There is a snapshot of me at about 2 years old, perched on my seated father's extended leg like a jockey on a horse. My hands are held loosely in his. My father’s hair reaches his collar, appropriate for a liberal academic in the early 1970s. He has full sideburns, an audacity that once made my grandmother exclaim, “Why, Charlie! You look like a hippie.”
We are in the living room in St. Paul next to the antique Danish spinning wheel and clogs my parents took with them from continent to continent on their student missionary travels. On the wall behind us is an explorer’s map of the eastern hemisphere, framed and hung as decoration.
In the old snapshot, I’m grinning broadly as my dad bounces me up and down, singing the French country tune “A da da! Sur le cheval de bon papa”
Sometimes, in the evenings, my father would sit in the basement and listen to his record collection, which ranged from symphonies to choral music to Peter, Paul and Mary and the Beatles.
When I was eight, my dad taught me the basics of drafting and carpentry—his own fathers’s trade—building a sturdy plywood and lumber playhouse for me in the back yard, complete with a pitched, tar shingled roof.
My parents had traveled the globe and taught me how to have sincere conversation and share a meal as comfortably with a Hmong refugee from war-torn Laos as with a member of Congress. I was taught which fork to use, the purpose of a caviar spoon, and what to say or not say to a server during a six-course meal. I also learned to eat fried okra with my hands, and how to dig into a pot of fiery hot stewed chicken using a handful of sticky rice as a utensil.
My father taught me the art of storytelling. My childhood friends and I would beg him again and again to tell us about the time grandaddy Johnson got four flat tires. My family’s oral history was rich.
The night I came out to my father as gay, he wept and embraced me, not completely understanding what it all meant, but affirming me as a worthy and loved young man.
For all of this, I am grateful.
I am grateful for my father's simple humility. He recognized his own faults and was familiar with the words "I'm sorry”.
He taught my five elder siblings and me that emotional vulnerability could be a man's strength, not his weakness. Emotionality was ok. In our home, it was permissible for a man to cry. More than once, my father reminded me that being a pacifist doesn’t make one a passive-ist.
He was finally felled by the ravages of a disease he passed on to me through genes and by behavior—the disease of alcoholism and addiction. But my father died sober and spent the last years of his life as an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I remember, during his fading days, asking my father about the AA process of making amends.
He told me he was dying with nothing unresolved, no aching wrong unaddressed. He said that forgiveness was an essential part of loving someone, and forgiveness was greatest gift I could give anyone, including myself.
Today I honor him.
