by walter g. meyer not halfway done A-LISTS FATHER’SSONG MY


“I know it’s been said that you can never fully be a man while your father is still alive. And some psychologist could write a dissertation—or already has—on why that is so, but with my father’s passing there was no sense of the liberation that supposedly comes with no longer being your father’s son.”


It’s strange the things that I want to discuss with my father. I was watching a John


Wayne movie that I had watched with my dad when I was a child, probably on some Saturday afternoon when it was too cold to go outside. I remember a lot of John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart westerns and many comedies. My dad was a big Marx Brothers fan and an even bigger Danny Kaye fan. Could it have been my exposure to the oh-so-fey Kaye at such an early age that made me gay? And the question I wanted to ask my father was so dumb: did he remember that that bad guy in El Dorado was played by, of all people, Ed Asner? Dad would watch movies on AMC and call me for some bit of trivia: “Hey, do you remember who played the sheriff in Dodge City?” Now I could cheat and consult IMDB, but for years he just depended on my memory. September was the first anniversary of my father’s death and his 88th birthday would


have been in October. I know it’s been said that you can never fully be a man while your father is still alive. And some psychologist could write a dissertation—or already has—on why that is so, but with my father’s passing there was no sense of the liberation that supposedly comes with no longer being your father’s son. And not the amount of grief that ought to accompany such an event; by the time he went, my father had been so sick for so long that our roles had long ago reversed in terms of who cared for whom. He was no longer in full control of his own affairs let alone in a position to advise me on mine so whatever manhood I was supposed to achieve I guess I had. And he was so glad to no longer be sick that the feeling of relief at his passing drowned the grief. My father and older brother had a neat, clean, streamlined relationship; the road my


father and I traveled was much bumpier. There was that gay thing, for one thing, which he never understood and I came to accept never would. There were the disagreements over religion and politics—he was a Catholic Republican who watched Fox News. Any one of those things is enough fuel for a lifetime of arguments. But our arguments I think I also led to a deeper level than the superficial Father Knows


Best one that he had with my brother. When brother and I talked after the funeral, I was surprised the number of things that my dad and I shared that my brother never knew about it. Besides not knowing about the Danny Kaye obsession, I was surprised to learn that my brother had never shot arrows with our father. Dad had taken me shooting so often that I was good enough to be asked to join the


archery team at Penn State. My father was part of what Tom Brokaw aptly termed “the greatest generation” that starved through the Great Depression to win WWII. Stuck in western China during the war, Dad requisitioned equipment for baseball or basketball, but what he got was archery gear. With nothing else to do, he shot arrows. Years later he’d take me to a miniature golf course a few miles from our home and


after we surrendered our balls to the windmill on the last hole, we’d rent two bows and a quiver of arrows. I never got my own quiver. I didn’t need to. Dad’s never emptied because for each bull’s eye or each balloon broken (randomly placed all over the wall) he got two free arrows. We always popped the balloons first. What ended our shooting sprees was never running out of arrows, it was running out of energy. As I was packing up my things to return to California after my father’s funeral, my mother said, “And take those Danny Kaye movies with you!” She never shared my father’s and my taste for goofball comedies. So now I can watch The Court Jester and remember those Saturday afternoons with my dad. But I could never tell him I thought Danny was cute or one reason I liked El Dorado was the brief appearance of hot Johnny Crawford on whom I had a crush from re-runs of The Rifleman. But the fond shared memories win out and, dad, the pellet with the poison is in the chalice from the palace.


Walter G. Meyer is the author of three books (so far) and still watches old movies, but hasn’t shot an arrow in years.


OCTOBER 2010 | RAGE monthly 31


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