A Father’s Imagination

A Father's Day letter to the man whose name I carry

I used to imagine you would come watch me pitch.

They told me you tried out for the San Diego Padres once.
So in my head you knew the mound.
You knew what it was to stand on it with the whole game resting in your hand.
I imagined you in the stands behind home plate, just once, seeing me do the thing they said you could do.

Then one day after school, you showed up.

I had been told that if you ever came around, I shouldn’t let you know where I lived.
So I took the back paths home, the shortcuts only me and my friends knew.
I put on my gear for practice.
And there you were.
Waiting for me at the field with my schedule in your hand.

That was the moment.
You were trying to come back.
After years gone, you had memorized my schedule and you were standing there ready to reenter my life.

I was told to tell you to “get lost.”

So I did.
I never heard from you again.

I still don’t know what you were imagining.
What you thought we would become.
I only know that whatever you pictured for us, it was not the life I wanted for myself.

Then I moved from Oakland to Palo Alto to start a new life with my Aunt Micki, and it was a whole new world.
You knew Micki.
I get the sense the two of you enjoyed each other.
It didn't change a thing.
In Palo Alto you were persona non grata too.
Whatever ruling had been made about you traveled with us, town to town, fully intact.

Somewhere in that new world the charm kicked in.
The charm everybody says I get from you.

Strange thing, to carry a man’s gift and not the man.

I became a global kid on that Palo Alto High School campus.
Friends in every clique, known by everybody, at home in every room.
The thing a father is supposed to model, I taught myself by watching.

And I navigated all of it alone.
First kiss.
First time.
First heartbreak.
The season I got ruled academically ineligible for basketball.
Leaving for a new city to go to college.
Landing a massive job in the music business with nobody opening the door for me. Getting married young.
Every rite of passage you are supposed to walk a kid through, I walked through by myself.

So when it became my turn, I poured everything onto the floor.

I sat in the pre-partum classes.
I read that “What to Expect While Expecting” book until the pages tore loose from the spine.
By the second time I was basically a trained doula.
I caught my own child as they came into the world, right there in our living room.

No manual.
No model.
I navigated young marriage and young fatherhood the way you navigate in the dark, hands out, feeling for the wall.
You weren’t there for any of it.

I kept on anyway.

I became successful.
More than anyone in the family I came from had ever been, more visible than the name had ever carried.

CNN
Wall Street Journal
Working with Biggest Brands, Athletes and Celebrities In The World.
Standing on stage holding audiences in several continents.

Which meant there was nobody above me to call.
Nobody who had stood where I was going.
So I built my own circle of counsel and figured it out from there.

Every sport my kids ever played, I started them in it myself.
I supported them and my family for three decades.

Not out of guilt.
Not to show you up.
Not because anyone told me to.

I did it because that is what it called for, and showing up was the one thing I had decided I would never get wrong.

Here is something I never got to tell you

My imagination depends on staying a little bit of a child.
To get into it I have to suspend time.
I step out of the clock and into what I have come to call Kairos.
God’s timing.
The appointed kind.
Through that door I can get back to green apple jolly ranchers at recess and wiffle ball, basketball cards and long hot summers with nowhere to be.

That is not a soft skill. That is my whole imagination engine.

In the 90s my imagination found the imagination of a generation of young artists and entrepreneurs, and we built things that bent the culture.
You cannot work with imagineers without being one.
The child who imagined a father in the stands grew into a man who could imagine futures into being.
The wound and the gift came from the same place.

I imagined being on a soccer field at three in the afternoon, coaching.
By five o’clock that was my actual life.
I imagined what it would feel like to look up from a game and see a parent there for me.
Then I understood that the imagining was the calling.
I was never going to get the parent in the stands.
I was going to become him.

One quiet day I went looking for you.
I got on Ancestry, and what I found was your headstone.
That was my answer.
You were already gone.

So there I sat, in front of my macbook pro staring at a JPG of the grave of the man whose name I carry.
And through the research that followed I found the rest of the family.
I learned I was Bahamian.
A whole branch of myself I had never met.

People say it is too late to fix things with your father once he is gone.
I am telling you it is not.
I forgave you standing there.
No bitterness.
I repaired it on my own time, because my own time is the only time repair has ever kept.

And the lesson did not stay about you.
Everyone walks to a clock only they can hear.
Everyone has a door that opens from the inside, in their own season.
You cannot reach through it.
You cannot rush it.
All you can do is stay on your side of it and keep the light on.

So I have stopped trying to author endings I was never going to control.

What is left to me is quieter and harder.
To stay reachable.
To be easy to find for anyone whose road ever bends back this way, and to carry no grievance for how long the road takes.

You stood at my field once with my schedule in your hand, and I was made to turn you away.
I did not see you again until you were a name cut in stone.
I would rather be findable now, while being found still costs me something.

Not the parent in the stands.
The one who never goes dark.

Fatherhood is not easy.
It is by far the most important job I have ever held or ever will.
And the imagination it takes to keep a door open with no promise that anyone walks through, that came from a father too.

Just not the way I planned.

James William Andrews (Oct 7, 1939-June 4, 2000)