With father’s day on the horizon I figured I would write a little something about my old man. My pops unfortunately passed away a few years ago and like anyone else that has lost someone, I find myself thinking about him from time to time. Fortunately now when I think about him I think about the good times that we had and not so much of the day he passed. I think that is always the hardest thing when we lose someone is that we tend to focus on the day that they left us and seem to forget about all the other good days we shared with that person. Now I just did not learn that lesson on my own, I had a good friend of mine that I used to coach with share that bit of wisdom with me a while back. We were working out one day and I was talking about my dad and how tough of a time that I was having with him being gone. Out of nowhere, this dude just drops some serious knowledge on me. Now to set the stage you have to imagine a big dumb muscle bound looking ex-football player that talks like he has taken one too many hits to the head… naw I’m just messing around just in case he ever reads this, or has someone read it to him hahaha, but he really is a good dude. He said to me ‘man it’s interesting that you bring this up about your father and having a hard time with it. I just saw something today about loss and it goes exactly with what we are talking about right now.’ He said ‘when we lose someone, people always want to focus on that one day that they lost that someone. We just forget about all the other days/times that we had with that person. We let one day define how we remember that person for the rest of our lives because it caused us so much pain. Don’t let just one day make you forget about the 30+ years you had with the man, remember those times.’ Now you talk about some higher wisdom, I just looked at myself in the mirror of the gym for a minute while everything finished firing off in my brain. This big serious goofy motherfucker just dropped some serious knowledge on me (this is one of my brothers for life so I to talk shit, but I can hear him right now ‘fuck you Ramos’). Anyway, that was some serious stuff and in all honest you should fold that up and put it in your back pocket because you may need it one day.
So anyway back to pops and father’s day and memories and butterflies or whatever. Pops… man this was a hard dude to grow up with if he was your father. My father had a very tough upbringing so he was not the most affection or involved man when I was growing up. Things legit had to be done one way and if you didn’t do it that one way then you were most likely going to get kicked through a wall, but it obviously was a different time back then. Now if you even say you are going to kick your kid through a wall you serve 6 months in jail, have to go through rehab, and only get supervised visits. So, I just politely asked my kids if they want to see what’s on the other side of the wall really fast when they start acting up hahaha. We did not do a ton of things with my father growing up, mostly because he was in the Navy and was gone more than he was home or when he was home he was working a lot or just because he had two jobs. The man did what he had to do in the name of his family. As mentioned earlier he was not really an affectionate man either, I remember being a kid and just sitting in the living room with him not saying a word while he smoked a cigarette, drank a beer, and watched M*A*S*H. This is what I called ‘spending time with dad’ growing up. But… we had some good times nonetheless.
I can remember bits and pieces of times when the old man would take me to the Padres games when he was stationed in San Diego. He would meet up with some friends before the game to do a little tailgating (beer drinking) and barbecuing. I remember one time when for some crazy ass reason he thought it was the Undertaker and decided it would be funny to pretend to pile drive me in to the concrete in front of the stadium. Well I guess those beers caught up with him because what was supposed to be his knees hitting the ground ended up being the top of my damn head hitting the ground. I was a youngin but I still remember how bad that shit hurt. He of course tried to calm me down by first checking to make sure my brains were not leaking from my head and basically saying ‘you’ll be fine’ then going back to his beer. Actually, I think I got a Padres baseball for my troubles that day. I remember us moving cross-country to Virginia shortly after that and my dad driving the family straight through and only sleeping in the car if needed. I was a little guy, so I could lay on floor of the back seat and my sister would get the actual seats. If we started fighting he would threaten to pull over and feed us to the wolves. Where the hell he came up with wolves I don’t know, but looking in those crazy eyes of his… I just knew that I didn’t want to take that chance. I can say that once we finally settled in Virginia that I don’t really have to many good memories that stand out from that time period. I’m sure there were a few, but as I got older my pops for some reason got colder. Now that is not because of me and I am sure we will go down that road one day but all I can really say for sure is that he gradually became a different man. It really wasn’t until high school where the good memories pick back up again. He never really took interest in any of the sports I played growing up but he did start coming to my football games in high school. There was one game that always sticks out in my head as a good moment I shared with my father. We were playing one of our ‘rivals’ that night and we had been told over and over that we were not going to win this game. See the team we were playing had the best running back in the area at the time, mostly because he was like 34 years old playing high school football, and that we had no chance of stopping him. Anyway fast forward to less than 2 minutes left in the game and we are down by 1 touchdown, but we are inside our opponents 10 yard line. With time running off the clock we call the play, run to the line, hike the ball and my quarterback hits me with a nice pass to score the game-tying touchdown. I can still feel that adrenaline and excitement rushing through my veins as I talk about it. I remember being there on that field and all the noise just disappearing. I look up into the stands and see my dad cheering like crazy. He sees me looking at him and he just stops and points to me. I let out a yell and point back up at him. That was a moment. See when you grow up thinking your father doesn’t like you or care about what you do, you tend to become numb to affection. However, that was a moment where I knew he cared, where I knew a father was proud of his son. Weird right… but of all the touchdowns I ever scored or games I played in, that is the by far the best one.
I would say that after my graduation from high school, for some reason that only my dad would know, he reverted to the ol’ man that was around when I was a young boy. I mean I have good memory after good memory of that dude. He wanted to be a part of my life and he was excited to hear about what I was doing and he wanted to be around when something big was happening. Things were not always easy for him through his life but he was making the effort to be around and to be my dad. He moved the family to Florida, I stated in Virginia, during my senior year in high school. I would try to go down to visit them often and let me tell you that my pops would always make me feel like I was a king coming to town. There was never any down time, he would take me to meet everyone he knows or has met and they would always share a story that my father told them about me. They would always say the same thing ‘your father is very proud of you.’ I used to smile and say thank you but often couldn’t help wonder where there hell all this love was when I was growing up, but that’s just the journey sometimes. To this day, I am sure I can go back down to where they lived in Florida and I can almost guarantee that someone would recognize me as ‘Joe’s son’ and share a story my father told them. He was just that type of guy.
It’s always crazy how we can take ourselves to the places where we play the ‘if’ game or the ‘wish’ game. Although things were not always the best between my father and me growing up, I promise you that I would not change one thing. See what people sometimes don’t understand is that even though my childhood was not the most amazing or that my pops would whoop my ass frequently or my pops was not around much because of work or he did not show much love… that’s what made me who I am today. That tough love taught me to be tough, that anger for him not being around made me want to be around for my family, those times where he was just mean made me want to be a better father to my kids. Now if you talk to my wife, I am sure she will share some ‘good’ stores of me being an asshole but if you really knew where I came from then you would know I could have turned out way worse.
So what are we really talking about here? My childhood, my pops, my life growing up as kid, what’s wrong with me, some boring old stories… Nah, just wanted to write some stuff about the old man and bring up some good memories. Father’s day is coming up and even though my father is gone, he is far from forgotten. So to all you fathers out there getting it done and being the man that your children and family need you to be, I salute you. Take some time and make memories because honestly you may never know what your kids choose to hold on to as they grow up. Enjoy the day fellas, from one father to another.
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