"I'm sorry."

That's all my father said to me. And with that all the years, decades really, of missed opportunity to connect, were over.

We were on the edge of the Snake River canyon. It was the last day of a four-day trip that my mother had forced my father to take with me. I was visiting my folks in Chicago en route in my '64 VW to Moab, Utah where I was to meet my then wife. From there we would drive south to El Paso where we were living. I wanted to show her the Red Rock country of southeastern Utah first.

But my mother was insistent, "Go with him Tony. You've always wanted to see that part of the country and you never spend any time with your son. Just do it!"

"Oh I donno." And then would follow all the usual avoidances my father used to stay in one place.

But something was different this time. When he got stubborn he simply could not be moved, but there was some creaking of the wheels that my mother sensed and on the day I was ready to walk out the door my mother had packed a suitcase for him and all but carried him out the door to the little beetle.

And off we went.

My father never was a big talker. At least, not to me. He told jokes that were really stories about his life as a musician whenever we had people over. He'd have a couple of "Tom Collins" and off he, and they, his musician friends, would go. He was very funny and great to hear as he told the tales of life-in-the-music-business.

But talk to me.never in my life. It's not that he ignored me, it's just that we didn't relate about much of anything.

I assumed this was normal since none of my friend's fathers talked to them either. As was true of their fathers before them. That was just the way it was. Of course, this was long before TV and Father Knows Best or "Leave it to Beaver" where the "hero" father did a lot of talking to his kids. Such a thing was unknown in real life.

At least in my real life.

But there we were on the road west.and not much passed between us other than map directions, comments on the weather, and gas mileage computations. That was the real father-son communication then.

The second night out we camped somewhere in Iowa. My father hadn't been camping in many decades but he was up for it. I still have a picture of him blowing up the air mattress inside our tent. That night a bit of a rain storm came up....I should mention that we had heard what sounded like air-raid sirens about an hour before but we figured it was just the town doing a 'test". That wasn't unusual in those days and certainly not unusual in a small town.

That's what we thought anyway.

As the rain intensified and the lightening increased, we only noted that the tent remained dry, mostly, and weren't too concerned about it.

The next morning we learned that the sirens had been tornado warnings, which explained why the rain seemed to be horizontal for a while. From then on my father suggested motels whenever he sighted the smallest cloud anywhere in the sky, my encouragement to "camp out" notwithstanding.

"I'll pay for it." he'd say, so I went along with it.

By the evening of the fourth day he had more or less recovered so I was able to steer us into a very nice campground at the Snake River Gorge and it was there we cooked a hot dog meal over a little fire and sat gazing at the spectacular scenery as darkness came on.

It was then that this extraordinary thing happened. I felt this arm go around my shoulders and thought for an instant that someone else had come into the camp, but it was my father who hadn't spontaneously touched me this way for as long as I could remember, and who accompanied this gesture, with; "I'm sorry."

"For what?" I asked quickly, wanting to assure him, assure him because I knew how much it took for this man to say such a thing.

"I was never there when you were growing up...but I had to work a lot you know, and....."

I stopped him as quickly as I could. I didn't want him to feel hurt about this and I wanted him to know that I knew how big a thing this was for him to do.

"I know, I understood." And I did. I understood it all along. I felt no resentment about any of it. I did want him to know me in the present moment, that's what was most important to me.

We sat in silence awhile longer and then I said, "I know things were tough and you had to work a lot. That's just the way it was."

"That's right." He replied. "I had to string a bunch of things together just to make the rent."

And we talked about those hard times, and a few good times.but the rest of the conversation was just about making talk, the "healing" of whatever had grown between us was accomplished with that one line, "I'm sorry."

Sometimes, that's all it takes.

Dick Prosapio ©2006, All Rights Reserved
  CoyoteCall@spinn.net