I Was Your Son: A Troubled Journey

ISBN-13: 9781492276784 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 90 str.

Tom Cagley

Opis

Why should anyone read this? Because the end effect is restorative and invigorating and because everyone who's ever had a father like this wants to believe there is a happy way out. The author was born in the bottom of the Depression. His early life was normal for the times. By the time he graduated from high school, he'd won the school's golf championship twice, earned many varsity letters in four sports, and had learned to box. But he'd also been touched by death five times --- his mother when he was 16, her brother in the war, and his maternal and paternal grandparents. After high school, he'd gone far away to college, earning As when he had been a C student in high school. During his first year away, his father had remarried, and he hadn't been invited. His father adopted the two children that his new wife brought to the marriage; she adopted two of his three. In college he majored in English, planning to teach high school, and, like the two summers before, had worked away from home the summer before his senior year. He fell in love and left college midway through his last year ---without a degree, ignoring a post graduate scholarship and the career he had planned to pursue. But he'd found a wife. Soon he'd be a father of a baby boy. There would be four more, and he'd begin a forty-year career in the women's retail business, going to the top although secretly colorblind in this vibrantly color-sensitive world. Very early in that career, he called his father and asked him for his blessing on his marriage and his first-born. "You're dead to me," he was told, "and I don't want to ever see you again in my life." And he didn't. It was a lifelong sentence without parole, and he'd just turned 22. He began writing these essays and memories of life with (and without) his father long after his father's unexpected death in 1979. "It took over a decade for the anger at what he'd done to subside," the author said. "We'd never have the reunion I'd prayed for, and all I'd be left with would be questions that could never be answered. Why this or why that or how could you?" Still, he wrote these with an optimistic point of view, rather than rail against facts he could not change, rage against his life as it evolved or try to understand any possible reasons for the steps his father took to cut him out of his life and do it so successfully. And like a well-shot arrow, they fly straight to the heart of the matter, ending on a high note --- in 78 pages. "If I hadn't looked at what happened between us with years of detachment," the author said, "I'd never have been able to raise my six children with the values they have today. I made mistakes along the way," he admitted, "but I never gave up on them or burned a bridge between me and the kids nor ever stopped loving them --- and telling them --- no matter what they did. They were mine forever, and I was theirs for the same length of time." The author wrote "I Was Your Son: A Troubled Journey" in seven parts which generally coincide with the timeline of their lives while both were alive. In the last part, END-GAME, the author posted the last picture anyone has of his father. He is looking directly into the camera and talking to the author directly, saying words he never said to him, ones that would have altered their life together completely.

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