Unsaid

By the time I was done mowing the front yard, sweaty and with green grass blood splattered on my old running shoes, I decided to go inside and find Dad, to see if I could talk myself out of mowing the backyard. I knew my plan of attack: It isn’t that bad, I would tell him smoothly. It can wait until next Saturday for sure.

It turned out that I didn’t have to mow the backyard after all. I never found Dad. Instead, I found a bloodied, bruised, freshly-fallen-off-the-roof version of my Dad. His unrecognizably swollen and scraped face made me want to never have to remember what I had just seen. Twenty minutes and a 911 call later, my mom had rushed home, Dad was being urgently loaded onto an ambulance, and I was left to myself for a couple minutes.

My six-year-old sister Sami, who (despite our efforts to prevent it) had accidentally seen our broken Dad, was huddled in her room, sobbing, “I want my Daddy to be okay…” I was thinking the same thing. But I was too old to say it.

* * *

There was a time, though, when I wasn’t too old to say it. As long as I can remember, my dad was always my hero. He would do anything for his ‘little boy.’ When I was seven years old, Dad surprised me one Friday with a night of camping. I had been begging for weeks to go camping. “Maybe sometime,” he would casually tell me at dinner. I came home that Friday to find Dad in our front yard, setting up his little blue tent. The charred, black marshmallows (the results of my novice wilderness cooking skills) mingled with the stripling warriors story that my dad read to me. We were only twenty feet from the house, but we were rugged mountaineers, pitting our raw willpower against the unrelenting elements. The next morning, my mom came outside and took a picture of Dad and me standing in front of our tent. I still have that picture. I am a scrawny little kid with a Batman t-shirt and wide smile, giving my dad a hug.

“So, did you have fun?” my mom asked curiously.

I jumped up and exclaimed, “That was the best night of my life!” I was seven years old; I wasn’t afraid to say it.

* * *

“He has no idea how much we’re going to miss him. Our house is going to feel so empty with him gone.”

Was this my dad speaking? Of course not. It was somebody else’s father.

Tonight was my home ward’s “Graduation Night 2009,” where everyone got together to watch slideshows of baby pictures and have fun in honor of the ward’s graduating young men and women. Ice cream and nostalgia mixed deliciously as each parents got up in turn, to talk about their child. Everyone from the ward had showed up to see us off.

“I love you so much. You’re better than I am, just like I always hoped you would be.”

I’m not even going to pretend my dad said any of that.

All of the other parents let the tears flow freely as they shared stories filled with diapers and tears. It was the kind of awkward that everyone secretly hopes for at big events like graduations. It was the kind of awkward that lets you know that you will be missed.

It was my dad’s turn to get up, and somehow I sensed that he wouldn’t stick to the “we’re going to miss you so much” script.

“Well, J.J. has lived with us for eighteen years, and I guess his bedroom will finally be clean now.” I shouldn’t have been disappointed, really. I wasn’t expecting anything more emotional than his usual jokes. But, surely there had to be something my dad would miss about me. Wouldn’t he miss getting amazing, thick cookies and cream milkshakes after priesthood session? He’s going to be going to those alone now. We always had the exact same sense of humor. Wouldn’t he miss joking around, sitting on our regally fluffy leather furniture and just laughing our heads off at something on TV?

“I will admit that I am going to miss being able to watch him be stupid. You were always good for a laugh, J.J. How about the time you thought the trees at your high school were made of plastic? Or the time you though marshmallows grew on plants? Sometimes I wonder how you could possibly be my son.”

The let-down was starting to sink into my chest. I was doing a good job of acting like I was laughing hysterically with everyone else in the room, even though I sort of felt like I had missed out on something important. I shouldn’t have been disappointed, because I knew he would never say the things that the other dads had. I wish he could have said them, though.

* * *

Anyone who has seen the TV series ‘Psych’ could tell you exactly what my relationship is with Dad by watching Sean Spencer and his own dad harass each other every episode. You can tell they love each other…they just have a weird way of saying it. My dad and I are like that, too. When Dad took me to have my wisdom teeth removed last May, I blurrily woke up from the anesthesia in the recovery room to see him sitting across the room, sending work emails on his smartphone.

