Posted on: Monday, June 13, 2005

ABOUT MEN

By Mike Gordon
Advertiser Staff Writer

I woke up at 2 a.m., startled by the realization that I could not remember the sound of my father's voice.

The thought was so out of place that I could not stop thinking about what it might mean.

I looked at a photograph of my father hanging in my home that was taken not long before his death in 1977. Even if I had to close my eyes, I could easily see that photo, see his face, the beard, the smile, my father arm-in-arm with my mother.

But his voice had vanished.

Until that moment, I had never truly missed it.

Curious, the things we discover missing. A man can live his whole adult life being too busy to notice something is not there.

If he isn't careful, though, he'll lose it. It will slip away.

When I first met Mrs. G., she would ask me about my father. What was he like? What did he like to do? What did the two of you do together?

I tried to avoid answering her questions. I felt like I didn't know my father well enough.

All I could recall with any clarity were the last moments of his life because I had been there.

He had passed away before I could learn his personal milestones, before I could ask questions about the things he had done. I was 19. I thought people lived forever.

Mrs. G. pressed me nonetheless, and I discovered I knew my father better than I thought.

And that I missed him.

I patched together memories of the things we did.

He enjoyed baseball more than I did, and yet to this day, I still treasure the memory of the two of us throwing a ball back and forth.

He didn't surf, but he would gladly drive me to the beach and wait on the shore.

He was a professor who understood the power of words better than I did. I have always wondered what he would say about the way I use them.

Our conversations were seldom deep. But one night when I was in high school, while walking the family dogs on a nearby golf course, we lay flat against a grassy hill and stared at the star-studded heavens.

We were like a grain of rice on the entire golf course, he told me. This planet, the two of us, everything about our lives was little more than an insignificant speck in the cosmos.

How similar I felt, decades later, wide awake in the middle of the night and trying to find an echo in the cosmos.

I never figured out what triggered my sleepless night. Stress, spicy food, guilt. Who knows.

But it took a while for me to realize that nothing had slipped away.

My father lived in fond memories. Listening to a baseball game on a small AM radio and pondering the big picture.

So what if I couldn't hear his voice?

I could remember what he said and the things we did together.

Reach Mike Gordon at mgordon@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8012.