The Many Faces of Love

There came a time in my relationship with my father, sometime in my very early teens, when he proclaimed that I could no longer hug him or kiss him good night. I always wondered if he had some subterranean inkling that his youngest son was gay and that, by hugging him or kissing him goodnight he was somehow reinforcing the idea that it was OK to hug or kiss another man. I’ll never know but a few years later, during the height of the Vietnam war, I went to the airport to pick him up from one of his trips to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas where he taught combat strategy (or something like that). He was a Full Colonel by that time and I was an avid war protester showing up at the terminal with my very long hair, a pair of his army issue khaki’s and one of his WWII wife beater tee shirts dyed camo green. I waited with anticipation as my dad and his buddies walked up the ramp and into the terminal. It was the usual crew, a few Colonels like my dad and a couple of Generals, men that my father had known for years. As I stood there watching he turned to each of these men and hugged them, not the shoulder bumping, homophobic hugs that straight guys are so fond of giving these days, no, these were long, loving hugs shared by men who had survived battle together, men who had seen too much at a time when they shouldn’t have. And I was jealous, I was very jealous and I was angry.
As he parted from his buddies my dad turned around and saw me, his flesh and blood, his youngest son. . . and he stuck out his hand. Now I know this is my “family and friends” Facebook page and I hesitate to write what I actually said but for the sake of authenticity and power I’m going to say it anyway.
I looked at my father’s hand and looked up at his face, his smile, and I said “Fuck you.” “Fuck you if I, your son, get a handshake and those guys, those army buddies of yours get a hug goodbye.” I remember my father’s face turning red as he looked at me incredulously. Within one heartbeat his arms were around me and the year’s long boycott on hugging and kissing his youngest son was over. It’s funny, I don’t remember there being any words spoken about the whole thing as we drove home, I just remember helping him up the walk with his bags and him hugging me once more before we said goodbye. He was a wonderful man and I miss him every day.
There’s another point to this story though, one that I hesitate to mention for fear of ruining the continuity of the already told tale but in fact, it’s the most important part. You see, my dad wasn’t a particularly huggy, kissy kind of guy anyway, not until his older years that is. But did I know that he loved me? I did. I knew that he loved me because every day, no matter how tired he was, no matter how disillusioned by his life he became, that man got out of bed and drove to a job he hated. That man worked with a broken back, a failing heart and a marriage that lay tattered at his feet for one reason and one reason alone, to care for his kids. He put food on our table, clothes on our backs and even laughter in our hearts and he didn’t complain, he just did it.
The moral of the story, if you want to call it a moral, is that Love has many faces. The easy love that falls off our lips when describing our feelings for our new Iphones, our new cars, our morning waffle is not the same love as that shown by a man through his daily actions. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again here and now, I’d give all the “I love you’s” I’ve ever heard for one, “I’m here.”