Anesthesia usually has a weird effect on people, and I was not spared. My jaw felt like a balloon filled with mashed potatoes. I remember stupidly reaching up to touch my numbed jaw and exclaiming slowly, “My face! I left it in the operating room!” My dad laughed. “I’m serious!” I yelled. “I need to get it before we can leave!” My dad was still laughing. “Stop it! If I don’t get my face back today they need to mail it to me! Make sure!” This whole ordeal was just too much for my dad. By now he had pointed his phone’s camera at me and started recording every stupid thing I said in those two blurry hours. Of course, Dad made sure none of the young women in our ward missed out on that story.

* * *

I will always remember the time Dad’s old mission president came to our house for dinner. They sat around the table for hours, laughing and joking. They were like two Army veterans who had run into each other years later. Memories swirled in the air like cigar smoke. I could tell that my dad respected his mission president—he had made it very clear that if I embarrassed him anytime that night, I would be in big trouble. He knew I didn’t need the threat, though, and I knew he was mostly joking. Actually, I thought his mission president was smart and interesting to listen to. He was about 60 or 65, bald, and slightly taller than my dad. He told us gripping stories about his adventures in Moscow where he had served as the Church’s temporal administrator for all of Russia. They wandered through a vast expanse of conversation topics for hours, even delving into politics momentarily.

Towards the end of the night, he turned to me and said, “J.J., I just want you to know something about your dad. He was one of the best missionaries I ever had because he had integrity. There were some missionaries who I had worries about, who were sometimes in places where they shouldn’t be or doing things they shouldn’t. I never had to worry about your dad. I always knew he was where he was supposed to be.” Dad laughed and said something modest, but he didn’t fool me. I looked over at him and thought, “I want to be just like my dad.” I didn’t say it, though. Guys don’t say stuff like that.

* * *

“Okay, so are you all set?” my dad asked. We had just unloaded all of my assorted junk and trinkets into my prison-like white-walled dorm room, and had walked around campus together. Now was the inevitable time for us to separate. I knew my dad wasn’t necessarily eager to give up his only son, regardless of what he told everyone in our ward. “Oh yeah, we will definitely have a lot less laundry on the bathroom floor!” Everybody would laugh, but I knew that he was going to miss me.

As we stood in the parking lot next to the rental car, both of us knew that we were separating. From now on, I would only live with my parents for a month or two at a time, perhaps between my mission homecoming and the next semester of college. This was the start of a new act of my life, and it was just starting to hit me that my parents didn’t have as big a role in the next part as they had in previous chapters. The awkwardness hanging in the air was screaming. It felt like a cliché ‘man-hug’ moment. But nobody ever hugged in our family.

I sort of felt obligated to tell Dad something sentimental that would be emotionally meaningful and perhaps tear-jerking later. But it didn’t come. I was too old. I said, “See you at Christmas,” and he got in the car. There were a bunch of things we could have said, but we really didn’t need to. He had smiled at me. I got the message.

* * *

One of my favorite pictures was taken when I was about three years old at my grandparent’s house. Looking at the picture, I can still smell the cold bite of my grandpa’s basement where my cousins and I would explore my grandpa’s tools and old toys for hours. In this picture, a young man is sitting with a little boy on an easy chair. I can see myself in the clean-shaven, naturally funny and unfailingly easygoing young man that I know is my dad. Everyone tells me I look (and act) just like my dad did when he was young. He is smiling warmly at his son. The little boy is wearing a baby blue plaid tuxedo, with a golden-brown bowl-cut.

I love that picture because of what I can see in my dad’s warm smile, looking at his only little boy. He loves me. He doesn’t need to say it. A picture is worth a thousand words. If I have learned anything from my dad, it’s that sometimes using words only messes up what you are trying to say.

(Image from http://blog.americanfeast.com/images/Father%20&%20Son.jpg)