My father on coming to see me graduate from U.S. Army boot camp at Fort Benning. I was eighteen. We sat at an outside table in small pizza parlor located within the confines of the lush, historic Army installation in Georgia. A warm, autumn breeze laced with scents of sweet grass and pine circled the table. My father dabbed his slice of pizza with a paper napkin, explaining with a laugh that the bacon cheeseburger-flavored pizza was "waaaaaaay too greasy" for his liking.
"After your grandma and grandpa divorced, grandpa sorta went off on his own and did his own 'thing,' and my mom remarried, and she focused on her 'new' family, so to speak. I suppose they were all too busy, or preoccupied, or maybe they just didn't care much to see my graduation. With the draft, everyone was shipping off anyways; I may have just been a statistic to them. I always sorta wished my dad, at least, would have come to mine..." My father paused momentarily, "Anyways, I couldn't miss yours."In his twenties and thirties, my father would cross a continent on a motorcycle or by the toss-of-a-thumb, but at the time of my boot camp graduation, my father was not the sort to travel-out on his own. Family vacations or even weekends away with his wife, surely, but as he aged, flying across the United States for a two hour ceremony was not something that he would drop everything to do... But he did.
"I'm proud of you. You're following in your 'old dad's' footsteps!"
I relished his words, and I still do. You see, at that moment my father's simple use of the adjective "proud" was done so in ways quite dissimilar from prior uses. A father is certainly proud when his son or daughter learns to read or when he or she scores a winning goal during a sports event, or even when he or she graduates from high school; but, my father's use of that adjective during that moment was one of the most important words that he ever shared with me.
No comments:
Post a Comment