What Your Soul Really Looks Like

I found this cool site that has some interesting thangs on it and here is one of them: I was surprised by how true it was.

What Your Soul Really Looks Like

You are very passionate and quite temperamental. While you can be moody, you always crave comfort.You are a grounded person, but you also leave room for imagination and dreams. You feet may be on the ground, but you’re head is in the clouds.You believe that people see you as larger than life and important. While this is true, they also think you’re a bit full of yourself.Your near future is calm, relaxing, and pretty much what you want. And it’s something you’ve been anticipating for a while now. For you, love is all about caring and comfort. You couldn’t fall in love with someone you didn’t trust.

Inside the Room of Your Soul

No Bull (continued)

I will begin right where I left off here, if you want to start at the beginning.

The third visit was a time when my father took me to a Minor League baseball game.  I was about the right age but with the wrong person.  He wanted to leave after a few innings and I wanted to stay and eat more popcorn and watch the game.  I was 10 that summer and remember this very clearly also.  We ended up staying for a bit longer and then leaving. 

I went home with my very first “souvenir” baseball that they gave to all the kids that were there early (like we were).  I was in my 3rd year of baseball by then and had this old, raggedy baseball glove that had been literally torn to shreds by the coaches dog, but he gave it me.  That was my first glove.  It was old and smelled like shoe leather with shoe laces strung where there once had been leather stitching. 

I have more fond memories  about that damned glove than I do of my father.   The glove and I pretended together that we were stars in “the big leagues”.  Every day after school, I would grab that glove and find someone to play catch with or just go out front of the house and play catch by myself, throwing the ball into air over and over again. 

I once counted that I threw the ball in the air over 350 times! That was a big deal to me when I was ten.  It is intriguing how certain things stay with me for so long.  I felt like that glove was waiting for me to get home to play with it.  Much like I bet my kids wait for me to get home today.  They meet me at the door and run into my arms shouting Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home! 

I didn’t have that as a kid.  At ten, I was a latch key kid and my father never came home.

He also never watched any of my baseball games.  I played baseball from the time I was seven until I was 22 and out of college.  That is one hell of alot of games to miss and never watch your son play.  That glove was, in a sense, more reliable than my father. 

The glove was right there when ever I needed it;  My father was not.

A few years passed and the fourth visit happened when I was twelve years old.  Again, we went to pizza and we talked.  At that time, it sure felt weird to try and catch up your father on the past few years of life that he missed. 

Looking back at it, he had no clue about me.  How could he?  For the first twelve years of my life I probably spent less than 1 year with him in total, if that. 

When we were talking I asked him for his phone number again and again he refused.  Saying he didn’t have a phone.  I was in gifted classes growing up and was beginning to feel confident enough to challenge adults on things I didn’t believe to be true or just didn’t understand fully.  I challenged him on this to be sure.  I remember saying, ” you mean to tell me that you don’t have a phone or a way that I can reach you at all??”  He said, “no”.  I pushed harder and said, “what if I want to see you in a couple of weeks or want you to watch my BMX races next weekend?”  He said that, “he couldn’t do it.”  He asked if I wanted to play pinball after that, so we played pinball for a long time.  It must have been at least 30-45 mins, as back then it seemed like an eternity to me.  When we were all out of quarters, we left and he dropped me off at home, with my mother asking him to come in, my father refusing and leaving.

That was the last time I spoke with my father. I found out when I was 28 that he had passed away 7 years earlier.   My mom was the one “that broke the news”.  When she told me, she expected me to be emotional and feel something.  I didn’t really; except anger.  I felt like he had left for good much like he left the first time, but I wasn’t looking out the window through the curtains.  My mom found out where he was “layed to rest”. He was cremated and put into an earn at a cemetery a few hours away from where I was living at the time.  I went to see it eventually when I had the gumption and confidence to “see” him for the last time.  The earn was in a building with lots of windows and had nice benches.  I was the only one in this place.  I first cried and then screamed at the earn.  I left an hour and a half later by saying, “you missed out on alot of fun” and “I forgive you”.

