My Father's Eyes

In the wee small hours of the morning, around 2:00 or so, about an hour after I had finally fallen asleep, I was awoken by inane drunken babble outside my door.
"I'm so happy that we're here."
"Yes, I know!"
"I'm going in bed. I'm in bed!"
"Oh man. That looks so good."
And so on. The two babbled like that for the better part of an hour, discussing going to sleep, taking shoes off and so on. Then, just as that started to quiet down, angry drunkenness stormed in to the room just north of my bed. Because the person who built these little student villages must have specialized in building cubicles, I heard ever "fuckin' can't believe it!" he shouted to himself and a gaggle of rotating friends.

My Dad came to mind. He told me once, before I left for college, "Have a good time, but not too good a time. Just stay out of the papers."

I wondered if my roommates actions last night, which resulted in a late night taxi ride to the hospital, several trips to the toilet to vomit, and several other embarrassing happenstances, would qualify as having fun, but not too much fun?

Truth be told, I find myself wondering about my Dad a lot these days. It might be due to the lack of television, the amount of free time I have to think, the fact that my left hand goes numb when I sit at my desk for too long, or the distance that separates me from my family; regardless, there he is. For those that don't know, my Dad passed away in 2007, after a long, and ultimate losing battle with the degenerative muscle disease ALS (0r Lou Gehrig's Disease). My Dad and I had a strange relationship, but in the years before he died, while I was at Southern Illinois University, we had seemingly come to an understanding with each other. Maybe it was because we both realized how much we were like the other, though we would never like to admit it while he was alive. Maybe it was because my interest in Fantasy Baseball and the Cubs gave us something to talk about. Or maybe he just didn't want to die with any bad blood between us. Whatever the reason, I had come to like the time that we spent together, watching baseball or football. American football, not that cute game where the men run around in shorts kicking balls around.

As I laid in my bed and listened to a grown man cry because he broke his foot kicking a radiator in the kitchen, the question I wish I could ask my Dad is if he is proud of me. My Dad's favorite joke was to tell me that I should get a real job at some point in my life (the rub was that I was teaching full time at St. Dominic at that point; a job I had no right having, as I was underqualified and undertrained). Because I got summer's off, it wasn't a "real" job.

My Dad worked like a dog, probably to a fault. He was a hard worker, and accepted nothing but hard working from his coworkers, and by extension his family. This life was for working; the next life was leisure. Though it may seem like a ridiculous question for a grown man to be asking of his dead father, considering his attitudes toward life, I am not sure that he would necessarily look down at me reading comics all night and smile, proud of his son. I am hardly contributing to anything, I am a financial burden to all those that care about me, and I have the better part of my adult life interested what most unfamiliar people see as trash literature.

Despite taking a different path than my father would have chosen for me, though, I think he might have secretly been happy with me. After all, I never have been carried down the stairs to a waiting taxi at 5:00 in the morning, ordering those around me to grab the right pair of shoes. I might be studying children's trash, but at least I am doing it diligently.