by Paul Elam

Created on: April 08, 2009   Last Updated: April 09, 2009

It was February, and I drove through Athens into the heart of east Texas with a cold wind blowing dead leaves and debris across the highway. The sky, dark and moody, mimicked the turmoil in my heart.

"Just talk to him," Jim had said. "There is much you have to say and you won't have many more chances."

"You just don't f*cking get it, do you?" I blasted back at him. "He has Alzheimer's. It's late in the game. He doesn't even know my mother most of the time, much less me. What possible good is this going to do?"

Jim smiled, and placed a hand on my shoulder and gently squeezed.

"Just talk to him."

I cursed him again but made the commitment. I thought he was out of his mind to hand me this as a task. But the man, part friend, part brother and all mentor was seldom off the mark.

Nonetheless I cursed him some more as I drove on, watching the buildings in the small town give way to bare trees and farmland.

I had no idea at all of what I was going to say. My father, at least when it came to he and I, had, in a way, always had Alzheimer's. He was always there, and not there at the same time. I spent the first eighteen years of my life living with him, often sitting in the same room, but he was a million miles away.

His idea of fatherhood stopped at disciplinarian. A product of the great depression, a military career and two wars, his edges were cut in granite, his hand even but forged in steel. And his tolerance for nonsense, as he called it, nonexistent.

The only real gentleness I ever saw in him was with my mother, whom he loved beyond words. But that tenderness didn't translate to his sons. He had three boys and all of them were to become men.

In my home, his word was the law, as surely as if it had been carved into stone tablets and carried down from the mountainside. He taught me, sometimes brutally, the importance of hard work and discipline. His affections were almost never spoken. They were considered to be implied in the lessons he taught.

Honor. Work. Obedience. Especially obedience.

And it was the obedience, of course, that I ultimately refused to embrace.

That refusal was a source of chaos in my home. It earned me the lifetime ire of my brothers and the stern disapproval of my mother. It eventually pushed me out the door and into the service, the quickest escape I could find. Despite all the circumstances, I can say, largely with thanks to my father, that I left with my head high. Anyone raised by that man would have a spine, if nothing else.

But the echoes of all that

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