"Father's Day"

“FATHER’S DAY”

            I remember the incident so vividly.  It was in the summer of 1963 on the cusp of my senior year in high school.  I would have another vivid occasion in that summer in late August when I surreptitiously listened to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, DC, and that is the story for another blog.  This incident was earlier that summer, sometime in July.  I had just returned from a six week science camp at Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi, a venue made possible because a bridge spanning the Mississippi River at Helena had been opened in 1960.  It would be my first long time away from home, and I was dreading the experience.  Because we did not have a car, our next door neighbors Mr. Mack and Ms. Fannie, drove with my mother to take me to the camp.  I was good at math and science, and the teachers at segregated Central High School had recommended me for the camp and had obtained a scholarship for me.

            During the orientation for the camp, the senior white leadership of the camp proudly pointed out the bullet holes in the Lyceum building where Southern white manhood had resisted the invading federal government, which had “forced” Ole Miss to register one of its state citizens as a student – an African-American named James Meredith – in the previous September, 1962.  I am ashamed to admit that I felt pride at that point in the orientation.  I did well in the science camp, and I thrived in it, so much so that I got my picture taken with an Indian (they were allowed under the race caste system in Mississippi) graduate student who was doing work on vortex flow and its potential for harnessing energy.  That photo and an article on the science camp appeared in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger newspaper, and that brings me back to the incident to which I referred earlier.

            After I returned home from the science camp, a letter came in the mail, addressed to me.  The return address was marked “GP Stroupe, Jackson, Mississippi.”  When I read that return address, my heart leaped – it was a letter from my father, for whom I was named!  I had never received any communication from him at all, in my 16 years of living.  I had so longed for it, and here, finally, was a letter from him.  My heart was pounding, as I opened the envelope and tried to anticipate what my father would now say to me in his first engagement with me.  I opened the letter, and the newspaper article on the science camp fell out – my father was proud of me!  Then, my blood boiled as I read the note, not from my father, but from his second wife, the woman who had taken him from my family.  It said that that they were so proud of me, and oh yes, give the child support check to my mother.  No word from my father – no word from him.  I remember cursing out loud and flinging that letter across the room in anger.  “That ******* couldn’t even bring himself to write me and express his praise for my work.  He had to get his wife to do it.”  

            I would hear nothing else from my father for 9 more years, and even then I met him accidentally – another story for another blog.  So, as I approach Father’s Day, I have even greater ambivalence about it than I had about Memorial Day – at least for Memorial Day, there was some honor involved.  In this case and in this relationship, I felt dishonored and disowned.  For a long time, I felt that my being disowned was my responsibility. I allowed the anger of that summer of 1963 to dissipate back into anxiety, wondering what I had done to force my father not only to leave me but also to ignore me.  Years of therapy and great friends would begin to heal me, and I am grateful to all those who stepped into that breech in my heart.  Thanks to all the men out there who took me in and nurtured me – and there are many!  I honor them this Father’s Day.

            My honoring of Father’s Day also comes from experiencing Wordsworth’s line “The Child Is Father to the Man,” from his poem “My Heart Leaps Up.”  I use it differently than he did, though.  I mean it in the sense that I received a lot of my fathering from being father to our kids David and Susan.  They are a great joy to me, and I have learned a lot about fatherhood from them.  I’ve made many mistakes with them, but through loving them and having them love me, I have felt the redemptive power of fatherhood.  And I’ve sought to repay all those people, who stepped into the breech with me when I needed fathering, by seeking to offer that to others. 

            So, on this coming Father’s Day, let us give thanks for those who gave us fathering love, whether they were our biological fathers or not.  In the best sense, fathers teach sons and daughters what real men are like. Not the immature men who seem to be stuck in adolescence (like the President), but rather men who show us what manhood really is – nurturing, protecting, forgiving, challenging, and most of all loving.  I’m hoping that all who are reading this have experienced this fathering love from somebody in their lives.  If not, contact me, and we’ll see what we can do!