September 2001

What Dad Gave Me

When I was 13, my father gave me a .22 caliber rifle for Christmas.

When I was 15, my Christmas gift was a desk that Dad had spent a month making secretly in the garage.

When I was 18, in the Spring of my senior year in high school, my dad looked across the dinner table and said “We can make it.” I had been accepted to Stanford but denied any financial aid. As a Baptist Missionary, my father didn’t make a lot of money. He made less than I did as an intern at National Semiconductor during my junior summer in college – and so spending $15,000 a year on tuition seemed ridiculous.

I had spent an hour the day before staring at the high school swimming pool feeling my dream of attending Stanford fading away. I accepted the fate of attending my second choice and became resolved to make the best of it.

“We can make it.” Dad looked at me seriously. He laid the family finances out in front of me on the dining room table. Mom looked on, smiling.

In King Salmon, my father had built a beautiful, amazing home out of scrap lumber and spare equipment from the Air Force dump. Previously we had lived in a trailer. We ordered food by the year to save money. My allowance was $3 a month in 1989. Dad managed money in the way that someone who grew up during the Great Depression would. And somehow Dad knew what to invest in.

“We can make it.” A feeling began to grow inside of me – something I didn’t know how to express. As an 18-year-old late adolescent, I wrestled with the need for independence from your parents balanced with the fear and uncertainty of facing real responsibility. I wish I would have known how to say thank you. I guess I never got to say it explicitly.

But I think I made Dad proud.

On a summer halibut-fishing trip, Dad asked me to light a fire in my Uncle’s fireplace. Looking at the matchbooks in front of me, my 11 year-old voice replied that I could only light the wooden matches and not the soft matchbook matches. Dad smiled and handed me a pile of the matchbooks and said, “Have all of these lit by the time I get back.” I don’t think I burned my fingers more than once – but I was mad for being forced to do this (my problems with direct authority aren’t new).

A year or two later, Dad left me with a 25 pound halibut and said, “Have this cleaned by the time I return.” I had just watched him clean one, and he had been careful to show me each step. I managed not to mangle the fish, but my nerves killed me. I didn’t come up with obsessive perfectionism on my own.

An old Green Toyota Corolla sat in our back yard for a summer, and one day Dad brought me a tire iron and a jack. “Remove every one of these tires, then put them back on. Then do it again.” At 15 this wasn’t such a bad task. You can’t get a tire on wrong.

How to drive a nail. How to paint a house. How to install Hurricane Ties in the rafter of a house so that the house can withstand just about anything. How to build a wood box for the fireplace. How to take pride in what you do. How to drive a stick shift (perhaps the hardest father-son time ever). How to tell your son that you love him and still be the toughest guy your son knows. Sometimes you can observe, and you can learn, but you can’t duplicate everything.

Once I had started college, being home for Christmas meant that I had to carve the turkey. When your father can clean and gut a full-grown moose in under an hour, cutting a turkey becomes a mixture of art and science coupled with a healthy respect for sharp knives. We even did the Julia Child voice from the Cosby show. And the first few years I hated it because I couldn’t get it right. Now, I’m pretty good.

It took me six weeks to tell my parents that I had separated from my wife on the first of September 2000. On the other end of the phone, there was just love. No judgment. No prodding about why and what and when. No pushing. When it mattered, Dad knew what mattered.

As my mental state spiraled downward in the three months following my separation, Dad’s health declined slowly as prostate cancer advanced into other parts of his body. After his visit to Austin in September, I called his doctor. A 50% chance of making it a year isn’t great. A second opinion from a urologist offered an honest dose of reality - that a year was overly optimistic.

I called Dad every chance I could – I don’t think I called my parents more than once every two to three weeks in college. We’d talk about how he felt – I’d talk about work or whatever – but for the first time I’d really talk to Dad. The calls weren’t about just checking in to keep your parents from worrying; they weren’t time for time’s sake. We didn’t discuss philosophy or the meaning of life. We didn’t argue. I even asked for advice on mounting my satellite dish on the roof, and of course Dad’s advice was perfect. We talked like a father and son should.

I couldn’t feel any love for my soon to be X-wife; I had shut out an undercurrent of anger, pain, and depression just to keep my head above water. I couldn’t feel any love for myself; the breakup and my resulting behavior made it hard for me to look in the mirror some mornings. Eventually I completely shut off communication with my X-wife and devoted my energy to someone worthwhile, Dad. Dad gave me someone to love.

I flew out every month to see him. Each time he was a little slower. At Christmas Dad was emotional. I had only seen Dad get emotional twice – both times from behind the pulpit, talking about the loss of a childhood friend and the resulting fear of eternal separation. Dad cried, Mom cried, we all cried a lot that Christmas. I flew home feeling closer to my father than ever before. Despite the brutality of Dad’s cancer, being close to him gave me something that I needed more than anything else.

My brother stayed with Mom and Dad a couple of weeks after Christmas. Over the phone Stephen told me we were down to weeks. My sister Donna was coming the next week. On the Friday the week after, I was scheduled to make it down to Ft. Walton Beach around 9 P.M. That morning, I called my sister and through tears she told me that we were down to days, and to get down as soon as I could.

Through a small package of miracles, I made it to see Dad earlier, and spend the last four hours with him before he slipped into a coma. Three days later I was holding on to Dad when he passed away. I felt just like the little boy who would crawl into bed scared and feel secure because of Dad’s regular breathing, laying there next to him, just hoping that he could make me feel okay one more time.

Prior to January, Dad had become obsessed with giving things away to people. He wanted me to have his golf clubs, his tools, anything he could get me to take home he forced on me. Dad had picked out a few items to immediately pass on to the kids. Two of these were boats, one in Alaska going to my brother, and one in Florida going to me. Not having a place to keep a boat in Austin (or any decent fishing within two hours), I turned the boat over to a broker who quickly found a buyer.

I left Reactivity, the company I had co-founded, in May. At that moment I couldn’t imagine working. Sometimes I couldn’t imagine being excited about life again.

I followed Dad’s footsteps to Ireland and spent the month riding my touring bike over 800 miles in 20 days, followed by 10 days in Belfast, Dublin, London, and Paris – where I witnessed Lance Armstrong win his third Tour De France. Dad’s boat covered my mortgage, travel, food, and all my other bills during that month. I came back excited to be in Austin, to find a job that I could be passionate about, and to start living again.

Dad gave me a chance to rebound.

Dad wasn’t perfect despite being a perfectionist. Dad made some small and some big mistakes. Sometimes he was too harsh. Sometimes he didn’t understand what being 14 years old was about – Dad was supporting his family at that age after his father’s untimely death. Dad often only saw one right way of doing things.

But Dad gave me a few things along the way.

Bryan