Two of a Kind

Two of a Kind

Kim and I are watching all the episodes of Loudermilk and the episode tonight involved the death of Loudermilk’s wayward father. As Loudermilk is trying to get his life back on track, his estranged father appears out of nowhere and Loudermilk is reminded about what a bad father he has. His father was a philanderer of epic proportions. It also turns out Loudermilk’s addiction problems connect directly to his Dad’s advice back in high school that he should avoid smoking grass and instead just drink alcohol. That great advice reminded me all too well about my own father and the great advice and role model he provided me in my youth. I may have had the distinction of knowing my father even less well than Loudermilk seemed to know his father. I have two great gems to remember my father for. The first is a pair of gold sombrero cuff links that I have actually never has the occasion to wear. He gave me those at the wedding of my oldest sister. For some reason, he also found that was the right time to give me the one piece of advice he had ever given to me. He told me to never let anyone cut my hair except an Italian. I guess he felt that would last me my whole life.

In the show, Loudermilk finds a photo of him and his father with the message on the back of “Two of a kind”. And that was the moment of truth for him. The last person in the world that Loudermilk wants to be like is his absentee father. When he gets the message that his father has died (of unspecified causes), he mentions that his father was 70 years old. As it turns out, my father also died of a massive coronary at age 70. At the time he was living near here in Carlsbad and was walking his dog while he smoked one of his ever-present cigarettes. We buried him at the Mission San Luis Rey, so its a place I can go and visit easily any time I want. But you see, now that I’m also 70, it all feels pretty weird and I may want to wait for next year to do that, if you know what I mean.

I have spent most of my life not thinking too much about my father, but when I do, I think that I want to be sure not to be “two of kind” like him. He was married something like seven times and has at least nine kids that we are currently aware of. I have met all but one, which give me an edge of any of his offspring. And here’s the thing, there isn’t one of those children, all of whom are grown up at this point, who can completely understand why he didn’t care about them more. Strangely enough, I may be one of the only ones of those offspring that hasn’t spent a lot of time worrying about what I missed from my father. I had a strong mother who I admired and gave me the best role model I could ever imagine. And I got to see first hand on one or two occasions just how dysfunctional my father was at his relationships with his children. The one time I brought my oldest son to meet him he showed almost no interest in him and that was as close as I ever got to feeling anger towards him. Mostly I felt sorry for him and I was lucky enough to be able to close the book by paying for his funeral and being the only one to eulogize him as his ashes got interred. It’s a pretty classic story, so much so that Netflix has produced a series where the tertiary storyline sings the same tune.

One of the other characters in the Loudermilk series goes to see one of his ten estranged children and she very politely tells him off by saying that she’s a better person because she has learned the value of human empathy and caring for others by virtue of his neglect. This is a comedy series, so naturally, the idiot father is very happy to learn that he did a good thing for his daughter and that gives him some absurd closure for his lack of attention. In many ways, even though it was just a gag, the reality is that people like that really don’t think the way that empathetic people think, so it probably was less absurd than it was made to look. I have often said that the biggest beneficiaries of my father’s neglect of me as a son are my three children. As much as I was temporarily mortified by my two divorces, mortified because it made me wonder if the apple had not fallen so far from the tree, I worked hard to always give my children both everything they needed and as much time and attention as I could. I may have been an absentee Dad, but I was a very consistent and ever-present absentee Dad who never missed either an event or a scheduled visitation. I sometimes wonder if my three kids see it that way as well, but that is for them to sort through as they ponder their lives.

All that said and done and all my sense that I have had all the cathartic processing anyone would need, I am still a sucker for a good father/son scene in a movie. Perhaps the most impactful one I can recall was in Field of Dreams when Kevin Costner gets the opportunity to have a catch with the younger version of his baseball-playing father. I can recall seeing that movie in Manhattan while I was going through my first divorce and can recall barely being able to get out of the movie theater in my weeping catatonic state. The scene still brings a lump to my throat because baseball was my favorite childhood game, I did actually see one Dodgers game with my father (1963 Dodgers/Giants pennant game with Sandy Koufax on the mound), but I never remember ever having a catch with him.

I’m not sure any of my kids remember playing ball with me either, but they all remember skiing with me, so I guess that will have to do them. They are all good skiers and my daughter, despite being only a so-so enthusiastic skier, has made sure to teach her two daughters how to ski. That makes them the fourth generation of skiers since I learned from my mother, who skied the slopes of Tuckerman’s Ravine back in the old rope tow days of the 1930’s when the sport of downhill skiing began.

So, here I am in my 70th year being reminded of fathers dying at the age of 70. I don’t feel like I’m even close to dying, which I suppose is a good thing, but I have two calls tomorrow with two life settlement companies who may want to buy one of my life insurance policies. That will require me to make sure to tell them every bad thing about my health I can imagine to make them think that my policy is a goldmine that may pay off big for them in the near future. Its a funny thing to have to tell a life insurance salesman all about how you don’t think you will die for many years even though you are buying insurance …just in case. It’s and even funnier thing trying to convince a life settlement underwriter that you could easily get hit by a bus tomorrow and to say it with a degree of earnestness without sounding too morbid. Maybe telling them the “two of a kind” 70-year-old father story would work, but I should probably not bother reminding them that my mother lived to 100, since that might just confuse them.