It was my old man's birthday a couple of days ago, he would've been 93. Grief is a strange thing, for me in particular. It's rare for me to cry or lose control of my emotions but I do think about my dad and try to make sense of him as a man, as my father, and the impact he had on me (whether for better or for worse). Part of the reason why I rarely cry was because he beat it out of me, repeating what his father had done with him. I remember getting hit with the belt, tears running down my cheeks, trying helplessly to protect myself and he would yell, "Stop crying!" in Spanish. From an early age, I learned that you have to control your emotions in any situation, it was the harsh reality of not only my household but also the world that awaited outside. I suppose it's part of the reason why I seem cool under pressure but that's a lie, I simply don't show what I'm feeling on the inside. The problem with this approach, as I've learned time and again, is that you keep these feelings stored away until one day you can't anymore and you burst like a volcano. I guess it's fitting considering that El Salvador, a country two-thirds the size of Belgium, has 23 active volcanoes.
Instead of crying, I think. I analyze my memories, play them back in my head. As violent as my dad could be, he was loving too. He used to take me everywhere with him, first in that classic Buick station wagon with the wood panels on the side and later in the '79 and '78 Ford Thunderbirds. I was his sidekick, riding shotgun and helping him navigate from an early age, a human GPS before the term existed. He would ask me what's the best way to get to so-and-so's house and I'd pull up the route in my head. I was familiar with all the major expressways in Queens, the Van Wyck, the GCP, the Belt, the Clearview, the Jackie Rob, and some that take you to parts of Long Island, in particular to Hempstead (where there's a sizeable Salvadoran community).
He'd pick me up from school and we'd go pick up my mom from her job at the Duty-Free warehouse near the airport and, if we had arrived early, he'd take out a tennis ball or handball and we'd play catch until she came out. We used to play catch inside the house too, with a basketball during breaks while watching games. We watched so many games! When it was baseball season, you're talking about over a hundred games in a single season, and all the Yankee games he could catch, he'd watch! That's from late spring to early fall, you've also got a lot of tennis around that time and we watched all the greats of the time, McEnroe with all his swearing and fits, Boris Becker, Sampras, Agassi, Navratilova, Graf, Sabatini, Monica Seles, Hingis. When it started to get colder, we'd watch basketball, the Knicks, of course, I remember the '94 and '99 seasons in particular when they made it to the final. I also recall all the playoff games against the Indiana Pacers and Reggie Miller, I hated that guy (yet I admired him so much, so clutch). There were NFL games, mainly the Giants and Jets but since at the time neither of us knew how the sport was played, it was less interesting though I do recall watching the Super Bowl, you couldn't miss that. Now I know a lot more about American football since I used to play in a fantasy league and my cousin Uli broke down the rules to me. We watched hockey, another sport we were a bit clueless about, and lots of boxing fights at my tio Luis' house (because they had that famed pirated "black cable box", so they had all the channels).
My dad loved sports, he'd watch anything and everything. If the Olympics were on we'd watch whatever was on, it didn't have to be a "masculine" sport. I recall watching figure skating and all the greats, Nancy Kerrigan, Tonya Harding, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Michelle Kwan, he'd marvel at the spinning moves like the triple lutz or a well-performed set. Later on in life, I remember noticing that he was watching golf and asked him why, what the heck does he know about golf to which he replied, "Ah, just leave me alone!". During my adolescence, I started to hate traditional sports, I stopped watching sports with him and went outside to skate with my friends and cousins. One sport that I particularly hated was football or soccer, for starters, I was dreadful at it, and since I didn't understand the rules, I found it boring. All of my cousins and brothers played on football teams, my dad was even a coach for an amateur team at one point and yet, I hated it with every fiber of my being.
Life is full of irony, though. I spent a good decade hating sports, wondering why people would waste time on such a fruitless endeavor when they could read a book, watch a movie, enrich their minds. Now, I've become my dad, to a lesser degree but nonetheless, life has come full circle. FC Barcelona is my love, though I try not to let football take over my life, as in life events take importance over sporting events. I still watch tons of matches, read articles, and watch YouTube videos to stay up to date. What I was trying to avoid, unconsciously as a teen, I've become as an adult. I became my dad.
Now as I start thinking about what kind of dad I want to be to my future child, I'm thinking about what worked and what didn't. Corporal punishment was something that for a long time I thought could work as long as you didn't go too far, hitting the hand or a spanking, could be fine but definitely not a belt. I've talked about it with Armelle and she was and is vehemently against any type of corporal punishment. This was the cause of so many arguments but now that parenthood is on the horizon we both are on the same page. You can discipline your kids without hitting them, I do it all the time in my line of work as an educator, raising other people's kids. I don't want my children to feel the way I felt, the pain I felt physically and emotionally, and the rage and resentment I held towards my dad as a result.
Some things come full circle and some cycles are meant to be broken.
