Happy birthday, Dad

My father would have been 87 today. He's been dead over ten years and still I miss him. I watch as newcomers enter the rooms, many of them now second-generation addicts. Their tales of fathers in prison, mothers addicted to crack, at six of having to climb up on counters to open and cook cans of soup or go hungry, and while my heart aches for them, I just can't relate. I call them the children of wolves. They raised themselves and it's no wonder they, too, became addicted.

The longer I stay clean and continue to gain perspective on my childhood, the more I realize that I had it pretty darn good. My father was Lutheran, a Huegenot, I learned a few years ago. The Huegenots fled France, many of them to upstate New York, to escape religious persecution by the French Catholics. Ironically, my father married my mother, an Irish Catholic from upstate New York. My mother always said it was "love at first sight." They were both engaged to others, but she said that when she first saw him at the GE plant where they worked, she knew that she would marry him.

Dad was a bit of an enigma. He talked little of his childhood on a Melrose farm. His father deserted the family when he was about five, and he carried that stigma his entire life. I don't believe he knew how to be a father, at least to his sons, my brothers. He just did what he thought was right.

He was a depression-era child and he could fix anything. I once told my mother that I was going to marry someone just like him, except he couldn't sulk, because Dad could get mad and stop talking like no one I've ever met. He would always talk to me, but to my mother? "She's not talking to me," he'd say, as I sat with him behind the barn, where he pretended not to smoke. I'd mention it to my mother and she's say "Oh, I'm talking to him. He's not talking to me." And we'd laugh.

On one of my first jobs as a claims adjuster, my boss was cooking the books big time. My coworker had turned him in to the main office a year earlier, but nothing had been done about it. I was newly clean and worried about being in that environment since I wasn't the most honest thing when I got here, to put it mildly. So I called my dad, who'd been an insurance agent for about 40 years, and told him I needed to talk with him.

He and mom were waiting for me when I drove out to their house. I explained what my work environment was like and asked him if he thought I should quit, because I didn't want to be around the temptation. My dad said "This is the type question we've been waiting for you to ask us all your life. " (I had left home at 15 and didn't seek a lot of parental input at any age.)

He went on to say that at some point in your life, and some hit it sooner or later, you "have to make a decision." He said you ask yourself if you want to do the right thing or the wrong thing. He knew I was strong enough to choose the right thing. He suggested I keep my job. "I know you'll make the right decision," he said.

One day, a few months later, the home office guys showed up and fired my boss on the spot, escorting him out of the office. We ran around the office high-fiving each other, ecstatic that the truth had finally been revealed. It was a big lesson for me.

I was a terrible daughter. I know I broke his heart in the worst possible ways a daughter can break a father's heart. When I went to him early in recovery to make amends, he interrupted me as I tried to express how sorry I was for what I put him and mom through. "Stop," he said, holding up his big hand. "You will never be anything less than perfect in my eyes."

In that simple lesson, Dad taught me unconditional love. He was a great man, a man beloved by his friends and sadly never understood by himself or his sons. And I miss him. Happy birthday, Dad. I love you.