When driving home that day I stopped off at my mom’s house to check in and chat a bit.  It was then I vowed that when I became a father, I would never lose touch with any of my children for as long as I lived.  I cried with my mother that day.

More later.  nighty night.

Re: Chris Gardner Story

I wanted to follow up my post regarding the Chris Gardner Story with a story of my own.  It is the story of how I was raised by a single mom and came out on top.  I won’t focus my daily postings on this topic alone, but will frequently post in this Bulldawg Mini-series titled, “No Bull”  about my life growing up as a kid.

Previously I wrote:

“Basically a rags to riches story about overcoming obstacles and knowing who you are to get to the top.  I love these stories because they are very similar to what I went through as a kid with my mother.  I mean we never stayed in a BART bathroom and we always had the same house, in fact to this day my mother still lives in the same house I grew up in.  I remember waiting in the car alot while she went to get things, sometimes even digging through dumpsters for arts and crafts supplies.  These supplies were usually blocks of wood and other textiles that we then would cut up and make things with.   I remember going to FISH closet to get clothes and government cheese.  We went to church every Sunday.  I am so grateful that my single mom raised me with integrity, trust and confidence.  Maybe more on this later.”

Well, now is that time.  If this bores you, my apologies in advance.  If not, good.  I am very proud of my mother and how she raised me.

Dad

I was born to a Welleslyan mother and a self made, self taught electronics engineer that held big roles in developing the first reel to reel video tape player and in developing the infrared scope on the M1 Tank.  I have trade journal clippings framed of him on my walls in my office at home.  My mother recalls having Gordon Moore from Intel over for dinner parties back in the day.  My dad was apparently a heavy hitter until the engineer recession of the 70’s hit.  Then, during those years, along came me, the bulldawg puppy.

My parents had been married for just over ten years when I was born and things were zipping along quite nicely for them from what I can gather.  My father had his pilot’s license and drove a 1962 Corvette.  My mother drove a 1964 Buick Riviera that we later called “Bessy”.  They had just purchased the model home in the housing development where my mother lives to this day and eventually my father bought his own plane. 

When I was two, as my mother tells the story, my father came home one day and sat down in a chair and said he wanted a divorce.  They were divorced that year and he left.

I don’t remember any of this.  I was too young.  What I do remember (I remember all the way back to when I was 4) was not seeing him too much.   At age 4 I remember looking out the panes of glass in our front door after my father rang the doorbell twice.  He was there because he had “visitation rights” as I learned later on.  I tried to open the door, which was locked, but just couldn’t quite get the handle to turn and open.  My father couldn’t see me from beneath the curtains that covered the door.  My mother yelled, “I’ll be right there!”…..and within 1 minute my father left.  Either he didn’t hear my mother or he didn’t care to wait around.

I still remember that to this day.  It really hurts to this day as well.  It for a while contributed to my fear of being left, which I have long ago overcome.  I also swore that when I was a father, I would never have my children feel the way I did as I watched my father turn around and leave on that day.

Despite my mother’s efforts to coordinate time with my father, there were only 4 visits between the ages of 7 and 12.

The next visit was when I was seven.  I remember that visit.  He took me to Shaky’s pizza parlour on a bright Saturday afternoon.  We were there for an hour or so and while we were there I asked for his phone number so we could “talk more later and see eachother again another time.” He declined to give it to me, saying, “he just had a new one and didn’t remember it.”  It was here that I saw many baseball teams with other kids my age having a great time playing the video games, eating pizza (with their dad’s of course) and an overall comraderie was in the air.  I thought that day I would like to play baseball.  I played that next year all the way through college.

The next visit was when my father came to the house and we all ate lunch on the back patio.  I was 9 by then, according to my mother and all I remember was that we ate ham sandwiches and my father gave me a lego set.  My parents talked for hours and then my father left right before dinner.

More tomorrow.  nighty night.