It has taken me a while to come around to posting this...

Surreal, it was. Multi-line road, clear and cold morning. Dark. I think he must have not heard the cars. All three of the cars coming off that light were electrics. Two Teslas and a Kia. They were racing I think. Not sure. I was behind them by a few cars, though not so far back I couldn't see what happened.

Some guy, maybe homeless - I don't know - just ran out into the road from the left and the center turn lane... From my side of things... He clearly was intending to get to the other side; his body language and the impetus of his gait made that certain.  He never even looked up. He never seemed to acknowledge the cars. They never seemed to acknowledge him.

Next thing I see is white tennis shoes. Shoes and dust blossoming up and out beneath them. They were Adidas, those shoes. Mother of God, I can't not see them even now. Plain as day. The right one was untied, or had come untied on its way off and up.

Up, over the scene. Up, over to the sidewalk from where the guy had stepped only moments before. It landed upright. I straddled it as I pulled off to the side.
The car in the middle lane was folded in on itself. The driver was locked upright and staring straight ahead. A young guy. He was catatonic with his eyes open. Shock.

The guy he hit was forty or fifty feet in front of him, the line of jetsom trailing behind from the point of unity with the frunk of the Tesla. I followed that line in a sprint and in slow motion all at once. I passed a coffee cup, off-brand plastic job with an absent broken handle, contents steaming in a tan puddle that transcribed the mug's final loping arc to where it rested now. I passed what looked to be a tangle of cables - maybe wired headphones balled up in a pocket. I passed a out-turned backpack; an old-looking Jansport job in Burgundy, though I don't know whether the wear had been there or had been deposited in the events that had just unfolded.

I got to him and instantly, innately, knew he was gone. Eyes wide open, face far too serene for the pain his bent form would be in otherwise. No steam at his mouth and nose. No sounds there either.

The paramedics were on him like lightning. An ambulance was a couple of cars behind me and in the lane on the opposite side of things when it all went down. They were out so fast they didn't even turn on their lights. I moved to the side to let them work. I had forgotten how much like the movies it all was... They were still unwilling to give up when I walked back to my car and left, straddling that white Adidas on my way out.

When I was 25, I had my identity stolen.  It took a few years, several disputed purchase investigations, and locking my credit files to finally move past the financial frustrations caused by that event and I took from it a very important lesson:  No matter how hard you work to build your financial self, someone out there at any moment can tear it all down.

I heard someone say something interesting once:  "It takes distance to gain perspective".  At the time those words were shared, the speaker was wanting me to see the light as it played through the leaves of a tree and was just telling me to back up a bit to take it all in.  It took me way longer than I'd care to admit to realize the depth of those words.  I needed perspective from the moment to gain insight, which meant I needed time between it and myself.  My father, for instance, left this realm almost 11 years ago.  he is buried some 50 miles from my home so it could be said that my father waits some 50 miles away from me.  It can also be said that my father waits some 11 years separated from his son. Oh how I lament the comparative absence of romantic thinkers who might first conceive the latter.

Much in this way, "identity theft" can be thought of as something much more profound than the accumulation of illicit financial charges perpetrated in our name.  It can, with the proper perspective, be thought of as the result of faulty conceptions of ourselves and others.  For ourselves in the sense that the failure to properly understand who we are in as objective a manner as we can manage robs ourselves of honest self acceptance and proper integration.  For others, in the sense that failing to see those around us as honestly and as completely as we can robs them of true acceptance and real appreciation at best and utterly decimates them at worst.

What then happens when someone very close to you inadvertently steals your identity because their own experiences and traumas have taught them to perceive you incorrectly?  A personal reflection:  Someone very dear to me was put through metaphorical hell in life by the men closest to them.  A father and a former spouse each took their toll on this person, slowly poisoning their understanding of how men act and what those actions mean to the point that they automatically perceive every action of mine through this bent lens.  Despite wanting to believe me to be honest and possessing of integrity, and even professing this belief at times, my identity is stolen in each and every instance in which they are convinced beyond reason that I must be exactly like the men they've known before me. No matter what I do or do not do, I am guilty before I do or do not do it.  The mold of a scoundrel is set before me and I am merely poured and pressed to fit it.  I cannot express to you how that feels beyond saying it greatly hurts, is profound in its loneliness, and simply ought not be.

When I was a boy I used to love to watch my father work around the house on the weekends.  He was always a handy sort of guy.  When I was very small, he was ground crew for Eastern Airlines in Atlanta.  After a massive heart attack or two rendered him unable to work and once he had completed a rather long period of recovery, he busied himself with the sorts of things any self-reliant and capable man might take up to occupy his time.  This increase in time spent working around the house suited me just fine.  My dad seemed to truly enjoy having me around as he worked and I soaked up every bit of knowledge and wisdom he put out.  He eventually took to accompanying my mother on her job, one she took up when he was laid low, and continued assisting with that right up to a few years before his death in 2013.  For a few years though, he was home a lot and I will always cherish those times.

