Tradition, Tradition

 I’ve been pondering a lot lately about fatherhood, thinking along with that, of the examples of fathers in my life.

I had three grandfathers; two passed away before I was born; the third, my maternal grandmother’s second husband, passed away when I was three. The only memory I have of him comes from a picture of one of my earliest birthday parties. He was standing behind me and smiling, so I’ve chosen to remember his kindness.

I’ve had many other examples recently, especially from very close friends, of men being really good fathers. And of course, there are the memories of my own father.

The earliest memory I have of my father is sneaking away from family gatherings together. It was hard to sneak because of the creaking sound that came with the second-to-top step of our two-story-home staircase but usually we got away unscathed. The staircase led to our parents’ bedroom where a recliner awaited him and a little cubby in front of their bed awaited me. He would dig a wooden bowl into the secret second batch of popcorn he had made just for us and would hand me my first portion. I would probably crawl back for seconds, thirds, and so on, but this would be enough to hold me over for at least the introduction. You see, this early memory of my father was our weekly tradition of watching Mystery! on Sunday nights. We had to get in our spots at least five minutes early or we risked missing one of the best parts, the Edward Gorey animated introduction. The quirky, musical cartoon would depict the typical opening credits while poking fun at the whims of murder mysteries: the cocktail parties, the mysterious family members, the body slipping into the pond, the note-taking detective, the foolish police, and the crying damsel in distress. And then there were the hosts. The camera would rotate and zoom in on the quaint host who would usually approach your television screen from within the walls of an old home or dining room. They would welcome you to the show and produce an introduction to the evenings’ story, while portraying the struggles of the protagonist and leaving you begging for the plot to begin.  The main man from my youngest years was the raspy and eyeballing Vincent Price, who was then replaced by the elegant yet mysterious Diana Rigg. These personas along with those in the stories, like Jeremy Brett in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, David Suchet in Poirot, or John Thaw in Inspector Morse, made up the heroes and the fantasies of my childhood. If I read books at school or watched other shows on tv during the week, I was often disappointed with how the characters never compared. When Thaw and Brett passed away, seemingly ending their respective series, pieces of me died with them. When I had grown up and Kevin Whately decided to continue the Morse series as Lewis, while Suchet started making more episodes of Poirot, part of me healed. I’ve since collected pretty much every DVD and episode of all of these shows, I have developed quite the obsession of all things Sherlock Holmes, and I have even built quite the collection of old Vincent Price movies. A huge part of who I am as a person and my quirky interests as a teacher and writer come from the memories and traditions I built with my Dad.

Jamie has tried. She really has. But I don’t think she loves these shows as much as I do. We have our own tradition on Sunday nights. We’ve continued with the popcorn and what is now Masterpiece Mystery or really anything PBS for that matter, and I know she can see how happy it makes me. Not just because of the qualities of the shows, but because of the traditions.

But something inside of me is absolutely dying. Dying to make traditions with my own son or daughter. Dying for them to take a piece of me that they can hold onto forever.

I need to build new traditions with my own kids. I want to hold them in my arms and calm their fears; feed them when they are hungry; rock them back to sleep. I want to build forts in our basement and watch movies or read stories and create our own adventures together.

I don’t know what parts of me they will latch onto. I probably wont know it when it happens. I don’t know what they’ll treasure the most about their time with me but I want to give them as many options as possible.

My Dad and I don’t have a ton in common these days, but I love the fact that if I want to call him up after a long day, that we can always talk about current and past episodes of Mystery and how those night of sneaking away really made me smile.

Steve