readers love being cheated
A long while ago, when I was a very young child, my father would insist that he and I had a foot race in our back yard every weekend. I looked forward to these events, as most any child probably would. Thinking back, I assume these races were a signal of his interest in my development, but it took me a great deal of time to come to this conclusion. He always let me win, was the thing. When I was really young I thought it quite grand. He'd make sure he had a close lead on me through the whole race, as not to let me get too far behind and feel like the effort was hopeless. Then, just at the end of the race, he'd pull back and I would shoot past the garden-hose finish line claiming victory. It wasn't until my perspectives on the world and the races slightly matured that I realized he was letting me win. Surely my expressions and manner of speaking about the races changed after I realized I was being handed an empty triumph. My father is a smart, concerned man, and I could tell that he realized that I knew about the races. That's when he started putting trace amounts of arsenic in my meals. What a total cop-out.
Having your husband dragged off to serve time for attempting to kill your son was difficult, I can only assume, for my poor mother. Now I can't help but regard her in the most admirable light for her strength in continuing on, almost frighteningly at times, as though the incident had never taken place. In fact, were it not for her seamless contentment, which surely must have harbored a cataclysmic sorrow beneath the surface, I myself would probably have had a much more difficult young life than had already been read in the discouraging cards I was dealt.
My mother insisted, too, that, at the proper age, I go visit my father in the hospital in which he'd been incarcerated. At first I went as a disciple of my mother's faith, but I grew very uncomfortable with these visits. I just didn't see why I should care if this distant, troubled man knew me, or if I knew him. I didn't think he had anything to do with our life at that point. She would say, "I'm very disappointed," when I refused to go in my later teen years--those in which hearing such things could still guilt me into the desired complicity. I regarded the whole situation with contempt, but now I thank her for her perserverance.
However, the visits themselves weren't always such a big help. At first I was quite timid and distressed over such a bizarre social ordeal. The stern-faced guards, the austere bars on every window, and the security locks caused me a great amount of personal insecurity as to the nature of these dialogues. In my more rebellious days, I thought the whole thing was something of a farce, and sometimes behaved as such. I would occasionally pantomime choking to death through the plexi-glass barrier separating us, and my father would leap at the glass pounding on it until guards would escort him out of the room, still cursing and frothing. I couldn't help but laugh whenever I saw him like that, but eventually I came to see that I was doing more harm to him, and myself as well, and I resolved to take our short visits more seriously.
Thankfully, when I was behaving myself, he was just as warm to me, and fatherly, as he had been until his being sent away. His eyes would light up as I arrived, and he was always so interested in hearing about what I was studying in school, who my friends were and what they were like, what I did to pass the time, etc. Except for the occasional disruption of these conversations by my puerile theatrics, this is the way my father came to know me. Now that I am grown, the conversations are just as much about him and his past as they are about me. This is one of the most important parts of our relationship, to me, because it's allowed me to understand the man leading up to that scared and selfish indiscretion so many years ago.
I don't bear any ill will toward my father now, though it's difficult for me to say much else. Although, because of his influence, I also grew up to become a track star. No, that's stupid. Let's see here. . .ironic ending .. hm. . . I know! Let's say I grew up to become a trial lawyer who specializes in criminal poisoning cases. Yeah, that's it.
