My Father

Ten years gone. Still teaching me stuff that he never said.

“The dead aren't absent, they're just quiet.” – Me

Everything was set. I mapped out which roadside BBQ place I was going to stop at in the middle of North Carolina as I headed east. I would turn left, head up the coast to Norfolk, Virginia, and stay with friends. After a day or so, I would trudge north up I-95, then hook a right where the District and Maryland meet to drive to Delaware and hit the beach with the DC Family for the week.

But I only made it twenty minutes in.

There are only a few people I can be sure I would answer if they called. Anonymous is always one, but the others are three of my four siblings.

On this summer day in July 2015, my oldest brother was calling. He never calls me. I felt my heart pounding, and my palms began to sweat on the steering wheel as I pulled my 2004 Nissan Sentra off the next exit. After I stopped in a parking lot, I embraced the dread that was coming, and sure enough, I was right - he told me in three words that Dad had passed away.

Your father died.

In my family, we had this funny habit of adding possessive pronouns to things commonly shared between us. Referring to our dad was one of them.

Your father sounds like I had a different one than my brother did. Your father is the start of a doctor’s update informing me of this terrible news. Your father is a threat to misbehaving children who must wait until he comes home and starts with the beatings.

Like most unexpected events, it took several moments for my brain to understand what was happening.

Okay. Let’s take a minute.

Dad died.

My father is dead.

He’s no longer alive.

I’ll never see him again.

We will never speak.

Okay, I need another minute.

With my head spinning, I blurted out to my brother, “I guess I need to come home now?”

“Yes,” he replied with a soft chuckle. “Yeah, come home.”

I turned the car around and headed west. On the way back to my Raleigh apartment, I gripped the steering wheel and cried.

Mike Dake

Michael Lawrence Dake was the unexpected second child of Charles Jackson Dake and Annabelle (Allen) Dake. He was born on Valentine’s Day, 1943, in Cleveland, Ohio. His older brother, Charles Jackson Dake Jr., was 14.

The middle name Jackson was inherited from Mike’s great-great-grandfather, Jackson Green Dake, who was born at the foot of the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee during Andrew Jackson's ascent to military fame. Which probably explains why Jackson keeps popping up in my essays.

Jackson Dake and his sons, including Mike's great-grandfather, Samuel Jackson, fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Samuel was captured at the second Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, in 1864, and probably spent the rest of the war sitting in a military prison in Illinois.

Samuel’s first son, James Jackson Dake, was born ten years later. James married and had five children, including the youngest, Charles Jackson Dake Sr., born in Tennessee in 1908.

By 1910, James Jackson Dake was working as a salesman for a manufacturing company, but by 1920, he was swept up in the Great Migration and moved to Cleveland to work as an inspector for Standard Oil.

As an adult, Charles Jackson Dake Sr. worked for the City of Cleveland, driving buses and trains. Annabelle was a housewife. The Dakes were Methodist but not orthodox, so religion wasn’t a significant commitment, but enough so that neighbors didn’t think they were godless maniacs. They were more dedicated to the idea that silence was the best spiritual exercise.

Due to this dogma, I know little about my father’s childhood. He never told me anything about it. I assumed a few things - like he was a decent athlete, mainly in baseball, where he batted left-handed but did everything else right-handed. I hope he grew up with friends, but I have never seen any photographs or stories suggesting this. I never learned his lineage regarding the Civil War, a subject I showed great interest in school.

I only know that Mike Dake attended public schools and graduated from Cleveland Heights High School on the east side of town in 1961.

Dad looked more like his mother and her side of the family.

At 15, Mike Dake worked at the gas station down the street from an Irish Catholic family, where he noticed my mother. Mom, the youngest of five, was born to a County Roscommon mother and a second-generation father from Galway. An unusual coincidence, Mom was born on February 15, 1943, the day after my father. I believe this was an immediate connection that lasted through their 57 years of friendship.

My parents had five children. After practicing with the first four, perfection arrived in 1976, when your mediocre history humorist entered the world.

Hopes and Dreams

One of my earliest memories of my father is playing baseball with my siblings and neighbor friends in our large front yard when I was four years old. We lived in Medina County, Ohio, just outside Cleveland, on a five-acre property, with four acres in the front that served as a baseball diamond.

