I started reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls yesterday. I’ve only read the first twenty five pages, and I’m not sure if I like it. My gut reaction is I don’t like it and the story of her neglectful parents makes me mad, and so far it seems like she’s putting her dad on a pedestal. Her love for her parents is so strong even though they are terrible parents and maybe that’s how most kids are, they have unconditional love for their parents. Maybe I don’t like the story because she has so much to say about her dad and it’s hitting a nerve inside me. I have very little to say about my dad. I don’t know if I ever had blind love for my dad like Jeannette has for hers. I can’t recite many stories about him. Only that he was a sailor and taught me how to sail. He taught me to scrape barnacles off the hull and to row a dingy at night in the fog. My most intimate memory was I pooped while taking a bath with my dad, we both started laughing and thought it was super funny, I must have been around three or four years old. In Jeannette’s story her Dad Rex Walls tells the kids bedtime stories, mostly about himself she says. My dad doesn’t talk. To get him to say anything takes a lot of coaxing, and a lot of what comes out is strange and sometimes revengeful towards my mom. I don’t remember ever feeling like I loved my dad so much, I only remember being really mad at him or having no feelings about him at all. I’m not expecting much next week while he’s here. I have very few emotions at all about his visit. I texted Danny last night to see how the honoring was going at the nugget and Danny said “It’s so fucking weird!!!!!!!!”
Category: dead beat dad
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He failed to see the humor in it. I presented an idea, one my brother and I thought was a great idea. Danny talked to our Dad first. He left me a message. “I found out what Dad wants.” So he does want something, I was right. When he called me on my birthday he had an ulterior motive, when he called and left a message that said “I love You” with a gleeful voice he had an ulterior motive. The kind of message I longed to hear my whole life. I call my dad after talking to Danny and he tells me his news, “I’m second runner up for King, if something happens to the King I’ll be named King and honored at the weight loss convention in Sparks at the Golden Nugget, but the King seems to be doing O.K. so far.”
“That sounds like a scam to get people into the Casino to gamble, your dad weighed like 100 pounds when we saw him six years ago, unless he put on a bunch of weight, he didn’t even have a belly.” Says my husband.
He’s Danny and my (Almost) only relative, he’s Jack and Fiona’s only Grandpa. He’s a dead beat and always will be.
I find myself getting upset again. What do I do? Just let my dad and the memory of him shrivel like a raisin? Do I go on a great adventure with Danny and the babies, meet him in Reno, Danny can film it, I can write. (This idea my husband thinks is weird.) Maybe it is, maybe it’s totally idiotic. It sounded like fun, we can visit Malissa and her family, take the babies on a hike on the PCT. I thought Alan would think it was a good idea, that way we keep my Dad and Betty three hours away from our house, clean and simple.
My Dad sounded like a kid, an excited kid asking his mother for money to go to the ice cream shop. I got wrapped up in his passion, something I never see in him, I said, “Write me a letter, tell me all the details, dates, can you do that?” I give him my address (again) and he says he will write me a letter.
It’s another Gloomy morning, a good day for studio work and writing. I just put Jack and Fiona down for a nap. They seem extra tired and cranky today. Maybe it’s the weather.
Dirty Laundry Blog by Jennifer Hynes 