My dad Roger was the second of four children born to Oscar and Mary "Lynn", his parents, my grandparents separated when he was about 4 years old. As a young man in the military Grandpa Oscar later said that he didn't know what he wanted in life, he just knew that it wasn't Grandma Lynn! At the time I thought I understood that. It wasn't till much later in life that I really understood what Grandpa meant. My grandmother as it turns out was a lying and at times vindictive woman. That my Dad although broken and flawed was a good man and that he was even distantly related to my grandmother is hard to fathom...
For years my father wallowed in the damage that was caused by and brought upon him by his mother and others. To dull the pain that was his life he turned to drugs and alcohol. Let me just say this to all the non-addicts (those of us that don't feel the need to get high) you don't realize how far away the drinks or the drugs make all of your problems seem until you get really drunk or high. No matter how drunk or high you get though you always come back to who you are and your problems are still there and cause you been drinking to get away from your old problems new ones problems have come up...
Dad ran through that cycle over and over again for over thirty-five years. It started with smoking cigarettes, then it progressed to alcohol, once that stopped working to numb the pain I think my dad started using speed. I say "I think" that because I recall times when my dad was a superman or a madman. Little did I realize he thought he was superman too. Working for days on end, not sleeping, but then when he did sleep he was gone, crashed out, and there was nothing you could do to wake him. Then there was that time when I was 12 and my dad drove across country from Western Pennsylvania to San Francisco with no sleep, 3 1/2 days with no sleep! Chain smoking while mom was asleep, telling us that the cold window from the blizzard we were driving through was keeping him awake.
Later in life when we got back to the West Coast Dad found crack! Crack cocaine! The scourge of the inner city found place in our little flat in Daly City. No doubt Dad got it somewhere in The City or Oakland, but he never did drugs around us so how did I know? Later in life I realized how my dad knew all he did about drugs. I would be helping Dad cleaning out apartments before we painted them and we would come across socket drivers with bits of steel wool in them. My dad knew these were quick cheap crack pipes! There weren't shows like "Intervention" back then. You couldn't turn on the TV and see what the drug life was like. And yet my dad knew!!! He also knew enough to protect us! He never wanted us to turn out like him...
That is where the pride came in. Dad knew that no matter how bad a person he was he was never going to let us be worse than him. I know that sounds strange but he knew our upbringing could never be as bad as his, and at the same time his bad example would or should persuade us to avoid following the same path he did. He knew we were never emotionally abused by a parent, sexually abused by 'friends', or told we were abandoned by our father. We weren't raised in a world where we were told that "black folks need to know their place" or that "we were stupid and never going to amount to much!" We all had laughing loving personalities that weren't stifled, " because children should be seen and NOT heard!" And above all we were never fooled into believing that we would not, or could not change. My Dad was all of those things. And yet he knew we didn't have to be.
My Dad did his best to protect us from becoming just like him! That is not to say my Mom didn't do it... But in hindsight I knew that Mom was making an efforts to be a better person, Dad on the other hand thought he was just fine the way he was. After all was said and done Dad spent years on drugs. When I was 17 he left to go do drugs without the accountability of a family. Over the next couple of years Dad went back and forth between trying rehab and living in the parking garage beneath our apartment. From 17 to about 20 when I did see him and despite the fact that Mom had let Dad back in the house and yet I still didn't speak to my him. Finally after two and a half years Dad hit "rock bottom" and stuck with rehab, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps and stayed clean and sober. Over the course of the next couple of years he became a practicing Christian and he kept clean. On December 9, 1992 after a brain aneurysm Dad died.
It is coming up on 20 years since Dad left our family, with every day that passes I realize how much I hate what he did to us, and yet I am thankful for all he did for us! Because of him I was raised to stick to my principles and everyday I do that I take pride in being Roger Jr. Because of him I remember everyday to tell my wife I love her, I don't want to miss that chance the way I did with Dad. Because of him I know my serious flaws are not too difficult to overcome, and I know that I can't overcome those flaws alone. Because of him I know how to be there for somebody whenever they need you, there are times that you can't always be there, and there are times when you have to choose not to be there. Because of him I learned that you didn't have to be the biggest or the toughest or even the meanest, you just had to believe that what I was doing was right. I learned that you should never start a fight but if one finds you, you better finish it.
Despite what I might think about my Grandma Lynn, she did love Dad. To deny that would be like denying my Dad's love for my brother, sister, or myself. And I knew that Dad loved Grandma. I used to watch him, clean up her house, because she just didn't care how dirty it got, I watched him hide her cigarettes because if he didn't she had no reason to get up. I watched them argue back and forth because Grandma would do just the bare minimum to get by. And just like I do not and will never doubt his love for her, I will never doubt his love for us, his family! To this day I carry the pride of knowing he did his best to care for us and he did so with the knowledge that each of us had a chance to be different. We just had to take that same leap that he did and choose to be different!
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