Recollections of my father | News, Sports, Jobs – Alpena News
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Holding a place of pride on my bookshelf are two large pinecones, tall as standard hardcovers and wide as two fists.
While stationed in California, during his time in the Air Force, my father climbed a tree and dropped those pinecones into the waiting hands of a friend. It turns out that catching large pinecones with your bare hands is not wise. It turns, out, too, that sap can sting.
My father, Dan Kissane, didn’t tell me a lot of stories from his youth. Mostly, that was my fault. I remember overhearing him tell my mother that he wished I’d pick his brain once in a while, because there were things he could teach me. I felt guilty, but did nothing to remedy it.
He was a devoted father, but, sometimes, an intimidating one. More, he was different than me, or at least I thought so; I was a reader, inward and sometimes insufferable, and he was confident, outgoing, and likelier to levitate than to pick up a novel.
At 15, I decided I would become a Franciscan monk (girls and rock and roll would change that). One night, we went out to eat, just the two of us: a rare thing. On the way home, he shut off the car and said that I couldn’t let my fear of the world push me into hiding from it. I was outraged; that wasn’t what I was doing!
But it was, and he knew me better than I had known myself.
I had to leave home to begin to understand him. Returning occasionally from college, I found him more sensitive than I remembered, both to perceived or imagined slights, but also to the needs of others. And I started to realize how much he had influenced me, down to the gestures I used and the way I spoke.
In drips and drops, I learned about him. He told me about a Peruvian bunkmate, and what it meant to meet someone whose circumstances were so removed from his own. He talked about teaching carpentry, and how the best student he ever had was a woman. My father took people as they came, and, if they disappointed him, they did so as individuals.
One example of early-1990s tolerance still makes me laugh.
We had just finished the movie “Philadelphia”, in which Tom Hanks played a gay man dying of AIDS. As the credits rolled, my father sighed sympathetically and said, “Say what you want about gay people, but Elton John wrote some of the best songs in the world.”
As he grew older, he reserved his anger for liars, cheats, and hypocrites, which meant he couldn’t bear politicians. He would yell at the TV until you feared for his blood pressure (although his heart, true to the end, never failed. Cancer took him).
He made friends everywhere he went, and had a joke for all of them. Several of those jokes, if said by a public figure today, would result in his being exiled from polite society. A favorite featured a one-legged demimondaine named Eileen.
He watched the worst TV you can imagine, lapping up investigations of bigfoot, aliens, and bonkers conspiracies. I think it’s because he wanted life to be more interesting than it really is.
One evening, we sat together on my deck and he explained that extraterrestrials had met with American presidents, helping to shape domestic and foreign policy. But that makes him sound less grounded than he was. Also, he had a sense of humor about it. The real crackpots are deadly earnest.
Once, he saw a panhandler and raced to hand the man money. I gave him a hard time about it afterward, dredging up some argument about how donations to food banks were more effective than giving strangers cash.
“Yeah,” he said, “but imagine being in that position. Imagine having to ask.”
What can you say about a man? He loved his family, loved us fiercely. He loved honesty, discipline, and humor, and, if you demonstrated those values, he didn’t mind anything else you did. He loved people who tried. Who cared.
After learning he was dying, my wife and I drove to Alpena to visit him. Already too thin, he came and sat at the table with us. He didn’t say much, but he was there (“Sorry,” he said at one point, waving his hand vaguely. “I’m in the Twilight Zone”).
When we left, he got up and followed us to the driveway, as he always did, to let us know that he loved us, and to say goodbye.
It couldn’t have been easy for him, not in any way.
I can’t know what it cost him to do that.
But I know what it was worth.
John Kissane, alumnus of Alpena High School and Alpena Community College, now lives in Grand Rapids with his wife, children, and terrible dog.