Back then, he would sometimes catch me acting somewhat dismissively with something - banging a tool around too hard or breaking a toy for no good reason - and he'd look me square in the eye and say "you know, things last a lot longer if you take care of them".  I would hear disappointment in his words and modify my behavior for a little while but they didn't really sink in back then.  They didn't matter in quite the way he wanted them to.  I see in my own children the haze of non-understanding when I find myself parroting those words to them now.  Still, I come back to my father's words more and more as I age...

"Things last a lot longer if you take care of them."

I don't know whether my father internalized those words the way I now do... I can't know, because of the cancer that finally stilled the monolithic spirit he contained, but I like to think he did.  I chose to believe he wasn't just trying to get me to see that the stuff in my life would last longer if I took care of it; he was trying to help me realize that all things would.  The items of possession that each of us accumulate in a lifetime can be cared for in such a way as to reduce their degradation over time, sure, but so could other things.  Resolve, patience, integrity, love, affection, you name it.  All of it can be made to last longer by nurturing and protecting it.  By the same processes, that which harms us in life can also be made to last longer through effort.  Want more suffering?  Add anger into your relationships.  Sprinkle in some good old-fashioned neglect.  Ignore your loved ones in favor of what should be minor pursuits and you'll make an investment in pain that one day not-too-removed from now will return dividends in agony.  Don't waste your limited life by adding hurt and pain to the world around you.  Be instead a clarifying agent that lessens the sorrows of life, for yourself and for others.

Today's society of throw away things and throw away commitments has no room for my father's wise words of old, but that's just the template.  If you choose to accept the pattern that's presented to you, then the pattern of throw away and shallow neglect is what you will receive.  Dare to be different.  Take care of the things, the people with whom you share them, the relationships and commitments you make, and the meanings and purposes of your life and they - all of them - will last a lot longer.

Kiddo and I were out running errands yesterday.  A thunderstorm came up so we stopped by a store to let it pass and to grab a few things that were on our shopping list.

He has caught bits and pieces of stories from friends and family over the years that have made him curious about some things I’ve gone through.. These are things details about which I have been careful to reveal slowly as he matures. I want him to know my life and to know how I came to be the dad he loves but I want to give it to him in pieces he is equipped to handle. I think he has fallen into sync with this rhythm and so asks me about something he’s heard from time to time to see if I’ll tell him anything new. Yesterday was one of those times.  After we talked for a bit, he got quiet for a little while and then asked me a question he had never asked me before.  The conversation that resulted went something very much like this:

“Daddy, why do you remember the bad things that happened to you so much?”

“What do you mean, kiddo?”

“When I ask about you growing up, sometimes you really seem to think about the stuff that I ask that is bad. You get really quiet and I can tell you’re thinking about it for a long time.”

“Oh, I think I understand what you’re asking… give me a minute or two to think about how I want to answer your question..”

A couple of minutes passed in relative silence.  We walked through the isles of the store as we continued our shopping.

“Son, the good moments in your life aren’t the ones that change you. They’re the ones you try to hold onto and remember warmly but they don’t really shape who you become. They nourish you and give you strength to grow but they don’t grow you. The bad things, the worst things, they are what widen and deepen who you are because those experiences are what chip away at who you were and expose all the people you might become. Notice that.  I said they expose who you might become.  That’s because how you choose to face the dark things in your life determines in what direction those experiences grow you.  Those choices decide some aspect of who you will be from that point forward.  Life is full of choices like that.  I guess, when you see me thinking about something bad I’ve experienced and I seem like I’m thinking really hard for a long time, that’s me thinking back on how I came away from that bad thing. It’s me asking myself if I’m happy about how I let that thing grow me and, sometimes, it’s me trying to correct how I let that thing affect me when I wish I had handled it differently.”

“Are you happy about how your bad things affected you?”

“How I let them affect me? Some of them, yeah. There are some I wish I had handled differently and I’ll probably always carry that regret with me.”

“Can you change how a bad thing grows you later on?”

“It’s hard, kiddo, because it’s all about habit.   You get into some habit from how you let those things affect you.  It’s easiest to react to things in kind.  Tell a joke and you laugh.  Get your heart broken and you cry, ya know?  When a bad thing comes and you get hurt, it’s easiest to be angry and bitter.  In fact, it’s unavoidable.  That’s the gut instinct we have.  The problem is, if you let yourself stay angry and bitter when a bad thing happens, it starts a habit and habits are really hard to break.  Some habits build up, too, until you’re grown up and sad about how your life has gone because you let the bad things in your life program your responses to put you in a negative place. You can’t change how a bad thing has already grown you, but you can force yourself to correct and start growing in a direction you’re more happy with from that point forward.  It takes a lot more time and energy to do it that way and you never get back the time you spent already.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes, son?”

“I’m happy with who you are. I’m glad you’re my daddy.”

“Thanks, kiddo. I’m glad I’m your daddy, too.”

That is my son and that is the relationship we have and this is how awesomely fortunate I am to be his dad.

