The words highlighted above are the perfect summation of how I feel about my father. However, we are bound like a book, and I believe our words, like a novel, are already written. Read this post which is so dear to my heart and let me know your thoughts. I think anyone with a father can relate somehow to this piece. Maybe Ethers, you can give me SOME hope? If we keep using the book analogy...and the picture above....the page is not fully printed. Maybe there's time to add more text to it.

Dear Ether, 

The first man I ever fell in love with was my father.  I suppose you could technically call it love at first sight. 

He was born in Longmeadow, MA (a small, peaceful town where homes are from the 18^th century and have plaques proudly boasting their build dates on their spotless facades).  He was the eldest of three boys and since this is an anonymous blog, I will attest to the fact that he was by far the smartest.  He excelled at everything he did and when it came time to go to University he was courted by every Ivy League school (Harvard even offered him a yearly stipend for his pocket money).  He became one of Eli’s men and went to Yale on full scholarship, became a Skull and Bone and sailing through college with perfect grades and varsity sports under his belt, went to Yale Law School.  If you look at notebooks from his time at college (this was before laptops) his handwriting is in perfect script and there is not a cat-scratch in them.  Of course after graduating from Yale Law, he went to one of the finest firms in the country in Manhattan, got a stunning apartment in a brownstone on the Upper East Side and worked for five years, toiling away being told he’d probably be made the youngest partner if he kept up his fervor.  However, he was unhappy.  He was a writer through and through.  And, lucky, brilliant Dad, and his writing partner, wrote a script and sent it to Hollywood with their fingers crossed.  And guess what?  They landed a job on a TV show immediately.  

Oh, of course there are many more things about him.  That he was perpetually youthful looking which would serve him well as he aged (people often ask him where he hides his portrait).  That he has never had a health problem in his life (knock wood).  That he has always had a love of cars, so much so that when my grandparents, in the 1950’s bought a pink Cadillac (yes indeed) with white leather seats and, amazingly, a record player (the latest and greatest in technology—if they only knew what the future would hold) he sat for 7 hours in it mesmerized.  He says when he closes his eyes he can still see his feet not being able to touch the ground and can smell the interior. 

And so, the tale continues.  My father comes to L.A., works on very famous comedy shows, meets my mother, 2 years later they get married, a year later they have my older brother and then 2 years later I’m born—and my love affair begins.  It’s unfair, really.  It was my mother who gave up a hugely powerful job as a producer, rare for a woman in those days, to become a stay at home mom, and become the bad guy.  My dad worked 12-hour days trying to squeeze out jokes sometimes at 2am (not an easy task).  Often I wouldn’t see him at all.  But when I would hear that car pull into the carport, I would run downstairs and throw my arms around his legs.  

This is what I remember.  He always had a brown briefcase with gold numeric lock keys and never wore a suit.  He always had a stern look on his face and disappeared upstairs.  It was only later did I find out that he was so stressed out and filled with anxiety that he needed to be left alone and decompress.  As an adult and a writer I understand this now.  But then, it wounded me.  And that made me want him more.  And this could be why I have so many attachment issues with men.  But that’s a whole other round we can discuss another time Ethers.  Through the years and his many styles of eyeglasses (whoa, there were some beauts’) I sought his approval.  My mother was so hard on us and was the school marm while my father was the hero who swept through and was quiet and calm.  On weekends we would go to the beach or he would read “The Arabian Nights” or Dickens to us.  I had a canopy bed and he would sit in the dark improvising the most masterful tales until he lulled me to sleep.  The only requisite was that I give him a topic.  

As I became a teenager and he became a very successful drama writer and producer (and eventually and Emmy Award winner) we became wealthier, he calmed down, but no matter what I could do, the man I was in love with never indulged me with pride.  He always was a critic.  I would show him my writing and it would be scarred with red marks.  I’d be talking to him and he’d correct my grammar.  I’d be playing soccer and  could see him peripherally on the sideline with a puckered look on his face and screaming “Come on One of 365, get in there!”  He did always tell me how beautiful I was—even when I had braces, bad eyebrows, spots and frizzy hair.  But I never felt like I was ever going to be good enough.  I was never going to be a savant like him.  I’d already failed and I wasn’t even 18.  I certainly wasn’t going to get courted by Ivy League schools or become a lawyer.  I tried everything to make up for that.   I killed myself in school to the point of exhaustion.  I forced myself to become a straight-A student when it wasn’t natural for me.  I went to summer school and did extra work to make up for, god forbid, a B or B+.  I joined every team possible and became a varsity tennis and soccer player.  But my math failed me and I failed my SAT’s in math.  2 hours of my life, after 13 years of school,  and I didn’t get into any of the colleges I wanted.  I ended up going to a top 25 small liberal arts college in CT (a pathetic attempt to try and re-live what my father had in New Haven) and fell apart there.  I became angry and depressed and slept all day and never attended classes.  I had bad relationships with men who I didn’t like let alone even love and was pained and lonely.  That’s when I bolted for England.  You’ll know the rest of that story eventually.  This is about my dad.  

To this day we bang heads at every occasion.  He’s retired now and is always around to judge.  He’ll comment on everything from weight to writing.  He’s yet to ever look at a piece of my work and ever say it was good; he always has a qualm with it.  He’s even sent back an E-mail I wrote him with corrections for me to fix.  When we fight we are both so similar.  We’re cutting and mean.  But it’s so funny…….I try to be intelligent when I fire at him because even in an argument I want to earn his respect.  So Ethers, you must be asking, “This is the first man she ever loved?”  Oh yes.  And I compare everyone I ever meet to him.   Even myself.  Because to me, he is what I would have liked to have been.  He is a constant reminder of, what I see, as perfection.  Yes, of course I’m no fool and see that he has so many character flaws.  But his achievements and his health and his wit and ease with himself–I would have dreamt for that to have been passed down to me.  Whenever I meet an old colleague of his or a college mate, they always say he was the greatest guy they ever met.  My friends all swooned over him.  I once asked him why he was so easy going to those he didn’t know as well or care as much for and he said, “Because I don’t love them.”  I guess that’s why I have such a fucked up view of love too.  He feels he has to be the bad guy to get the point across and get the irons in the fire.  I just wish instead of irons being in the fire, that there would have been just a tremendous glow and warmth exuding from it.

