Summer time and the living is easy,
Fish are jumping and the cotton is high,
Your mama is rich and your Daddy's good looking (this is dad's version)
So hush now baby,
Don't you cry.
One of these mornings,
You're gonna rise up singing,
You’re gonna spread your wings and you'll take to the sky.
But until that morning,
There ain't nothing can harm you,
With your daddy and your mammy standing by.
This was my all-time favorite lullaby. Sung in dad's gravely voice it carried me to sleep with visions of flight.
By the time I was four I knew that my mammy and daddy weren't gonna keep standing by. So I did what any rational four year old would do, I made up my mind to fly. I asked Dad about it and he answered, "You can do anything you want if you believe in yourself enough kid."
Well okay then.
Our house sat atop a steep hill with a concrete drive, sloping like the metal slides that once populated playgrounds before they were replaced with the slow moving variety designed to safely bore children to tears. I began at the top and ran down as fast as my little legs would carry me before leaping wildly into the air. The pavement was unforgiving but I wasn’t taught to be soft. I was taught to get up. I stood, blood dripping from knees and elbows and walked back to the top to start again. This went on for days. My dad even invited a few of his friends over to watch his “crazy kid” run pell-mell down the driveway in pursuit of lift-off while they drank beers and laughed. Dad dubbed me Bird and the name stuck. Eventually I accepted defeat, not because I couldn’t fly, but because I couldn’t believe in myself hard enough to take to the sky. Divorce happened and I hadn't produced the miracle to stop it.
Today, November 25th, would be my Dad's 89th birthday.
In thinking of him I was struck by how little we really know the people in our lives and how frequently we relate to our ideas of them instead.
For the bulk of my life I viewed my dad with the stunted capacity of a little girl hungry for affection. It wasn't until very recently that I began to see him as a man I loved but didn't really know.
And I'm okay with that.
It's how this humaning seems to work. Life is far too wide and individual experience too varied to truly know anyone. Of course the mind rebels and projects its imagined others outward, relating to them accordingly. But what a waste of time. Not knowing opens a door to curiosity, discovery and an open-handed love.
Today I'm missing my dad, not because I knew him but because I wanted desperately to be known by him. That recognition is in itself a gift. It allows me to see the human condition more clearly and respond with gentleness to myself and others.
We all want to be known and loved. We intuit that an open-handed love will soften the wounds at our center, untangling the isolated and contracted projections, reactions, defenses and judgements that lead to our suffering. But seeking this love in others is a bit like trying to stop a divorce by learning to fly. It's a displaced effort to ease our suffering. When we pause, however briefly, in our continued attempts to reconcile the unknowns, we glimpse the intrinsic beauty and basic goodness at the core of everything, whether we know it or not.
I have no idea what happens after we shuffle off this mortal coil. I'm mostly okay with that. But as Dave Lloyd's daughter, I am sending a "Glad you came to Earth" shout out across the ethers to the man that was my father. I love you Dad, open-handed and heart forward.
Dad's Advice On Love for me and On Love in general...
And On Fear.
Here are a few posts over the years:
2008 Visit
Father Day 2008
Another visit with dad and Farewell 2009
2011 Stroke
2012 Visit
Comments
Angelina, thank you for again enlarging me when I needed it.
Dex