THE QUIET MAN

He is a quiet, peaceful man. In fact, I cannot recall ever seeing him lose his temper. He's in so many ways the opposite of her. He rolls with the flow. Maybe that's the secret to their thirty six years of marriage.

While he and I have always had trouble relating to one another, I do hold such fond memories of him, especially as a child. He is a firefighter, a well respected on at that. I recall we would often hang out at the fire station where he was a volunteer. We would often go riding around, just the two of us, in areas around our hometown. One thing I always enjoyed was going by the Parkway drive-in to get a vanilla shake. This was one of his old haunts, dating back to when he was a teenager.

He's always supported me in everything I've done, whether or not he understood or whether or not he had words to articulate his support.

Here's my confession: He, of course, is my father. As with my mother, I haven't seen him in nearly two years. We all live in such different worlds. I must give him some credit, however. He has reached out on a couple of occasions. Although our conversations have been brief, and mainly consisted of small talk, at least it was a step. How I wish I were man enough to just reach back out to him, to cut through the awkwardness and have a deep and meaningful conversation. That, to me, at least at this juncture, seems like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. It frightens me beyond words. It is so easy for one to sit there and say "just suck it up and call home.", yet in reality, far more difficult to put into practice.

Whiel driving to Nashville last weekend, I passed a billboard just outside Cullman, AL. The sign read, simply, "Call Your Parents." I couldn't help thinking, is that sign for me? Why can't I do it? What would I say? Those are I have asked myself hundreds of times over the last year or so. It's a question which I cannot answer. I remind myself that they will not be around forever, and that I don't necessarily have time on my side.

There is a distance between my parents and me, both physical-there's close to 300 miles between us-and an emotional distance too intense to measure. I don't know how to bridge these great divides.

My dad loves me, of this I am sure. It may not have been perfect, but I know, as with my mother, that he loves me to the best of his ability. That should be enough. The trouble is, I don't think I fully understand love myself. How could I, never having their living example?

When I think of my father, I often think of two songs that sum up my feelings-Mike + The Mechanics' "Living Years" and Elton John's "The Last Song". Both deal with the dynamics of father/son relationships. If you aren't familiar with these songs, it's well worth a Google search. One line from each song really stands out to me: "I just wish I could have told him in the living years" and "I guess I misjudged love between a father and his son."

And so it is with me. I just pray that one day, in the not too distant future, I will abandon my pride, my fears, and my anxieties and somehow, some way, experience anew the love of my parents, bury the past and move towards the future with peace. That will take tremendous courage, strength and work. I've no expectations of a perfect relationship with my parents, just one where the lines of communication are no longer strained and where the very thought of interaction does not bring anxiety. That would be an improvement. There is a whole different me that they do not know, and I must believe there is more to them than I am aware.