Father’s Day

Bill Grote

My younger sister Elaine and I paddled Mom’s ashes out beyond the pier and the breakwater in the two-person rented kayak on what must have been the largest and coldest swell of the year. In Monterrey Bay, amongst the glass-bottom boats Mom championed for our summer sojourns, with the backdrop of bellowing sea lions, squawking gulls and the strong smell of sardines, we poured her in. Her ashes swirled strangely effervescent as they mixed with the sea. It was a tough moment of closure as Elaine and I said our last “Goodbye” -- knowing that it truly was a last goodbye. We sat for a moment in silence letting the sadness take us briefly back in time, then we stroked in to return the rented kayak, and return to our families and the humdrum of our lives.

Mom’s death came almost as a blessing. She had died many years before. Some stranger continued to inhabit her body. A person we didn’t know, and who didn’t recognize us either. Mom looked the same, but she wasn’t home anymore. Dad had died years earlier in a mysterious car crash. His passing was sudden, but harder to bear. But now with Mom gone, my sister probably sensed what I did. We were truly alone now. We were finally adults.

Mom’s death haunted me. So I left my wife and son to attend a church-sponsored mission trip to Cabo San Lucas, to build, with a group of high-school kids, a room addition on a poor pastor’s house so he could save the souls of the lost and the damned. The hotels and night clubs of Cabo San Lucas represent a job Mecca for many poor, unemployed Mexicans in search of a better life. Drug use, adultery, divorce, alcoholism, and wife-beating are rampant amongst this transient population. The high-school kids and I weren’t staying near the lush golf courses, or fancy hotels or nightclubs most touristas see at Cabo. We were near the town dump where the tar-paper shanties and their impoverished residents reside. We were next to the vultures, and the ever pervasive smell of garbage and rotting flesh. We were near the lost souls who squatted, sorting through the trash mound each day, hoping for salvation in finding something good in what someone else discarded. There are no lush lawns here, only dry dusty dirt, except for maybe a lone mango tree surviving on used dish water.

The Pastor was an older man, serious in nature, but with a wide dark face a large smile, and a zeal and zest for life. I figured that he viewed himself as the devil’s adversary. He probably conducted exorcisms every Friday night. His English wasn’t that good and he preferred to stay in the background. Our construction work, laying block, and rebar, was being supervised by Carlos, a 60-year-old Chinese architect. Carlo’s grandparent’s had worked on the railroads in Calexico and never left Mexico. Now, it seemed he owned most of the undeveloped land in Baja.  Carlos watched over us as we tied into the rebar, mixed mortar in the hot sun, smoothed the bottom of the local sun-dried cinderblocks, and hoisted them into their place along the level-string line. Most of these bocks were no-where near square, yet, they had been the main material used for constructing most of the housing project the Pastor lived in.

This Mexican housing project was similar to American counterparts, except for scale. Most of these houses were less than the size of a typical American one-car garage. Each existed exactly ten feet from their neighbors – even in the middle of this huge expanse of desert with a view of the town dump. They had one large room and a bathroom. Yet, we watched Mexican real estate agents showing families of four the various features they would receive for the $5,000 sale price. Features like a 50-gallon bright blue plastic water tank on the roof, flushing toilet, cinderblock exterior, and care-free concrete roof.

One night, while sleeping to gecko’s laughter, after a hard day of cinder-block lifting. I dreamed of my father. He appeared shimmering and young-looking with a golden light that seemed to illuminate the darkness around him. He seemed glad that I was trying to do some good in the world, and said that it was an important lesson to teach my son. He looked down at me from this glow and told me to “Be a good father.” I hadn’t dreamed of my Dad in years, so I took this as a good omen, but thought nothing more about it.

When Sunday came, Carlos came to drive me and the high-school kids to the Sunday church service – where we’d see the Pastor in action. The service was held in a grove of trees with umbrella like branches which offered a rich cool shade in the hot Cabo sun. White folding chairs lined the grove in long, even rows. Electric guitars started to play and maybe it was the hot sauce in the tacos, but for a moment I was back in Golden Gate Park in the 60’s. The feeling was the same. That unpretentious caring for others, the love and acceptance of all. As the harmonic rhythm of the guitars faded in and out with the breeze through the trees, I began to feel something in me changing, moving through time and space.

People were talking on the stage now, but it was in Spanish, so I remained isolated, lost in my dream of the 60’s, until an angelic-looking middle-aged Mexican lady pulled up a chair next to me in the aisle and translated the stories. There were Mexican women sharing stories of how their fathers beat them, raped them, or beat their mothers, and destroyed their families, yet, here, in front of all, bearing their hearts, and souls, they forgave them. The guilty fathers appeared, heads bowed, tears flowing and the fathers thanked them for deliverance. There was a lot hugging and crying. It was riveting and powerful. These poor women had hearts as wide and strong as the cinderblocks we were mortaring.

Next came the sons, they spoke of their father’s sins, of their father’s drinking, womanizing, and aloofness, and how it affected their families. How it affected them personally, and how it affected the lives they now live. They gave examples of how this sin is passed down through generations. The guilty fathers appeared, heads bowed, tears flowing and each son forgave them, despite their transgressions. Grown men cried. The pastor was saying something about “As fathers we have a responsibility to be emissaries of God. “We have to pass down the God in us to our sons.”

Suddenly my father’s spirit was there upon me, between myself and this beautiful lady who was interpreting for me in the aisle.  I found myself, forgiving him for the times he was never there in my life, for the skills he never had learned from his own father, that he was unable to pass on to me, for divorcing Mom and for leaving us, and most of all, for the times I could ever count on him when I was trying to grow up. As I sat there embarrassed, drowning in my own tears and sorrow. I felt my own spirit rise up and join his in a hug, and somewhere far away, I heard a voice say “Happy Father’s Day”.