My Father

I realise, with a lump of regret and sadness in my throat, that I don't really know my father. I love him, yes, but in the cool, distant love of a relative. Not the way I love my mother, a roiling relationship that covers the entire spectrum of emotions. I never sought to learn about him as I did my mother. I don't know his favorite color, his opinions, thoughts, and philosophies. I don't know his favorite foods, his preferences, and what he feels. What I do know of him is superficial and at most, gives me a caricature of the man he is.
My mother, on the other hand, I have a dictionary of scenarios and stories. I can predict her response, pick up her moods, recite her anecdotes and quips. She is so much my mother.
I've been so unfair to my father. He has done so much for me, and undoubtedly, in his stumbling, awkward ways, loves me very much. Yet, in antagonistic situations, I have always cast him as my foe, and I have always dismissed him more easily than I did my mother. I had already inherited his face, I justified, I would take my character from my mother.

My father is an intelligent man, who seems to know a bit of everything (and a lot of structural engineering). Yet, sometimes he can be so stupid about human nature. He lacks common sense and knowledge of social cues, making him an embarrassment to watch sometimes. He sometimes stutters like a broken record in animated conversation, but is a marvelous conversationalist. He is a coward, but also terribly brash. He's reasonable, I suppose, but so terribly childish at times. He has his eccentricities and his obliviousness, but beneath that I can't say much more.
He does not like to be touched, or is it I who has found less and less of a reason to hug him, hold his hand? I speak with him less and of trivial things. When he was here, I think mostly we argued. I left him to his own world, cooped up (barricaded? Sheltered?) in the master bedroom watching TV. I see him so little. I used to ask him so many questions, delighted and awed that he knew so much. Now I'm a veritable Mary Mary Quite Contrary towards his advice, whether from our different viewpoints or just opposing him out of...habit.

So why this sudden 'eulogy' for my father? Oh, I don't know. Today was a good and sunny day, nothing sad or father-affirming. My dad's doing well *knock on wood*. I've just been thinking, and in my ruminating journey, have realised (or rather, rediscovered) all sorts of mortal things. IT crystallized when I picked up Sixteen, a collection of short stories for young adults, and read Pigeon Humor which involved the death of a character's father, and it struck me how I know my father as well as a perhaps a character in a book, emotionally, but not terribly, involved. Thoughts condensed like storm cloud, and the words began running themselves over in my head. It sounded so much more eloquent and beautiful in my head, but like my father, I have bungled what I've tried to say, and have only ungainly conveyed perhaps a heavily diluted version of what I mean.