A Father's Love

I have this recurring dream. I am in the park at Barton Springs in Austin. The place is dead except for one man sitting on a bench about 100 trees away. I don’t think he sees me so I serpentine to within three trees.

He is a man in a dark suit, white shirt, black thin tie and sunglasses. He looks like Ackroyd of the Blues Brothers.

Without looking up, he motions me over. He pats the bench twice with his ring hand.

It is my Uncle David. My dad’s younger brother. The so-called black sheep of the family. The alcoholic. I move toward him cautiously. He has been dead for many years, but I don’t know it in the dream.

I could let you in on the whole conversation---how long he’s been on the bench waiting, why he chose Austin instead of San Antonio where I lived, and a bunch of other stuff, but that gets us nowhere.

So I’ll start where he asks, “How are you doing these days, KP? You look a little sad to me.”

I tell him I’m not sad.

“You’re thinking about your dad, aren’t you?”

I say yes, because I have been thinking about him and whenever I think of him I am either sad, or mad.

“Let me ask you something,” he says. “Who taught you to tie your shoes?”

“You.”

He sits there waiting for it to sink in. It doesn’t.

“Look,” he says. “I was your father. Look at me. I am your father. No kid has just one father. One man can’t do it all. You think it was luck that I was always around? I was there for you then, and I am here for you now. I am your father, too. Ask your mother.”

Like I say, I have dreamed this dream many times, and always when I needed a father’s love.