my dad

My dad is an amazing person. Yeah we do our fair share of fighting, mostly because we both possess the same terrible quality of reading all sorts of things into what the other is saying, but at the end of the day even if our conversations are just him screaming at me, I somehow (well, most of the time) feel enlightened, as if some wise eminent being has decided to grace me with a snippet of some greater knowledge or truth.

In addition to and going hand-in-hand with this is the feeling that ever more often these days, he makes me feel like I'm a real adult. Not all of the time--and boy he lets me know when I'm not acting like one--but often enough that it's changing our relationship and the way I see myself. He reminds me constantly that probably the biggest part of being an adult is having to face the sucky parts of life, and get away from the idea that life is like a Disney flick.

That's scary to me. So what helps is Dad's firm voice saying, "Shit happens. And you have to go on."

The latest thing he told me was a story his brother, my uncle Punk, told about when he was in the navy. My dad loves to use real-life stories as metaphors for life and how to live it. Uncle Punk used to be on ships that would sometimes hit very rough waters. The ships were designed with a certain amount of ballast in the hull, with a monitor that would detect how much the ship would list during a storm. In heavy storms, the ship would often list far enough to one side that water would enter the smokestacks and engine room. The ballast was what would enable the ship to come upright again, and as long as that happened, the ship's pumps could expel the water that was taken in, and the ship would stay afloat. There were times, though, that Uncle Punk and his crewmates saw the monitor's alarm light flash on, meaning that the ship was leaning too far over to one side and for too long, and they weren't sure if the ship would be able to right itself. Happily in their case, it always did.

Dad wanted me to see that it is important to have that ballast inside of oneself--that self-appreciation and love and confidence and strength that enables us to right ourselves even when we are listing and taking on water. I like this metaphor because the ballast is within the ship. A reminder of where one's ultimate strength has to come from.

Dad, I thank you for our conversation today. I felt a little frightened when you said bluntly that well, bad and unfortunate things do happen, and they happen to millions of people every day. Sometimes I do not like to think about that. But a greater part of what I felt was solidarity with you and solidarity with the world at large, and I felt strangely comforted with this knowledge. I guess I felt that if everyone else can deal with life's pains and aches and so much worse--I mean hell, just look at Myanmar, China and our own Midwest--I can, too. Maybe I'm just a little bit less afraid, and for that I am grateful.