My dad drove up the gravel driveway, past me and the ongoing game. He parked near the barn, walked back through the makeshift ballfield, toward the position where my siblings put me - deep centerfield, and handed me my first baseball mitt.

It was dark brown and about the perfect size for my hand, should any ball ever come my way. I never had a mitt in my short baseball career. I remember Dad spending some time with me, telling me how to pound my fist into the meat of the glove to loosen it up.

That would be the first of numerous gifts my father would bestow on me regarding athletics. It wouldn’t be until later that I understood that buying me stuff was his love language.

There would be golf clubs, shin guards, and all types of cleats, as well as bats, hats, balls, and uniforms. My Dad would drive me everywhere to participate in soccer, baseball, and basketball tournaments.

He was always at my games, but Dad never taught me how to hold a tennis racket for a proper backhand swing, throw a curveball, or bend the soccer ball around a human wall on a direct kick.

My father didn’t teach me in any particular way on any specific subject, yet he taught me in many ways that shaped who I am.

Hi Dad. It’s me, Christopher—your favorite.

Our Holy Trinity

My father and I connected in three areas of life: faith, sports, and school.

This man, who came from a long line of rural southern protestant rebels, ended up being a city boy who married an Irish Catholic kid and produced five Irish Catholic kids.

My father’s conversion to Catholicism was one subject on which he broke from his family’s sacred tradition and spoke to me about it.

During my sophomore year of college, I attended a retreat. A few weeks before I was set to go, my father and I talked during a car ride to Cleveland about his retreat experience.

It’s important to understand that my father was obligated to convert to have any hope of spending one minute of his life with my mother. To his advantage, his parents never spoke about their faith, so moving to the Catholic faith probably wasn’t something he ever mentioned to them.

Dad talked about how significant it was to reflect on what his faith meant to him and his soon-to-be wife. He was asked, “What does it mean to bloom where you are planted and grow?” This led to a deeper conversation about where I might end up after I leave college, and it was the first time I started to think about leaving Ohio after graduation.

Dad took to his new faith immediately and with dedication, and he instilled it in all five kids. Growing up, my father took me to Mass every week, where he would let me put a dollar into the gift basket. We mainly were Saturday vigil people. Somehow, Dad knew the Mass schedule of every Catholic Church in the Midwest because on any given Saturday as a kid, I was playing some sport somewhere on a Saturday. But just like sports, Dad never taught me how to pray or some of his favorite prayers.

School was another important aspect of life. Mom and Dad didn’t attend college. They got married at 21, had their first child a year later, and then life took off, with four more in the next eleven years.

Despite the end of their academic careers, they were determined that all the kids had opportunities to get a good education. I went to public school until third grade, then, when we migrated south to Columbus, I started attending Catholic school, which I continued until I graduated from college.

I was an average student, which frustrated my father. My freshman year of high school was exceptionally poor, and my father explained that he wasn’t paying thousands of dollars for me to pull grades that began with the first letter of my last name (D). I could only hope to get grades that started with the first letter of my first name (C). He didn’t share any study habits or how he achieved good grades – if that was the case.

From 1985 until 1992, my Dad and I intertwined all three. I excelled at sports, was okay at school, and built a solid faith foundation.

The Change

My father, the same one my siblings shared, turned 50 in 1993. It was also the year he abruptly moved out of the house. No one in our family would ever live with him again for the rest of his life.

By 1993, Mike Dake’s stress finally caught up with him. I was the only child left in the house at the time, and he left while I was in the shower.

I was a junior in high school. I had improved my grades from that initial year, which was a low bar. I did manage to make the honor roll by sophomore year. But that third year was tough - because I quit playing sports altogether. My stress had finally caught up with me.

Cutting out sports cold turkey is a shock to your identity. One great thing my father and I did after most sports practices was to go through the Wendy's drive-thru and devour food from their dollar menu. Our conversations during meals revolved around sports. The ones I was playing and the ones the teams in Cleveland were losing in. Without sports and Dad in my daily life, I lost my direction and purpose.

Dad wasn’t gone for long, but from the moment he left, I had two unanswered questions about my father—what he did for a living and now, where he lived.

