ARCHIVE

Dick Prosapio aka, Coyote is a member of the TMC Advisory Council, ceremonialist, psycho-
therapist (ret.), author, leader of men's experiential workshops, & Co-founder of The Foundation for Common Sense. He lives with his wife and daughter in Stanley, NM

For more info about Dick Prosapio, visit his web-site:
Spirit/ Earth Path
 
 

Tending the Fires

by
Dick Prosapio  © 2002

Recently I've been thinking about my father. I miss him. I don't know why this has come up in my consciousness of late but there it is. I miss my dad.

He died a little over four years ago on Labor Day which I found ironic at the time. Ironic, because he was a life long union man and the holidays original purpose, more than just another long weekend, was to honor the Unions of what we used to call, "blue collar workers". This was when denim was the uniform of bricklayers, ditch diggers, assembly line workers, railroad workers, miners, laborers of all kinds, long before blue jeans became the "hip" office and street wear of the middle and upper middle class. He began his work life as a bricklayer and then became what I would call a "blue collar musician" playing gigs around Chicago; weddings, parties, lounges and restaurants.

Funny what I miss about him though. It's not the long conversations we used to have. That never happened.

It's not the camaraderie we shared. We didn't.

It's not the deep and understanding relationship we fashioned over time. That didn't happen either.

No, I miss the fantasy of my mother and father living together happily in the house I returned to at Thanksgiving and/or Christmas almost every year for almost forty five years. You know how it is when we think back over time about how-things-were, we all tend to want to forget about the negatives and bunch all the positives together in one neat little package. This tendency causes us to remember even the bad relationships in our past with some fondness as we re-collect our memories of them and reassemble them in the proper order, a symmetry they never were able to assume in reality.

My mother and father's relationship was chaotic in its early stages, that would be in my teens and twenties. But in the last fifteen or twenty years of their time together, my mother seemed to mellow and my father grew more attentive so that they did in fact come to resemble what I wished for them in my fantasy of a classic Currier and Ives Christmas card. You know, the lights in the windows of home casting reflections on the snow at night. A Christmas tree sparkling in a corner, a fire in the hearth, a warm place to come home to. It did, in fact, become that in the years before my fathers death.

I think of the two of us and this little family as living in that kind of idealized picture. Hard to reconcile that romantic thought with the fact that we have one member of the family classed as a run away, a high school drop out and a drug addict. But there's enough room in that Christmas card fantasy for some unpleasant reality too. It's like we explained to our kids when it came time to 'fess up about the Santa myth, though the physical reality isn't what you thought it was, the desire and the hope which created the whole thing still has value and is still very much alive. We do hope for the best regarding our run away kid. And we know that is about all we can do; hope. Our "job" is keeping our lights lit and our fires burning. And It's hard work, this being the responsible parent stuff..this being the ones upon whose shoulders fall the weight of tending the home fires and nourishing hopes.

Yeah. You know what I really miss about my father not being around? I miss the hugs he used to give. Right around this time of year I could use one of those from him especially now that I'm the only father who's left to give them.