This is the ninth Father’s Day since my father died, and so I’ve grown accustomed to missing him — although this year I found myself often wishing for his advice.
As I faced personal and family decisions in a new job and home, I realized how valuable just a few minutes with him would be. I had a mental list of the exact questions I would’ve asked.
And then, I did get a chance to visit with him.
Before you stop reading because you think I’ve lost my mind, conducted a seance or made friends with a medium, let me explain.
As my family prepared for its move to Atlanta last summer (joining me after my first seven months alone here), we began the arduous process of packing, cleaning out closets and emptying drawers.
Buried in one of my drawers, I found two cassette tapes, put there many years before and forgotten.
I had a rough idea of what was on the tapes, but I was unable to find a cassette player. After some weeks of trying, I almost gave up but I found a friend who had a device to transfer the tapes to CDs.
The tapes contained a nearly four-hour-long interview of my father I’d conducted more than 20 years ago.
I was a young journalist, and he’d just retired after a nearly 30-year career as a Cleveland, Ohio, police officer and detective. He had served in interesting times — including during Cleveland’s race riots — and he’d been a narcotics detective as drugs grew into a huge concern in urban America.
I believed that his views of history could be valuable someday, perhaps even provide the basis for a book I might write.
Maybe that will happen.
But the recording has been a powerful gift to me over the past year.
At first, hearing his voice again and hearing him use my name prompted me to turn off the CD at a couple points, as my emotions overwhelmed me.
I’ve listened to it several times and have heard new and important things each time.
He tells funny stories, and difficult ones too.
But viewed from a father’s perspective, all of the advice I’d sought was there for me. The stories he chose to tell anticipated the questions I’d have 20 years later.
In one of my favorite parts of the interview, he matter-of-factly described a crisis in a drug case. His team had lost track of one of its members who’d been dispatched on an undercover drug buy with an informer. They were desperately hunting for him, and he described how they went about it and what went wrong.
It happened on the same day one of my brothers was at the hospital because he had been hit in the face with a baseball at Little League practice.
Several stories work out that way, dramatic, TV-like police stories attached to significant family moments that I can remember, demonstrating a father’s dilemma of balancing professional and family life.
This one worked out fine; my brother healed after several stitches and the undercover agent turned up safe.
The interview briefly chronicles my father’s beginnings as a young cop walking a beat — including in the dead of winter and another time when he had to handcuff a drunk to a light pole — to his final days as a special assistant in city hall.
Along the way, he describes bar fights and gun fights, drug raids and bank robberies.
In his navigation of difficulties and dilemmas, I heard the moral certitude that I most remember about him and that he always conveyed to his children: do the right thing, and you know what it is. And usually the right thing is the hardest thing to do.
Despite the moral confusion of his times, and the challenges of a street cop, he talks of fairness even when dealing with society’s dregs.
His contempt is reserved for those who mistreat others and who refuse to honor society’s important standards, whether they are criminals or cops.
The stories he recounts revolve around those themes, and his commitment to his family.
I made duplicates of the recordings, providing copies to each of my four brothers and my sister. All of my father’s sons are themselves fathers, each of us facing our particular challenges, just as he did.
I’m sure we’ll all be thinking of him today, and we’ll miss him. At least now we can seek a little of his advice, hear his voice again and keep his lessons with us.
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