Neither parent ever worked in an office, so I never grew up with the idea of one day going into an office to work. There weren’t any “bring your kids to work days” or “bring your Dad to school so he can tell your classmates what he does for work.” If Mike Dake had participated in something like that, I would learn at the same time as my friends.

My Dad at 50.

The Arrangement

But just because Mike Dake’s life was a mystery doesn’t mean he wasn’t around. He was there for my high school graduation, and by the time I started college, he had a job that paid him enough to cover about 95% of my expenses. It was a remarkable turnaround in our relationship from just a few years earlier.

We never spoke about the transition. It just happened over the years. Dad regularly visited our new home, another country house, this time outside of Columbus, Ohio, on another five-acre plot that had no room for a baseball field.

Mom and Dad would spend the rest of their lives together, not technically married but also not technically divorced. Dad would take my mother on long drives over the weekend. They attended Reba McEntire concerts and began a business trying to raise ostriches. I’m not kidding. Halfway through college, the Dakes dabbled in the emerging ostrich market. It never took off, and we never spoke about why it didn’t.

There are so many unspoken arrangements within a household. From the outside, you would have no idea what the situation was on the inside.

But it worked, and that’s all that ever mattered.

Ten Years Gone

Thinking of my father causes me to get pretty emotional, which, like poor grades from high school, is a low bar. But now I think, am I crying about my Dad because he’s gone, or that I never really knew him?

I think the answer lies somewhere in between.

I didn’t know my father well. This isn’t a sad story – it’s just incomplete. My dad raised me and did all the typical things white-middle-class fathers did; I grew up playing sports, always had Wendy’s whenever I wanted, and owned a boombox. I didn’t always get what I wanted – like baseball pants when I was in the 6th grade. My father may been mysterious about his life, but he provided and cared.

My Dad met his wife at 15, got married at 21, and had his first child at 22. The perfect child came when he was 32, with three in between.

I met my wife when I was 41, got married at 46, and have a good dog. There’s a strong likelihood that I will never become a father. It’s not a right or wrong comparison; it shows how incredibly different we were.

He didn’t talk much about himself, and I can’t shut up about what I think and feel. I’m sure the way my father lived his life influenced me when it comes to sharing. I’m not much of a mystery.

But I emulate his tenet of the importance of a faith-based life. My love language is telling you that I love you. I’m not a shopper. I’m never going to buy you a baseball mitt.

My father gave me faith, an education, clothes, food, shelter, and a pretty good batting swing, and he expected me to do great things.

I hope I am, Dad. Sometimes, I feel I fell short, and then sometimes, I think I knocked it out of the park.

Mostly, I wish I could share all of it with him.

There’s no guidebook for the proper way for a father and son to have a relationship. I’ve witnessed plenty of excellent, healthy bonds between the two. I’ve also seen my share of unfortunate ones. I guess what I’m saying is that each is unique.

My relationship with my father was complicated, but not really. I love him, I miss him, and I am who I am because of him.

The Last Time

My last time with my dad was Christmas 2014. I was home, and for some reason, I was my parents' and my aunt's chauffeur. We all just crammed into the Sentra, which wasn’t exactly looking brand new ten years after its purchase.

At that time, Dad made money by picking up cars, having them detailed, and driving them to another destination. I have no idea what this business model was, but I got to meet the guy Dad was working for, and he got to meet the son who lived and worked in Washington, DC.

Dad offered to have the Sentra detailed before I headed back east. I brought the car in, and the guy who did the actual detailing jumped in.

There’s nothing more embarrassing than watching your Dad sit in a folding chair while he watches a guy clean out ten years of crap from your vehicle. This is where I was grateful for the not-speaking thing. We sat in silence for the hour.

When Detail Guy was finished, Dad sent me on my way just like he had many times before. He cared for me like he always did, and I especially appreciate that our last personal interaction was embarrassing but funny.

The Sentra never looked so brand new. On the way back to DC, I gripped the steering wheel and appreciated how clean and brand new it felt.

I was smiling.

Dad loved to drive. There’s a family rule about it. I’m on the hip of my sister, way to big to be held like this.

Charles Jackson and Annabelle Dake

My Dad and my aunt at my college graduation. Dad passed away in 2015, and Mary Alice died this past March.