I don’t know what I will do when the time comes when my father is out of my life.  He’s so intertwined with it.  My brother resembles my dad AND my mom.  But I’m a spitting image of him.  It’s funny, everyday I have to look in the mirror and see the man who I love more than anything.  The first man I ever loved.  But also the man who will probably always haunt me.  When I close my eyes and I picture my father I see him sitting in the backyard on a sunny day.  He’s tan with dark hair, trim and in one of our lovely wooden chairs with the dog at his feet.  As always, he’s immersed himself in a novel.  I stare at him through the French windows of our sunroom and I see him look up from time to time putting his finger in the page where he’s left his last paragraph, and he closes his eyes.  Is he soaking up the sun?  Is he worried?  Is he thinking about life?  Thinking, possibly of ME?  And then I see him give his head a small shake and open the book again looking down once more to read.  This is the first man I ever loved.  And to my dying day, even when I am old and he is dust, I will always wonder what he really thought of me.  

If he could read this, which he never will, I would beg for his forgiveness for failing him and I would tell him that the only reason I ever stood up to him was to try and earn his respect.  But inside I was crumbling.  And if he had said the word or just put his arms around me, he would have silenced my vicious tongue.  Every year that passes I know that we are too far-gone to ever be what I had hoped for.  He really has always been the old dog that can’t learn a new trick.  And part of this is my embracing being an adult and learning acceptance.  But I still look at him through the same eyes I had as a little girl, for he hasn’t really changed much, and I walk around haunted by my first love. 

Dedicatedly yours, 

—One of 365

All I did was sit on a bench................

Dear Ethers,

At 8 years old I was kidnapped from a school by an old man.  This is a true story.  For 7 hours I was alone with him in his apartment.  There was nothing sinister.  He was simply lonely.  

I had been playing soccer since I was 4 years old at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles.  Anyone could come and watch our games.  There were many soccer fields set up at once for all the events going on over the weekends and with so many kids, there was chaos. 

It was half time and my mom, who was team-captain, was handing out Gatorade and apple slices to hyper players.  Sitting on an aluminum bench scraped with graffiti sat this innocent looking gentleman.  I remember exactly what he looked like to this day.  He was wearing khakis, argyle socks, black sneakers, a sky-blue lightweight sweater with a white shirt underneath and a flat cap.  He wore heavy rimmed glasses.  He beckoned me over and asked me about the game.  I thought he was someone’s grandfather so I tried to be polite.  I plunked down next to him and after a few more questions was itching to go back to my teammates and gossip.  As I started to get up this feeble man suddenly had a strong grip.  He told me that he wanted to show me something at his house.  I told him I couldn’t go because I was in the middle of a game.  He started to pull me.  When I called out my mother’s name she couldn’t hear me.  When I tried again, he covered my mouth.

He kept pulling me until he pushed me into the front seat of a very old Buick.  He locked the doors and said he only wanted to talk to me for a few hours and then he’d bring me back.  I was hysterically crying.  I could see my mom’s black hair in the distance, her head bent over handing out cups to kids.  I wondered when she would notice I was missing.  

His apartment was in a retirement home only a block from the school.  It was a swirl of oranges and browns with a lot of stripes and plaids thrown in.  His rug was the color of pea soup.  I remember because I sat on it without budging for hours.  The strange thing is he simply turned on the TV and watched, commenting on a joke or a line every so often.  I recall never feeling threatened for my life, just missing my parents and feeling chilly because I was in shorts and a T-shirt from my uniform.  

He never offered me food or showed me the bathroom.  But he was very protective of the phone and the door.   He wasn’t a complete fool.  I kept asking him if we could go back to the school.  I asked him whose grandpa he was (I still didn’t understand he had nothing to do with my team).  I looked around to see if he had any pictures of family.  There were none.  Everything was so tidy.  

I was patient.  Incredibly patient.  And he was very quiet.  I was so confused.  Time just kept ticking away. 

And then there was terrible rapping on the door.  

“Police, open up NOW!” 

My captor did not budge.  I did not budge. 

The door was knocked off its hinges and there were a handful of cops who grabbed me by my shirt and hair and pulled me off the floor.  They carried me downstairs in a rush to my parents who were white as ghosts and held me with all of their might.  That was the first time I had seen my dad cry.  A female police officer asked me if I had been touched, and I said no.  They took me to the doctor anyway.  It was humiliating.  

The man never explained to anyone why he took ME specifically or why he took anyone at all.  He had no record and was not senile.  He was given a restraining order.  

From then on my mom never let me out of her sight anywhere.  Eventually she let up when I got older, but she watched me like a hawk.  She said she failed me as a mother and would have killed herself if anything had happened to me.  She later told me that the hours I was gone she had collected sleeping pills and was going to take them with a huge slug of alcohol if I had been found dead.  She, to this day, says she has never been closer to death in her life (and Ethers, she has had a life-threatening illness……..I’ll write about that one day).  

I’ve had many weird and wonderful things happen to me in my life.  I know the man who kidnapped me is long dead.  But I’ll always wonder what those lost hours spent between us meant.  Why they happened and what their significance was.  He could have stolen everything, I’m so lucky he just got away with 420 minutes. 

Dedicatedly yours, 

—One of 365