Last Call For Boarding
October 20, 2012
"I want to be an airline pilot", is what I answered when my father asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up.
I remember the conversation too.
I was 7 years old, and my dad and I were taking a walk around the neighborhood.
We didn't do much as a family because he was studying for something the Navy had offered him. But there were times the two of us would get out of the house. Maybe it was for a little exercise, or maybe it was to grab bite to eat. Either way, those moments we had together I still hold close to me.
But despite what ambitious dreams I had as a child, he never filled my head with doubt. Anything was possible.
As life would have it, he wasn't there for me very much longer. My parents divorced, and for some strange reason, I thought it was something I had done.
A seven year old boy, and his head filled with guilt that his father had left.
I remember a book he gave me the following Christmas entitled, "A Father's Love". The print was small enough that I didn't want to read it, and for a young kid, it was too much for me to comprehend. But as the years went by, I held on to it. I still have the book. Somehow, it was a tangible representation of something that I couldn't fully understand intelligently, but could feel inside.
I wouldn't know what I had lost until years later.
When I learned last year his cancer had come back, and that it looked bad, I made several visits to him to rekindle the father-son bond we had lost. Though I was no longer a little boy, I was still very much a hurt child inside. I needed to show him the man I had become, for better or worse. It was important to me that I resolve all the hurt that had built up in me.
I know that my step-mother, step-brother, and step-sister would not understand, but I held on to hope that my father would feel the same little boy he left behind, the same kid who carries his DNA, the same soul he breathed his spirit into.
The fact is that my father had all but abandoned me. He never made an attempt to stay in my life. Instead, I had made attempts to stay in his. His disregard for me is why my step-family never bothered to keep me close.
Over the waters of San Diego Bay, I watch the Boeing 737s take off, soaring into the skies to far away places, filled with hearts and minds with destinations to visit and business to take care of. The very same jetliners who took their maiden flights over the waters of Lake Washington, found their way to my hometown to become an integral part of a world in a constant state of change.
And even if I were to never to pass on the DNA my father and his father and his father passed down to me, its not all lost. It was never about the genes or the name, but of the spirit. It's that breath we breathe into a young mind that leaves a permanent mark.
Maybe I spent the last year visiting my father to resolve some hurt I had been holding, but at the same time he was leaving me something with me to carry on. I only now understand that.
I may have lost him physically, but he's in me now. Yes, I'm fraught with faults, but I am who I am, and I'm going to stay this way. I'm not going to change for anybody. This is the man who's going define himself in a different time and place, with the same spirit that his fore-fathers carried. This is the rising son born from the glory of a short, but very powerful union.
I'm going to take off and fly, and you can either fly with me or wait for another plane. I have a spirit to live for.


