by Calvin Sandborn

My dad held everyone to the strictest standards. He never forgave himself, and seldom forgave others. He died blaming everybody. On the day Dad died, he was driving us to school in our 10-year-old Plymouth. Halfway there, the engine died, and the car glided down a suddenly silent dirt road. “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Dad exclaimed, and pulled over onto the shoulder. He hit the brakes hard, almost throwing me into the steel dash.
Behind me, my sister Pam rebounded off the seat-back, clutching her second-grade reader to her chest. Next to her, nine-year-old Candy spilled her lunch bucket with a clatter. Pam fell back into the rear seat, exhaling heavily, “Whoo!” Dad tried to start the car. Click. “Goddamit!” he muttered, repeatedly turning the key on and off. Nothing. He tried again, then sat back and glared at the silent ignition, “Don’t do this to me, you rusty sonofabitch!”
One more try. No luck. “Jesus Christ on a crippled crutch!” he muttered, as he jerked the hood release. He struggled to raise his heavy body out of the driver’s seat and stepped outside, slamming the door behind him. As the girls whispered tensely in the back seat, I sat in the front and watched Dad. For a moment he just stood there, frowning at the cattle in the field, squinting into the brilliant spring morning. The green grasslands, carpeted with tiny red and yellow flowers, stretched across a small prairie to Submarine Hill. Scores of tiny cotton puffs drifted down from the tall cottonwoods along the nearby stream and filled the air around Dad.
Sweat beading on his forehead in the warm early light, Dad swatted the fluff out of his face. He took a soft pack of Camels out of his pocket, lit one and took a deep drag, sourly contemplating failure. “That bastard Armstrong,” he finally muttered, throwing the fresh cigarette down and grinding it under his shoe. “Whatta piece of junk!” Shaking his head, he lumbered over to the trunk and rummaged around, returning with a screwdriver. Fury building, he heaved the hood open. “Goddam that Armstrong to hell, anyway!”
From where I sat, I could look through the hood opening and see Dad’s hands working aimlessly in the engine compartment, the anchor tattoo on his forearm moving in and out of view. He lifted the battery off its platform, and probed below with the screwdriver. A minute later he jerked back, shaking a nicked finger. “Sweet Jesus!” But he didn’t stop to take care of it. Instead, he leaned back into the engine and railed against the man who sold him the car last year. “I never should have trusted that sonofabitch Armstrong! I never should have believed him. He screwed me! Sound as a dollar, my ass!”
Candy and Pam huddled in the far corner of the back seat, whispering. They giggled once. I checked the car clock. “I don’t want to be late for school, Dad,” I called out. “Should we go ahead and walk?” He pulled back from the hood and stared at me through the windshield, blankly, as if I were a stranger. After a moment, he looked away, “What the hell do I care?” Bending back under the hood, he mumbled something. I didn’t move.
Finally Dad got back in, seat springs groaning under his weight. He wiped his bloody finger on the engine rag, then threw the rag onto the floor in front of me. “Now this had better work!” He turned the key back and forth several times. At one point the engine started to catch. “Oh, baby,” Dad coaxed hopefully, “Oh, baby, come on.” The engine shuddered for a full minute, rattled, then died. Dad leaned back and sighed heavily. He turned and looked out the window. The cotton puffs drifted across the sky, a legion of tiny parachutes. Finally he sat up and smacked the steering wheel as hard as he could. I jerked involuntarily.
“Jeez-us, just shoot me if I ever deal with that crook again. Nothing but sonofabitchin’ headaches. The Goddam con!” At this point, I turned, gave the girls a meaningful look and discretely gathered up my books. “OK, Dad, we’d better go,” I ventured quietly. He didn’t respond, so we got out and started to walk away. “Bye, Dad,” Candy called out to him. “Yeah, yeah,” he growled, shaking his head, impatiently waving us away.
“C’mon,” I urged, “we can’t be late.” Pam took my hand. As we walked down the road, I could hear him in the distance: “That bastard Armstrong had the nerve! Palming this off on me!” he shouted. I looked back in time to see him raise his right fist and slam it down onto the steel fender. “Goddam him to hell!” The fender reverberated, a heavy hollow sound. The car never did start; it had to be towed. And I never spoke to Dad again. He died late that night, as the arteries in his chest burst from ancient blame.
In his last years, this was my father. Consumed by failure, first he blamed himself, then he blamed others. It was all some sonofabitch’s fault. He forgave no one. Tom Armstrong was just the latest in a long line of people that he blamed his life for. And in the end, this man who routinely inflicted blame on others was the one who suffered the most. Refusing to give himself and others a simple break, he alienated family and friends. He missed his last chance to say goodbye to his kids. He died in an empty hospital room. It’s a paradox. Dad’s refusal to forgive others destroyed him.

