Father and Son
Just relax, take it easy…
It was 1974, and I was turning 15. At the time my dad worked for Gulf Oil, and he had been transferred to Luanda, Angola. Angola was just gaining its independence at the time, having been a Portuguese colony since the 16th century. There were no English-speaking schools for kids my age in Luanda, hence my opportunity to go to school in Leysin, Switzerland.
I was in heaven. Live in Africa? Go to school in Switzerland? Yes, please! I thought it would be one unforgettable adventure and fantastic from start to finish and that I was fully prepared for it. It was one unforgettable adventure and pretty fantastic from start to finish. But I was in no way fully prepared for it. There were some less-than-fantastic lessons to be learned along the way.
Sometimes you don't know how little you know until you get hit right between the eyes by your ignorance.
Before our moving overseas, I had never been on an airplane. From our home in Oklahoma City I had never been east of Iowa, north of Kansas, south of Dallas, or west of Colorado and Wyoming. I had never spent more than a week away from home at a time, and even then, I was visiting my grandparents on their farm in Kansas when I did.
Not only was my geographical range tightly bound by a narrow circle of destinations, but my thinking and the gauge of what was "good" and what wasn't was also tightly constrained. Doing well in school, being a "good boy," getting good grades, being polite, and being a "Christian." These were some of the metrics by which I was measured and, consequently, by which I measured myself.
In my world, it never occurred to me to question any of this. I guess more than anything else I just wanted to please my parents and not get in trouble. The mold was set, and I never even considered fighting the process. I am not sure many do, but for me, it was rigid and rigidly set.
Being "good" and being "bad" were based on what one did. Good people did good things, bad people did bad things, and there was no gray anywhere.
My family went to church, and we said grace by rote at dinner, but there was very little outside these actions that spoke to anyone in my family having any more than a religion of formality. I never gained any proper understanding of what Christianity in specific or religion in general was, or why it was important. It was just something that good people did, and since we were good people, we did it too. I always thought heaven sounded boring, and I never saw much in the way of forgiveness by our father at home. But, going to heaven sounded better than going to hell, of which I was constantly terrified. It was the way I was TOLD to be, rather than shown how to be, and under that pressure, I just went with it.
The United States was in my mind the greatest country in the world. We were good. The countries that opposed us, the Soviet Union, China, and their proxies, were then obviously bad. And for me, this carried on down to their people. I understood so little that I thought that the values demonstrated by a government pretty much mirrored the values of those governed by that government. So the people of the United States were good and the people of the U.S.S.R., China, and all their satellites were bad.
As a kid in the sixties, I saw the Vietnam War as if it were a sporting event. Every evening on the news, they had a scoreboard. It listed the number of our soldiers killed, wounded, and captured for the day as opposed to their soldiers killed, wounded, and captured. Since we killed, wounded, and captured a lot more of their people every day than they did ours, I figured everything was going great! The idea of those being real men, other people's husbands, sons, fathers, brothers, and uncles never entered my mind. I think that most boys growing up at that time were pretty much used to the idea that war was "cool." Since the US had never lost a war, we would obviously, eventually, win this one. War being "cool" was not anything anyone said. Still, I grew up getting GI Joes, army men, and play guns for Christmas, watching "Combat" and any other war TV show I could. Westerns and World War 2 movies were my bread and butter, and often my mom watched with me.
So, as the wheels of our 747 left the runway at JFK, I was fully assured that the United States was the best country on earth, and Oklahoma was the best state in the union. That was how I saw things before we moved overseas.
I tell you all of this to relate what it was like for me, days after turning 15, to leave my family behind in Luanda and go alone to Leysin, Switzerland, where I knew precisely nobody. I might as well have landed on another planet!
Getting to school was an odyssey in itself which I might share at some point. But through some trials and trepidations, I finally got to Leysin and school.
Once I got there, I had roommates.
