That day, Part II
I find the most interesting stuff by simply looking at the logs for this site. I'm too cheap to get rid of the advertisement above, and I'm too cheap to pay for web hosting for this site, and I'm too cheap to pay for a log program that will tell me anything beyond the barest stuff. So I don't know the specific search terms by which strangers land on this site (but thanks for coming by anyway.)

Anyway: I find that one of the archive pages that gets hit the hardest is April 2002. I'm not sure why, but I noticed that the story about my dad's car accident is on that page. Because I'm bored, and I've had a stressful day, I'm idly surfing the web. I plug "Nov. 24, 1987," the day of the accident, into Google and see what comes up. I find this fact in a story about weather extremes in my hometown:

"Most precipitation in one day: 6.27 inches on Nov. 24, 1987."

My memory of it, apparently, is "raining like hell." I didn't know that factoid, or if I did, I somehow forgot it among everything else that happened that day. All that precipitation was a major factor in an event which changed the lives of everybody in my very large extended family.

Raining like hell. Idly surfing the web. Whipped back in time at 1.6 GHz processor speed.

I had a very complex relationship with both of my parents, but particularly my father. He was 18 when I was born, and from what I'm told, he wasn't around a lot the first three years of my life. My parents were married, but apparently only in a matter of speaking. My mom contends I missed crucial bonding time with my dad because he was working, or gallavanting, or doing whatever a 20-year-old married man does with his time.

My dad apparently settled down a bit after my sister was born, six days before my third birthday. He worked second shift at a factory in Anytown; he usually had left for work by the time I got home from school. I remember feeling negative thoughts whenever I turned the corner and saw his car parked in front of the house. I don't know why; having him around wasn't particularly unpleasant. I think it was more because I didn't like any disruption in my routine, and his presence generally was a disruption in my routine.

My dad never quite understood me. I was a very small boy when I was a small boy, so I had little interest for sports. My pursuits leaned more toward the intellectual; his boyhood interests leaned toward sci-fi movies and superhero comic books. He tried to connect with me through what interested him when he was a boy, and it failed. Probably, I was kind of a jerk about it at one point.

I remember thinking from an early age that I was my father's intellectual superior. In my early double-digit ages, I did everything I could to make sure the wedge between us was firmly lodged.

Then, a month after my 12th birthday, my mother moved out. She moved into an apartment complex where children weren't allowed. My sister and I stayed with my dad. To say he wasn't taking it well would be the understatement of this or any century.

It was a different time, certainly, and a different place. A parent who left children 12 and 9 alone as much as he did would probably find himself facing charges today. In 1980, we just kept the doors locked and didn't answer the phone. We also stayed up until all hours, fairly secure in the knowledge that the sun was going to make an appearance before he did. We were almost always right.

Those two years featured my dad's only real dalliance with the bottle, but it was ugly. He was an incompetent drunk. Not violent, by any means. He was more of a melancholy drunk. And it always made him throw up. Whether he had one beer or 10 shots, the beverage always made a re-appearance. Most mornings, as we were getting ready for school, the sounds of last night emanated from the one bathroom in our house. "Boo-hoo-hoo ... bleaaaauuuh ... Boo-hoo-hoo ... "

Then there were the women, and, occasionally, the women's other boyfriends. One Friday night, a strange man knocked at our door. Clearly, he was very pissed off. And big. Because it was daylight, and because I had briefly taken leave of my senses, I answered the door. The dude was loaded for bear, but he was somewhat disarmed by the sight of a 12-year-old kid on the other side.

"Uh," he said, "I'm looking for Donna. Is your dad around?"

"No," I said, knowing full well that this dude was another jilted husband or boyfriend of one of my dad's flames. "But if I see him, I'll kick his ass for you."

The guy tried really hard not to laugh. He turned around and left without further comment, other than, "Uh, OK." My heartbeat went back to normal sometime in 1982.

These episodes didn't help the lack of bonding between my dad and me. Now, not only did I think I was his intellectual superior; at 13, I believed myself also his moral superior.

The ugly episodes ended justlikethat; my dad met a woman over Thanksgiving in 1981 and married her in Feburary 1982. She was a smart, strong-willed woman who had just graduated from college. She was nine years younger than my dad. Your quick math reveals that made her nine years older than me.

This 22-year-old woman suddenly found herself the stepmother of a teenager. Good thing she was strong-willed, because my sister and I did everything we could to run her off. And I mean everything. My dad, of course, was ill-equipped to deal with this, too. Getting remarried was supposed to make everything better. I don't think he took into account the fact that it might really piss his children off.

The clash of wills got really ugly over the next few years. I said a lot of really awful things to my father. I'm sure most other teenage kids do, too, but I really thought I meant a lot of it.

I don't remember the front end of one particular incident, but I remember how it ended. I said something to my father -- I can't for the life of me remember what -- but the next morning, I felt really, really awful about it. I was probably 17 then, so you can imagine how bad it must have been to make me feel remorse. I went down the next morning and woke him up (which he hated). I said, "Listen; no matter what I say, you're still my daddy and I still love you." I felt like I was about 40 years old. This was a major event in our house; nobody ever said, "I love you." It was not by any means that any of us didn't love any of the others; it was just that it was rarely, if ever, spoken.

I'm not sure what led me to apologize and humble myself before my father. But whatever it was seemed to click for both of us.

From that point, our relationship advanced to one of benign neglect. I'm sure he knew that I was, um, having the occasional beer and sneaking the occasional kiss when I was a senior in high school. "Just be careful," he said. "You're a smart kid. Be smart at night, too." I was, and I was, and I managed to evade trouble.

After years of financial struggle, my dad managed to scrape together enough for a down payment on a new house in 1987, my freshman year in college. We were leaving our old place on Madison Street with nary a regret. It was a bad neighborhood becoming worse, and we were all ready to leave after 13 years. I remember the night I packed my bedroom. My then-girlfriend came over to help. About midnight, we both fell asleep, fully clothed, on my bed. I was half-awake enough to hear my stepmother voicing serious disapproval of the situation. I heard my dad walk into the room. I feigned being completely asleep. He laughed a little bit. "I don't see a problem," he said. "Their shoes are still on, for Pete's sake." This summed up a lot of my teenage relationship with my dad. He didn't often like me, but I never thought he didn't trust me.

We moved into the new house on June 1, 1987. My dad could finally park his car in a garage. My stepmother could finally live in a house that had no remaining vestige of my mother's decorating tastes. I turned 19 the next month, and I really felt like my dad and I were beginning to understand each other.

I was pretty settled into a job that was going to lead to a career by that point. My dad appreciated the fact that I was working my ass off toward a goal, even if it wasn't the goal he would have chosen for me. "Just be careful," he said. "You're a smart kid." He neither approved nor disapproved of my decision to skip college in the fall of '87.

Later that fall, as I was deciding what I wanted to do with my life, I made up my mind to sit my dad down and talk to him about the choices he had made and the paths he had taken. After 19 years, I was ready to listen. The only task was going to be finding some time when he wasn't at work or sleeping. His work ethic bordered on obsession, much to my stepmother's chagrin. That was OK with me; I was at work or sleeping all the time, myself. Maybe over the holidays, I thought.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, my dad was building his company's float for our local Christmas parade. I couldn't stick around to watch; I had to cover a state football playoff game in Kansas City. I was spending the night up there, and payday was the following Wednesday. "You got 20 bucks?" I asked. Usually, that question would have been answered by an unfriendly laugh. These days, he dug in his pocket and found it. "Payday's Wednesday, right?" he said. "You'll have it back to me first thing."

Before Wednesday came Tuesday. The night of the record rainfall.