Dr. Ken Byers is a coaching professional with a thirty year background in business, industry and therapy. He specializes in telephone based Men's Life Coaching and cross-gender personal coaching, helping businesses and individuals identify, define and achieve their Vision through Essential Self-management Technology.
TRANSITIONS
"I am my fathers rage, and if I don't heal that rage, my sons will be their fathers rage."
In memory of Clayton Moore, "The Lone ranger." December 22, 1999
WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN ANYWAY?
January 2000
God she was big. I remember mom looking down at me and screaming, "just you wait 'till your father comes home...he'll teach you to tell lies." Apparently I already knew how to tell pretty damn good lies or she wouldn't have been yelling at me like that. But the fear of those words was so great that it didn't really matter. I don't know how old I was, but mom was four feet eleven inches tall and she looked big as hell to me, so I couldn't have been around too long.
Dad was a big guy, about six feet tall. Now if I thought four-eleven was big you can imagine what I thought about six feet! I don't actually remember dad ever hitting me. He didn't have to. He did this thing called thumping. It might well be illegal now. He would press his index finger against his thumb and flick the finger at the back of my head with, what to me was, amazing force. In retrospect, I guess they never really hurt all that much but still, his thumps held the terror of the ages. I learned early not to mess with father. I didn't need to worry about it very often because he wasn't around very much. Mom was not capable of much in the way of discipline and I think I had figured that out by the time I was three.
Dad fished most summer weekends, hunted in the north woods in the fall and winter, and worked five days a week. Evenings we would all sit around the living room radio and listen to the news with Lowell Thomas and then, on Tuesday's, The Lone Ranger. Then it was off to bed for me and he would usually disappear into the garage to work on the boat or his fishing rods or something. In any case all those things were definitely off limits to my inquisitive young hands. Those hands earned me many a thump as a youngster.
I remember a surprising number of things about those years. I was born at the beginning of WWII, but I remember air raid sirens and blackouts; half moons on the headlights of cars; playing postman with the food ration stamps; the horse drawn truck of the junkman who sauntered up and down the streets singing out his desire to collect the neighborhood cast off's in some unrecognizable language; the old glass milk bottles that would freeze on the doorstep in the bitter Detroit winter and push the little paper cap two inches above the top of the bottle. The milkman, the postman and the bus driver were heroes, men (always) who could be trusted to do the right thing. A kid could count on the same ones being around every day for years. They always knew the names of every kid on the block. I remember Sonja Hennie ice skating and life without television; Saturday afternoon at the movies for a nickel; two full-length cowboy features, ten cartoons and a Superman serial...for a nickel!
But I don't remember much about dad. Mostly I remember him as a disciplinarian. I know now he loved me more than life itself and I think I even knew that as a kid. But it was love from a considerable distance. Usually the length of an arm with a thump on the end of it. He died when I was eight. I remember wondering at the time if he figured I was getting too old to thump and he just wasn't needed any more.
He came and he went. He was a mystery to me. I never knew who he was and yet, I knew everything I needed to know about him. He was my father and that was enough. Although he was never far away from me, I didn't really think about him too much. Until, that is, one day about twenty five years after his death, when in a fit of angry reaction to something one of my young sons had done, I thumped him.
That completely spontaneous reaction, long hidden in my unconscious, shook me to the bone and caused me to stop and look at how many other ways I reflected my father. Was I too a mystery to my boys? Did I too make myself so unavailable to them that they saw me only as a disciplinarian? Did my father's rituals and beliefs become my rituals and beliefs? The answer to these questions was of course, yes.
In every episode, as the Lone Ranger rode off into the sunset we heard the same velvet throat ask the question. It was like watching it through a frosted window pane, as we each saw a symbolic part of our father and of ourselves, riding off on that blasted white horse. As much as we wanted him to stay, all we could do was stand there and watch, helplessly.
All those years I was growing up I had asked that question about my own father; "Who Was That Masked Man Anyway?"
I found out.
He was me.
©Copyright 2000, Kenneth F. Byers
Dr. Ken Byers is a coaching professional with a thirty year background in business, industry and therapy. He specializes in telephone based Men's Life Coaching and cross-gender personal coaching, helping businesses and individuals identify, define and achieve their Vision through Essential Self-management Technology.
Ken can be reached at: 415/239-6929
E-mail:
Website:
http://www.etropolis.com/coachken/.
|
This is a series of articles dealing with the lives of men. Mostly they are short stories that are common to almost all men in one way or another. Stories that form the basis of our lives and define who we are and who we will become. They come from many men who's stories touched me in a familiar way and within which are important insights into our growth and happiness. Some come from my previous writing others from timely stimulation, but always with hope that new understanding can be created. |
