Yeah, Dad, damnit, why did you have to die so early,
just another way of abandoning me my shrink said
and you were really good at that, screwing me up.
You were so busy building your empire, papered
with bills and dames, you didn’t take much notice.
Yours, a hard life, had to drop out of school as a soph,
work crap jobs to support your scoundrel parents.
But you got straight A’s till then, were really bright,
could have been a college academic like me.
A loan from your addicted mother,
rich from taverns and race horses,
propelled you to a personal war on poverty.
toward cash and fillies galore, despite your background wives.
We didn’t talk much except sports;
you more an announcer than a father.
But now, looking back, I remember you read a lot,
big impressive books, you told me about sometimes.
Then one day you found I was reading way below my ability.
The Hammer came down. You were good at Hammer.
Brought home a fat paperback—Les Miserables by some French dude,
Victor Hugo, thrust at me and pronounced sentence:
“Every night after dinner, you read this for an hour.
Otherwise no phone calls with your friends. None.”
I would have argued if I were not afraid of you.
Took the tome in hand and slinked into my bitterness.
Then, my little war—“You can’t tell me to read this damn book!”
Sat in the bathroom after dinner, vent open to hide my smoking,
glared at that yellow paperback as if it were to blame—
cursed it, cursed you, cursed Hugo—but boredom won.
Picked it up finally, crushed by no choice, opened and read.
Like a curtain rising, Jean Valjean, Fantine, Cossette, Javert,
captured my mind and sent me into my revolution.
I could not put it down. I carried it everywhere, even got into trouble
in class for reading it instead of the assigned dullness.
Propelled me to be a literature major, get my Ph.D, teach Les Miz
and the wide wide world of books to others— Heart of Darkness,
Huckleberry Finn, Ivan Illyich, Catcher In The Rye—a library now.
Enthralled students were enticed, not forced to join those adventures
by a father who abandoned them but changed their lives.
You are long gone like Hugo, but both of you are still alive for me.
Sometimes you don’t know who someone is till you look back.
Originally Published in Poesis Magazine