My Dad

I've decided to do a blog (or blogs) about my dad. I was reading random blogs here in the blogosphere and came across one about this person's grandfather. I think the guy who wrote it was Indian and he wrote about what an impact his grandfather had on him and his life and how the old guy wasn't really understood by the rest of the family, they were all a little afraid of him but how he formed a bond with him, listened to him, learned from his life lessons and example and now that he has passed, how he misses him and their talks. So this won't be like that specifically, but just how I remember my dad who passed away a few years ago and who I still miss and what our relationship was like. I think all families, especially parents and children, have complicated relationships, none are perfect and some are downright horrible. My relationship with my dad was not horrible but at times it was very frustrating, sometimes I didn't like him very much, but I always loved him and I knew he loved me. I think being able to admit that we didn't have a perfect relationship is healthy, even that at times he made me crazy because he was so damn stubborn but then again, perhaps I get that aspect of my personality from him because god knows I am one of the most stubborn people I know.
I actually met my dad when I was 9 years old. I had never seen him in person up to that time, well, at least not that I remembered. My parents divorced when I was 9 months old, I was actually born in Omaha, Nebraska but when my mom left my dad she moved us out here to California where my grandmother and the rest of my mom's family lived. My father was an alcoholic and apparently quite abusive at times to my mom and I guess had started to be abusive to my older brother so my mom left him, which was definitely the right thing to do. When he wasn't drinking he was a wonderful loving person but he drank pretty much all the time by the end of their (first) marriage and so she left him and came here with three fairly young kids. He was not in the picture at all for a long time although I've since found some letters they exchanged while they were apart and I guess he was keeping in touch sporadically and sending money when he could. I had seen a picture of him and mom was sending him school pictures of us and I remember getting a card for my 8th birthday with $5 in it, I used that money to get my ears pierced because my mom wouldn't pay for it. Found out later he wasn't too happy about that, but oh well, it was done and he wasn't here to say yay or nay. Around the time I was 8 my dad entered rehab and it finally took, at that point he'd been drinking for around 20 years I think and the doctor told him if he didn't quit he'd be dead in 6 months so he finally quit. After he'd been sober a year he asked my mom if he could come out to visit us and she said yes. He came out in October of 1977, I was 9, that was the first time I ever saw him. He was 14 years older than my mom, 47 when I was born, so when he came out in 1977 he looked really old to me. The first thing I said to my mom when he got off the plane was "he looks more like a grandpa than a daddy", they both thought that was funny. His hair was pretty much just grey and white, not much black left in it, but really, other than that, he looked young, his face stayed young looking until he was quite old. He stayed at least two weeks, I don't remember exactly now, and then he went back to Minnesota (which was his home state and where'd he'd been living most of that time), got his affairs in order, and came back out to CA. He and my mom got remarried on Christmas eve that year, after being apart 9 years and were married for 25 years before he died in 2002. It was an adjustment to suddenly have two parents when you are used to having one and especially a dad who was much more strict than our mom had been but more on that later...