The first semester, one of my roommates, Greg, was originally from Tucson, Arizona but now lived in Saudi Arabia. He was an atheist (bad) yet it didn't take much in the way of conversation to figure out that he knew far more about the Bible than I did. Instantly I was in a quandary. His father worked for Aramco and had been a fighter pilot flying F4 Phantoms in combat in Vietnam. When Saigon fell, the Herald Tribune talked about how the people lined the streets cheering as the victorious soldiers from the north marched through town. I said something about how ungrateful they were to us, we who had been fighting so long for them. He quickly pointed out that they needed to do what they needed to do so they could get food and other services. So in short order, I had just a tad of my ignorance brought into the bright light. This would continue from that day to this.
The other roommate I had that first year was from Persia (Iran). His name was Husain. He ate pistachio nuts (I had never even seen them before). He wore slippers instead of going barefoot and said, "Close the light, Bubba," when it was time to turn the lights out at night. I am sure that Husain's family was fabulously wealthy, but he never acted like it. I think we puzzled him as much as he puzzled me at the time.
In Switzerland, the rules were different in lots of ways.
We could go into any restaurant or bar in town (except for one which the school had put off-limits) and buy any beverage we wanted! I found I liked beer, along with Sloe Gin Fizzes and something called a "Singapore Sling."
We could, and did, smoke cigarettes (and before too long other things). But, we were responsible for ourselves and had to figure a lot out on our own. Living in dorms, getting along with people from around the world: when I was there, students came from Sweden, Norway, Canada, Germany, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Pakistan, and probably others I can't recall.
Talk about your culture shock!
I handled some parts better than others. However, I didn't have a framework of values that I understood enough to believe in that I could use to pave the way over all the changes I was being exposed to. I was a narrow-minded kid from a narrow-minded existence who had just tried to please his parents and do whatever they wanted. I had no inner compass other than the one that was imposed on me. Maybe every kid is like this, but for certain I was like this. Consequently, peer pressure was killer, and I wanted to be in with the "cool kids." I don't know if I ever made it, probably not. No one who wants to be accepted as badly as I did back then is likely to be thought of highly. Kids are kids; regardless of how we looked in the yearbook, we were all just kids. Anyway, even if I didn't make it into the group, no one ever tried harder. I made all sorts of questionable decisions in that first semester because I had no rudder of my own that I wanted to use to steer by.
To help all of us handle some of this, we had proctors in our dorms, grown men who we could talk to and who tried to keep us from doing too much stupid stuff, not that they succeeded very well, as in my case, but they did try.
The proctor on our floor was Tom, and his room was next door to mine that first semester. I liked Tom and thought highly of him. I remember distinctly one evening I was in his room, talking with him and sitting on his bed. He had a Cat Stevens album on, and "Father and Son" started to play.
Now, I loved Cat Stevens at that time, and I still do. But I can remember sitting there that evening, listening to the lyrics of that song, desperately wishing my dad was like the dad in that song and would ever talk to me like that dad did. It never occurred to me that the son in the song doesn't see his dad as perceptive, compassionate, or understanding any more than I did mine. He just thinks he's ignored and talked TO rather than talked WITH. That didn't dawn on me then. I just wanted a dad who would talk to me like the father in that song talks to his son.
Years pass...
I still love the song, and when I hear it now, I hear it from both sides. I hear that kid, and I understand what he's saying because it's what I longed to tell my dad. Maybe it's what all kids long to say to their dads. Probably.
But I also hear the dad and know what he's trying to say. He's trying to say what I think we all want to hear our dads calmly tell us; it's ok, you don't have to have everything figured out right now. Life is longer than you think, so you can take your time. It will come. It almost always does, and often when we aren't even trying too hard.
I know I was not that kind of dad with my kids a lot of the time. Unfortunately, I think I was a dad like the dad I had to them a good bit more than I would like to admit. But I do think I was that kind of a dad SOME of the time. The good thing is, that you are a dad for a long time. You are a dad (or a mom) a lot longer than you were a kid! You have time. You can get better and grow just like your kids do. I have learned and am still learning, even now that our kids are grown and on their own. Even for me now, the message is the same:
take your time, think a lot
Why, think of everything you've got
For you will still be here tomorrow
But your dreams may not