Nothing in Common

I just got off the phone with my daughter. She is almost ten. I can't even begin to explain how much it sucks being so far from her. She lives about 200 miles from me. I can't imagine, as a child, how hard it is for her. Telephone calls are an important way for us to connect. I can't wait to get her a cell phone or for her to start using email. I mean on one hand I don't want her to grow up. It would just be easier to communicate directly with her and not go through her mother. I get along pretty good with my ex, as long as the child support is coming.


I grew up in the home of a traveling salesman. He would go on one to two week road trips and come back exhausted. He provided a financially secure home which was unlike the one he grew up in. I think he felt if he gave us the things materialistic we wanted. I don't blame him for not being more emotionally available because he grew up in a different era. I wrote a poem about him called the "King of Repression"


The king of repression


Sitting on his throne with a drink
Old Granddad and Archie Bunker on TV
Smoke floats upward in shared silence
Did you get your homework done?
Yeah, the little I do to get by
No mess, no trouble everything okay
I don’t tell him about my friend Dave
He shot himself in the head last night
We only talk about the small talk
Two suicides in two years
I sit in shared silence


It's strange how I thought my father would always be this closed repressed person. I moved home two days before my mom died. It took her death and the realization that he had no one left but me for him to open up. He has told he loves me less than a handful times in my life. Two of those times have been since her death.

Nothing in Common is a movie that Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason star in. It this the story of a dysfunctional father/son relationship. The last line of the movie is Jackie telling Tom that he was the last person that he thought would come through for him. My father never said those words directly but he has said it with other ones.