Not a log cabin on a dark and stormy night, but not a bad start

It was the first day of summer vacation when my parents dragged me inside to tell me the news: I was adopted, by my father, anyway. I was 11 years old.

This was a big deal for my folks. They had speeches prepared; they still loved me, my dad was still my dad, nothing was going to change.

I didn’t care. All I could think about was how much fun my friends, Joey and Doug, were having outside in the summer sun while I was stuck in here listening to grownups drone on about stuff that didn’t matter. My folks’ entire presentation probably lasted only ten minutes or so, but it seemed to go on forever.

All I cared about was whether they were going to keep feeding me and whether I could continue living under their roof. Once I’d been assured both of these conditions  would endure, I was ready to boogie back to the great outdoors.

I was not a particularly introspective kid. It never occurred to me to ask who my “real” father was. I knew my mom had been married before, for a few weeks when she was only 17, to a guy named Bud. I assumed this  Bud fella was my biological father.

But honestly, I didn’t care. I just wanted to return to my game of kick the can. Eventually, no doubt wondering how any kid could be so incurious about his origin story, my folks turned me loose.

It was 20 years before the topic came up again. And that was only when my grandmother mentioned to my wife, a nurse, that Bud had had epilepsy. As a nurse, my wife knew that disease is often passed from father to son and – appropriately, I think – she freaked out.

It was only then that I began to hear the real story regarding the conditions surrounding my own inception. I relate the facts to you now only because all the principals involved in the story (save myself) have long ago departed this mortal coil.

Bud, my grandma said, was not my real father after all. My mother knew I believed this and never bothered to correct me. The reasons for this omission, I was to learn, were numerous.

It took some coaxing, but my grandmother slowly and reluctantly shared the true story.

My mother had married Bud on a dare. They were on their first date at the time.

Bud, only a year older than his new child bride, worked as a nurse; my mother was a beautician. Not surprisingly, the marriage was something less than a resounding success. It was also of very short duration.

A few weeks after taking her wedding vows, my mom skipped town. Bud filed for divorce. No one knew where my mother had hitchhiked off to until nearly a year later.

Turns out she had run away to sunny California, where she had landed a job as a “dancer” at a night club in the city of angels. (My grandmother was rather vague on this part of the story, but I’m assuming my mom wasn’t dancing with the Bolshoi Ballet and that tassels were likely a component in her work uniform.)

While living in an efficiency apartment above the night club, my mom met a young, Greek merchant marine. A customer at the club.

Mom and her Greek sailor lived together for a few months. Then he went back to sea and my mother came back to Detroit.

A week later she learned of my impending arrival.

So.

It took me a month or so to work up the courage to ask my mom for additional details. Some she gave up, some she never would, no matter how much I bugged her.

She claimed she couldn’t remember my biological father’s name, which is obviously baloney. I mean, she lived with the guy for months. She remembered his name. But I never learned it.

He was handsome, college educated and a good dancer. That’s about all I ever got out of her. In truth, it’s all I ever really needed.

Until recently, when my doctor wanted a detailed family medical history.  I could give him only half. I’d like that info, sure, but not as much as I like having an interesting origin story.

Mtaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 745-9530

I’ll never rake again without thinking of my old man

A couple weeks ago I wrote a column about parenting. In it, I mentioned my old man. The comment was peripheral, at best, to the point of the essay. I barely gave it a thought.

I’ve thought about it a lot in the past few days, though. It turns out that column was the last thing — of mine, at least — my dad would ever read. He died a few days later. Something like a stroke, sudden, unexpected.

In that column, I wrote the following: I love my old man, but as a child, I feared him, too. He put up with exactly zero BS from myself, my brothers and my sisters. I often thought he was unfair and sometimes he was. 

But with him, I knew where I stood. I had my part to play in the family and he had his. If I was bored, he didn’t rush to the psychologist’s office to see what he, as a parent, was doing wrong. He handed me a rake and put me to work in the back yard until I wasn’t bored anymore.

He mentioned that column after it was published, when I went to see him in the hospital. By then he was moving in and out of consciousness and was thwacked out on morphine; I hung around the hospital room for hours, hoping he would wake long enough to speak with me.

Nobody looks good on a hospital bed, but my old man looked bad; gray, tired, used up. Shrunken, somehow. Tubes and wires snaked into him and out of him, to help him breathe, to monitor his vital signs, to deliver drugs.

His breath hitched in small, shallow gasps. His hand felt cold, frail, insubstantial, like the fluff of an August dandelion waiting to be carried away on any errant breeze.

A moan escaped his parched throat as he swam up toward consciousness.

“Sharon,” he said, calling for my mother in his semi-delirium, forgetting she died two years ago. His fragile hand constricted slightly around mine. His eyes remained closed.

“No dad,” I said. “It’s Mike.”

“Big Mike or little Mike?” he said. A joke. “Little Mike” is my 10-year-old nephew, my brother William’s son.

“Big Mike,” I said. “Glad to hear you’re feeling well enough to be a smartass.”

I knew his windows of awareness were by this time opening but briefly, so I quickly told him about the crowds of friends and relatives that had come round to see him as he slept, how the whole family had stopped by during the course of the afternoon. He either didn’t hear me or wasn’t interested.

“I read that column you wrote about me handing you a rake when you were bored as a kid,” he said. “Pretty funny. I wanted to share it with your mother, but … she’s gone, you know.”

“I know, Dad,” I said. His grip, already tenuous, weakened further. He was fighting to remain awake, losing the battle. Then for just a moment, his eyes cleared and he focused on my face.

“Get a rake,” he mumbled, smiling, drifting off. A few hours later he was gone.

“Get a rake” were the last words my old man spoke to me. Somehow, I like that better than “I love you” or “Goodbye, cruel world.” “Get a rake” is … I don’t know … more honest. It’s closer to summing up the often complicated relationship I had with my father.

I’m really going to miss him, especially when I’m bored. Or holding a rake.

Buy my book, "Looking at the Pint Half Full," at Robbins Book List in Greenville, or in eBook format at Amazon.com.