Forgiving dad

For a long time, I hated my dad and didn’t forgive him. I hated him for his drinking, his rages, his vulgarity, for walking around the house in his underwear, for peeing in the bathroom sink, for scaring me. When I was 13, I wished he would die. And then he did. I thought I had killed him. For 15 years, I never mentioned his name to anyone. Applying a kid’s magical thinking, I was scared to death I might kill someone else with mere thoughts. For the longest time, I couldn’t forgive myself. I was scared to death that I would damage someone else. But I’m healing. And as I write this chapter and explore the idea of forgiveness, I think of Dad: His father dying at about the time that boys are first forbidden to feel their emotions, at age five; publicly humiliated by his preacher grandfather in front of the congregation at 14; running away from home and living on his own; adventuring to Alaska, becoming a bush pilot and later a glad-handing California salesman, a Willie Loman, a man’s man, a man finally undone by unemployment, drinking and failure.
Dad never took the first step towards forgiveness. He never got in touch with his own pain, never knew how to process his own tender feelings. Instead he took the “Anger Path” and forced those unwanted feelings onto us. He blamed himself for feeling forbidden pain, then quickly shifted that blame onto us. He took us all to live in the “Country of Resentment.” Eventually, he drank and blamed the forbidden feelings away. And he killed himself in the process. But he wasn’t always like that. A memory returns:
It was evening at the river. I was five, and Dad was still young and strong. We were camping in the California Coast Range. Although I couldn’t swim, I had wandered down to the river after dinner, and paddled an inner tube out to the middle of the big dark pool. I lay back in the inner tube, gazing at the cliff that loomed above, on the other side of the water.
Suddenly I slipped through the middle of the tube, and I was in the water, struggling. I sank into the cold dark water. As I struggled to the surface, I could see my dad running down the beach, tearing off his shoes, and plunging powerfully into the river. Then I was under again, swallowing cold water, sinking into blackness. In a moment, I was pushed powerfully to the surface. He had come up below me, pushing me to the air. As I gasped for air, he rose like a sea lion to the surface below me and I was saved. But then he swallowed water and began to cough and struggle himself. “Dad!” I cried in a panic. He sank below me and I again fell back into the black waters, gulping and sputtering, stepping on his head. As we sank, the murky yellow light of the world receded into darkness, with no sound but my thundering heartbeat.
I felt his hands grip my calves and place my feet firmly on his shoulders. Then, as in the game we’d often played, he drifted down and bounced back up from the river bottom, thrusting me to the surface. And then his tattooed arm was around my chest, towing me to safety. Keeping my face above the water, he coughed, then murmured, “It’s OK, Cal. It’s OK.” Finally we staggered onto the little sandy beach, and Dad hugged me. As I stood gasping, shivering and crying, he hugged me to his heaving chest. Then he went over and got a towel out of the trailer and wrapped it around me. Later, as he heated hot chocolate on the Coleman stove, he did the unusual; he sat me on his lap. After a while, he turned the Giants’ game on the radio, and we sipped hot chocolate while the sun sank behind the cliff.
By the end, I think Dad, like me, had totally forgotten that day. He forgot his goodness. I wish that, when he ruminated on his failures, he had been able to remember the good things. I wish that, when he thought of his years of unemployment, his bankruptcy, the jalopies he drove, his failed marriages, his destructive anger, he had been able to recall that day on the river.
Most of all, I wish he’d had a kind father to remind him of the good things about himself: his sense of humor, his charm, his ability to spin a story for a crowd, his compassion for the unfortunate, his intelligence, his ability to make a day’s outing with a young boy into an exciting adventure.
I wish he had understood that he was no different than any of us, a mixture of good and bad. I wish someone had told him that he didn’t have to be a superhero; he was simply human. I wish he had realized that he could be forgiven, and that he could forgive. The fact was he didn’t have to die alone in the “Country of Resentment.” There was room for him in the “Country of Love.”

Excerpted from Becoming the Kind Father by Calvin Sandborn, copyright 2007, New Society Publishers.