me, I forget where from, is that once at church he was caught using the ventilation ducts to spy on the women's restroom. I don't know exactly how old he was then. He was also a regular participant in "youth group" activities organized by local churches, and through these he met my mother. Famously, a car ride that resulted in her seated on his lap for the trip lead to their romantic entanglement. He met his widow in a singles group at his megachurch in southern Oregon, after talking his way into the goup meant for people in their 30s, though he was past 50 at that point. He was a regular churchgoer throughout his life, going so far as to listen to taped sermons from his church when driving on Sundays and unable to attend personally. The churches he preferred had "Assembly of God" written on them, and as far as I know these can be called "Pentecostal" churches. He was profoundly opposed to homosexuality based on his religious indoctrination, which made my sister being a lesbian a significant strain on their relationship.

In high school he earned the nickname "Crash Crane" for himself, due to his incredible ability to total cars he was driving. Reportedly, after the third car, he was not allowed to drive for a period of time, because the insurance companies would not cover him. These incidents were never his fault, something he and others acknowledged, though in this case others said so sarcastically whereas he seemed to believe that the circumstances were more to blame. I believe one totalling had him driving a car into a river, either when a bridge was literally out and he failed to stop, or when a bridge broke underneath the vehicle. Another involved a bee or other yellow and black flying stinging insect (there are many varieties in southern Oregon, none of which endear that awful place to me) in the car. The third, if three they were, I think somehow involved pulling out of a parking lot and getting sideswiped. I was never present for any collisions of his that I can recall, but the man was an avid and consistent speeder. He routinely drove roughly 20 MPH over the speed limit. Later on in his life he took a job with some kind of car racing outfit that didn't turn out very well, as I understand it. He subscribed to several car related magazines, and according to his widow enjoyed reading consumer reports, especially when they concerned cars.

He did not spend money well. I always found this a bit odd, considering that his professional trade in life was accounting. Come to think of it, he rarely spent anything well, time or money. He rarely seemed to be in good financial order. Perhaps part of that was his obligation to pay child support to my mother, but I don't think that amount alone would have been sufficient to utterly overturn one's finances in their own right. Paying for the divorce probably didn't help. It's a bit of a mystery. Large purchases especially seemed to have been his downfall. For all his love of consumer reports (perhaps born of these fiascoes), the cars he bought never seemed to work out well for him. The tiny white sports car he bought just before the divorce, according to my mother, was the result of his going to the dealership "just to look around". He was "forced" to buy the car because he "lowballed" the salesman, who agreed to the price. It wasn't long before he sold it, I forget exactly why. He would buy another Mazda later in life, a Miata that he bought while I was in high school and that passed to my sister. She was forced to sell it almost immediately due to mechanical problems that were more widothan the car. He bought an RV to live out of while working for the racing company, which I heard was in sorry shape and seemingly unsellable. The last house he bought with his widow was an ugly and poorly designed monstrosity. I stayed in it for a few days after he died. His widow is now losing it to foreclosure, I believe. After he died I had no involvement in the settling of his financial affairs, but I believe the house was put up for sale not long after he died. A historically bad housing market probably didn't help things in that regard.

I never once saw him touch alcohol. This occurred to me today, actually. I'm a bit surprised that I never realized it until now, but I also wasn't interacting with him much at all by the time I had it readily available and it became normal to see it and talk about it with other people. I had very little idea that it existed for a large portion of my life. My mother bought beer a few times over the course of years after the divorce (which furnished as bait for snail traps in the garden she maintained, as she put it, "I don't like killing them, but at least I know they die happy"). Not that she was drinking constantly, it was just that my father didn't allow it in the house when they were together. How my mother acquired a taste for beer in spite of that (she married my father when she was 17) I will have to ask her. The day after he died, his widow lobbied for the purchase of "adult beverages" to which my sister and I tried very hard not to assent to too strongly. I never asked him about it, but as with most of his seemingly Puritanical behaviors or views, I suspect the influence of religious motivations. Noah gets drunk in the Bible, and it is bad that he did so, therefore, you can never drink alcohol. Such sound reasoning surely deserves our respect!

He washed out of the Air Force Academy at some point. I think he got a degree in accounting from the University of Oregon, or else I don't know he came by his love for their football team other than by living in Eugene for a few years. He enrolled in Washington State University's MBA program, and failed to complete the requirements necessary to be awarded the degree. According to my mother, he blamed her for failing to support him (read: write his dissertation for him). He seemed to specialize in accounting for food companies, doing stints with Borden and another food company that either bought or was bought by Borden, a chemical company called Kanto (Japanese, I think), Harry & David for several years, and then the car racing thing was his last line of work, so far as I know. At one point we very nearly moved to Nebraska because of a job offer out there that fell through only after we had sold our house.

He had two children. We were born large, healthy, and with the accepted numbers of limbs and digits. The oldest, a daughter, lives in Long Beach, California with her partner (or maybe they haven't moved in together, I forget). She has worked in a variety of special education oriented schools or done other kinds of childcare (in-house nanny?) mostly. She has, I think gotten a bachelor's in education and is working on other accredtations, potentially a master's. She "came out" around the age of 17 or 18, and tried hard to demand acceptance from her father and his family, to at best mixed results. She converted to Catholicism around the same age, but not long before coming out, which was met with only slightly less enthusiasm. His younger child, a son, was much more well-behaved by comparison, neither converting to outlandish relgions nor seeming inclined to live an alternative lifestyle. His son played a variety of sports growing up, including football, and was very successful academically, receiving top grades in high school and attending a prestigious private liberal arts college. Reportedly, he was proud of his son's well-rounded intellectual attainment, saying that while he was only good at math, his son was good at math in addition to being gifted in other areas. After his son graduated from college, he received no further communications from him. He died not knowing, indeed wondering, why his son didn't want to talk to him.