I was stunned—not just by the question, but by the realization that I had never asked my own father the same thing before he died of cancer when I was my son’s age.
To fill the silence, my son ventured a guess. “You were probably antisocial.”
I fumbled through an answer. “I was fun,” I blurted, almost defensively. “Always up for a beer.”
After my father’s funeral, someone I’d never met introduced himself and told me he’d traveled through Asia with my father after they graduated from college. Really? How did I not know about that trip? About that person?
Or did he only see me as I saw my father: a lawyer who worked in some skyscraper downtown?
But the intimate details are missing from my memory. Who was his best friend? His first crush? What were his passions? And most critically, what was he like? Was he shy, mischievous, a rebel? He never offered. And I never asked.
A musical hero of mine, Soundgarden’s frontman Chris Cornell, once said about parenting that every generation has a responsibility to break the bad cycles it inherits. My father, it seems, repeated them; our emotional distance was his inheritance.
From what I could tell, their relationship was based more on mutual respect, a shared appreciation for their respective professional accomplishments as lawyers, than a deep well of familial love. As a kid, I sat bored stiff through countless conversations about my father’s latest corporate deals. I don’t recall any conversations between my father and grandfather that revealed who they truly were.
That’s the hope, anyway—that my son knows me not just as “Dad,” but as a person. It’s why, the night he was born, I sang to him not “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” but the Grateful Dead’s “Brokedown Palace,” and kept singing my favorites to him at bedtime until he started beating me at chess.
It’s a chance, too, for the kids to see their dads not just as parents, but as people, laughing at old stories about bribing our way to better concert seats, cornering Dickey Betts for an autograph after an Allman Brothers Band show, and gorging on late-night barbecue along the Mississippi blues trail.
And maybe, if we’re doing this right, to ask: what was it like to hang out with you in college?
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