Perhaps I’m too close to it, but I cannot tell you where the drive to write came from in my own psyche. I could link it to my father and the Irish tradition of storytelling, but that is it not all of it. Besides, my father is second generation Irish. My mother is first generation. I’m more Irish on my mother’s side.
It might come closer to watching my father, when he was fifty, get told that his department was going to be phased out of the company and he was out of a job. He started his own business, and in many ways he was far happier and enjoyed life far more than I had ever seen him in the previous years.
It might have something to do with the Catholic education my parents provided for me. It taught me to question everything (including the Catholic church; not all things work out the way they are supposed to).
Maybe it comes down a pigheadedness I inherited from my father—an attitude of “Goddammit, I can do that better.” That’s what I thought in 1977 when I read an awful profile of Charles Bronson in a well-recognized magazine. “Goddammit, I can do that better. I ought to write.”
I thought I was conflicted, and then I read an op-ed piece in the Sunday Los Angeles Times by Deni Béchard, who penned a Father’s Day piece on his own father, who was convicted of bank robbery, among other crimes. Béchard concludes his article with an homage to a man he obviously had a difficult relationship with:
Friends have often jokingly asked if he stashed the money from the bank job and whether anything was left over for me. Now, 45 years after that crime, as I consider Father's Day, it seems that he did: not just a love for story and his stories themselves but the gift of a relentless will to find my way, to test boundaries and take risks, not in violence or crime but in books.
I have similar experience and a similar homage to pay.
My father passed in 2004, but I need to say, “Happy Father’s Day, Dad.”
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