It had been a long day.  His mind was still swimming from work and the traffic of his commute.  Even after all these years, the level of spite with which other drivers appeared to sling their cars around had never lost its capability to stun him.  He closed the door on the sounds of the street outside.  He turned the knob to engage the bolt.  He slowly spun to face the foyer and absently dismissed his keys into the table-top bowl resting to his right.  This dance of his, from the closing of the door to the deposition of his keys, he had done a few thousand times by now; his silent ritual signaling to himself an end to the stresses of the day.

The room, though welcoming, seemed off somehow.  He had gotten home a bit later than usual, so the space was darker than it ought to be, but that wasn’t it.  Something seemed to be missing.  Not a thing, really, just something seemed different.  What was it?  Ah, yes.  The clock.  His father’s grandfather clock wasn’t ticking.  “Looks like I was forgetting something after all” he half-chuckled to himself.  The night before, he hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that he’d omitted something important from his routine.  “This job really is taking a bite out of me, huh?” he said to the open air as he walked across the dim, sunset-traced room.  He hadn’t held this job all that long and he resolved again to use the time off once it kicked in.  Keeping his nose to the grindstone was starting to wear old on him.

He wondered sometimes if his father had known what he was doing when he left him that clock.  He doubted it was deliberate.  Anachronistic things had taken on a weight to him not extended to the throw away things of today.  Perhaps his dad had seen a glint of that in him, but most likely he hadn’t known that about his boy.  Still, the impact was real.

Once a week he put on his white cotton gloves and hoisted those brass chains and weights.  Once a week he minded the gain on the mechanism and adjusted the time.  Once a week, amidst all that fiddling, he found himself unable not to think of his dad.  He had watched him so many times tinkering with this clock.  He remembered the man so many times noting the grain of the wood, the curve of the pendulum, and the tone of the chime when he closed the cabinet.  He saw his father’s attentive hands, his careful eyes, and how he inclined his ear to the sounds of the thing; the same scene repeated some thousands of times and stretched like a backdrop across his childhood memories.  It was one of his father’s carefully attended-to rituals and one he celebrated himself to this day.

Ritual, he had inherited from his father.  That man made a ritual out of everything he did.  Driving, shopping, coming home, all the simple absent-minded things every person does, his father did mindfully.  To this day, when he caught himself focused on not much of anything, he centered his thoughts on the thing he was doing in the moment.  That practice had been the suggestion of his dad more times than he could count. “Attention is the one thing we all crave more than anything else, son.  It's currency between people and is one you can earn through practice alone.  It's highly valued because so few of us know how to spend it well”.  The older man reminded him of this lesson dozens of times, whenever he caught his son doing something excessively idle with his time.  Yet for all his father’s reinforcements of the point, it never stuck with him.  Then all at once, on a cool autumn day, the older man was gone.  On that day, experience had made a ready heart and the lesson, so many times spoken before, finally found purchase.

When all was set right with his father’s clock, he closed the cabinet and turned the key.  He found his hand resting on the spot where his father had rested his so many times before.  Even if he wasn’t trying to remember his dad in those moments, the reality of the thing pulled his mind backwards and backwards is where his father was now.  He died this day, this month in 2013 and is at rest in the National Cemetery a bit north of where his son now called home.

As the memories flowed up within him, he bowed his head and closed his eyes.  He reflexively held his breath for a moment, some part of him convinced he would drown in the current that was overtaking him.  He thought about his dad.  He thought about his last months with him.  He strained his mind to recall the voice of the man from whom toward the end illness had stolen the faculty of speech.  He allowed himself the slow realization that he was now 55 miles and 9 years downstream of him.  It struck him bittersweet that such a distance he could never hope to regain, and yet in the moments of recognition around that clock he almost saw him.  He almost heard his voice. He almost felt his presence.  He almost forgave himself for squandering so much attention that he could have spent well on the man who loved him so dearly.  He almost forgot the distances between them as he remembered the man whose hand once held an impossibly small version of his own and whose absolute love and steadfast attention had once been his for so long.  “I love you, daddy” he recalled the little boy say, his hand squeezing that of his father’s. “I miss you” added the man who now stood wrapped in memory beside his father’s clock.

Slowly, the torrent subsided, and his attention returned to the present.  Something else had changed in the space around him.  “Hey dad”, a voice deeper than it seemed it should be announced from beside him.  “Hey kiddo” he said to his son who stood now with him in front of the clock.  “Have you ever noticed how rich the grain of this wood is?” he asked to the younger.  “Not really”, the boy replied.  “Son, attention is the one thing we all crave more than anything else.  It's currency between people and is one you can earn through practice alone.  It's highly valued because so few of us know how to spend it well” he said.  The boy half sighed, “Yeah, I know.  You say it all the time, dad.”  “Ha!” he laughed at himself.  “I suppose I do, don’t I?  Hey, I was just about to make something to eat.  Why don’t you come to the kitchen with me and let’s see what we can find.  We can trade stories about the day.”  The younger and the older left the clock and chatted their way down the hall.  The clock ticked softly to the empty room.  It was a thing pregnant with memory and meaning, and a focal point for love and attention. It was a thing to be passed between generations.