My dad called me the other day to ask if there was any way he could convince me not to go to Italy in three weeks. He asked if he could send me to Hawaii instead. He’s worried about the Italian hostage situation. The hostages themselves are in Iraq but apparently there have been a lot of demonstrations and anti-war (and anti-Berlusconi) protests in Italy as well. He thinks that there will be a lot of anti-American sentiment there and wanted to be sure, I guess, that I’d be safe. I’m pretty sure I’ll be as safe in Italy as I would be anywhere else in the world. Safer than I was when I was pepper-sprayed in the WTO protests five years ago (five? Man.), at least, and certainly safer than he would have been had he not heard the news about the World Trade Center being attacked as he was on his way into the city that day and turned right around. When I told him I was definitely going he asked me to take a picture of his old apartment in Milan and to get him something from Peck. The conversation was brief and cordial, as most of my conversations with him are. I was a little annoyed by it.
I guess it’s the only way he can show whatever love he has for me. We speak on the phone every couple of months and he asks me if I’ve lost any weight and then we talk about the weather and he tells me that he watches the Weather Channel on my behalf; that he always knows what’s going on in Seattle, weather-wise. Somehow I find that unbelievably sad. Dad didn’t approve of my moving here to go to social work school (he doesn’t like the idea of service work, which is what he considers social work) and doesn’t like that I work at a hospital, or in academia. He thought I should have tried to become a screenwriter when I lived in Southern California and told me, as I was packing up my first apartment to move up here, that he had lots and lots of friends in Hollywood who could, supposedly, have hooked me up. He’s never been out here to visit me because he doesn’t like to travel, but he gives me money sometimes and keeps track of the weather in Seattle on my behalf. Occasionally we talk on the phone or I go to visit him.
There’s a lot more I could write about him and about my relationship with him but my heart rate tends to go up when I do and I get shaky and weird. I guess everyone can write and talk forever about their parents, their family, the choices that they’ve made and the way things have always been and what they’d do differently if they’d known then what they know now, on and on and on. Sometimes that will let you know who you are and who you’ve become and what you’ve missed out on, and sometimes, as in my case, it won’t. I could give you examples and I could draw you some charts and I could tell you story after story to make whatever point I was trying to make, and there would be, at the end of all this, nothing to say. I have a father with whom I did not grow up and to whom I am not close. I don’t feel sad about this; I feel sad that I don’t feel sad about this.
I had a good childhood, I’m not trying to suggest otherwise. I was safe and loved and encouraged and very often spoiled rotten. I still am. I don’t think I would change much about that part of my life. As far as my dad goes, within the context of that good childhood, this good adulthood, I just can’t imagine his having a bigger part in my life, either when I was a kid or now. It doesn’t fit, it doesn’t make sense. I’m always slightly surprised to hear his voice on my machine, like I don’t understand who this person is and why in the world is he calling me? Sometimes I have to remind myself that I do actually have two parents. Does it matter? I live across the country from both of them. I’m not thirteen and I have my own life.
Still, though, there’s always a part of me that wonders why it’s like this, how my life would have been different otherwise.