March 14, 2001
My dad was a wonderful man, and an excellent father. He never lost the joy and curiosity of childhood. While he wore the mantle of authority with comfort and ease, still he would often relate to me as a peer.
In 1960, when I was 10, my father paid me what I then thought was a huge compliment. He shook my hand.
On that particular evening, he’d just come home from work. I heard him come to the door so I ran to meet him, and I did what I always did. I hugged him and I kissed his cheek. I can still feel the coarse stubble of his 5 o’clock shadow, and the faint smell of his bay rum aftershave.
My dad returned the hug, but then he stood back, and he told me that he’d been to a friend’s house, and, when he’d greeted his friend’s nine year old son by picking him up and giving him a hug and a kiss on his cheek, this boy had wiped the kiss off, and had told my father, “Men don’t kiss men. Men shake hands!”
My father told me that from then on, we were going to greet each other as men. He turned around and went outside and closed the door behind him. A few seconds later the door opened, and my father came back in the house, greeting me as if for the first time that evening. He extended his hand to me. We shook hands.
I beamed at this exchange. This was a rite of passage. I had been initiated. He called me a man. He greeted me as a man. I was so proud.
And then, three years later, my father died, suddenly, 2000 miles away from home. He would never again walk through that door. And I would never be able to hug him, or kiss him, or smell his aftershave. In all of these years I have never missed being able to shake his hand.
And now my own son is fast approaching the age I was when my father died. In 31 days, he’ll be 13 years, 7 months and 20 days old. That was the exact age I was when I was awoken at 6:20 am by my older brother, to tell me that my father had died. My world changed in that moment, and would never again be the same.
I look at my son, Nick, and I try to see myself in him. I try to get a tangible sense of who I was at the time I suffered the greatest loss I’ve ever felt in my life. I see him as naive, innocent, and too young to be hurt so badly.
In his short life I’ve watched Nick grow and change. I’ve seen him grow into a young man, and I’m proud of who he’s becoming, but I’ve also watched him give up parts of who he used to be. In watching this change, I recognize the parts of myself that I’ve long ago abandoned, and that makes me feel somehow hollow and incomplete.
When he was little, he’d run to me. He hug and kiss me in greeting, and if he wanted to be close, or he wanted to be comforted he’d climb up on my lap. Both he and his sister, three years older, would vie for a place on the front seat of the car, so they could sit, so cozy, between his mom and me.
Every day, when he left for school, I’d hug him goodbye, and kiss him on the top of his head, as I did with his sister. Eventually he got so tall that I had to stand on the first step of the stairs, by the door, in order to kiss him on the top of his head.
This was a boy whose favorite color was “shocking pink.” Whose first poem, written to accompany an origami flower, was, “Loveness in God is a pretty flower.”
I began to notice the change toward the end of his first year in school. We were outdoors playing. He went running after a ball, and he tripped and hurt his knee. It was badly scraped and bleeding. As I ran to him, I saw him quickly scan the surrounding area, to see if anyone, especially any other children, were nearby to witness his injury. There were several children playing nearby. Nick choked the tears back, and, rather than cry, he got angry at “the stupid ball.” This was a rite of passage to which I was witness.
He was changing. He was learning to be a man – which means less what he should be, and more what he shouldn’t. It means not being sensitive, not being too affectionate, not writing poetry – especially poetry about flowers, and it certainly means not crying. He was learning how to turn sadness into anger. He was beginning to focus less on how he felt inside, and more on who (or what) made him feel that way. I felt sad at this loss at the same time that I could relate to it.
The following summer, as we were getting ready to go to the beach for the first time that season, I dug out all of the beach toys from the preceding summer, to see which ones were salvageable and which should be discarded. I found two inflatable inner tubes, one green and the other shocking pink. The pink one, of course, had belonged to Nick. He’d picked it out himself, and he’d loved it just one year earlier.
But now he completely disowned it. It wasn’t just that he no longer wanted to use it. He couldn’t admit that it ever had been his. He insisted that the green one had been his. Apparently green is a more acceptable color for a boy.
The Universal House of Justice of the Baha’i Faith, in a statement entitled, “The Promise of World Peace,” says that racism “…corrupts its perpetrators.” To corrupt means to change. I know that if, as a white person, I have been corrupted by racism, then as a male I have surely been corrupted by sexism. I have been changed. I have given up parts of myself in exchange for the “benefits” of power, entitlement, privilege, and an unearned sense of superiority. I have only to think of Nick as a small boy to see the change in him and in myself, and to see what we have both lost. It’s the ability to feel a full range of feelings. To express a full range of emotions.
Psychologists have a term for this condition: alexythemia. It is a condition suffered by most men, to one degree or another. But most of us are oblivious to this condition that keeps a distance between us and others. Our wives are aware of it. They see it. Or rather, they feel it. But when they bring it to our attention, our most common response falls on a scale ranging from annoyance to anger. It’s easier to blame them for telling us that there’s something missing within us, than it is to feel sad that a part of who we once were is missing. It’s easier to focus less on how we feel inside, than it is to focus on who made us feel that way.
About three years ago, when he was 10, Nick was in a 3 on 3 basketball tournament. He played in a huge open building in which were laid out 10 half-court basketball courts. Each team consisted of three players, and a fourth player on the bench, rotating in to give each player a short rest. Each game was played for 10 minutes. The winner was the first team to score 15 points, or the team with the highest score when the 10 minutes were over.
Nick’s team only had three players, so no one got to sit out any part of their games that day. The first team he played had four players, all taller than Nick or his teammates. The game was close, but the other team stayed one or two points ahead the whole time. Finally, with only seconds to play, and behind by one point, Nick made a fast break, dribbled to the basket, and shot and scored the winning two-point basket.
What excitement! Nick and his teammates were overjoyed. After shaking the hands of their opponents, they all walked off the court. As he approached me, Nick raised his hand, to give me a “high five.” I misinterpreted the gesture as a hug, and I tried to hug him back and kiss the top of his head, the way I’d always done.
How humiliating for him. I’d broken the rules. “Men don’t kiss men.”
That was three years ago. I don’t regret what I did. My hope is that someday, when he thinks about me, Nick won’t miss that high five that didn’t happen. And maybe he’ll smile to himself, when he remembers that, even as a man of ten, his father still wanted to kiss him.
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