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What I learned about my father from a Jewish Girl

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I look back at college days at Mizzou and think I was a pretty typical frat boy.  But I was never really that typical.  Once, when everybody else was trying to get the hookup talking about classes and what they do for fun, I distinctly remember talking to Diane Bau about theology.  I suppose it’s not a surprise to any of you that this was never an area I considered taboo, even with a Jewish girl.

So we were about four beers into our TGIF mixer, and I vividly recall her astonished look when she repeated what I had just revealed to her.  “Seriously? You think you should be good because you don’t want to go to hell?  That’s why you try to avoid sin?”  I thought it was a good thing.  And admirable.  And I was apparently proud that I was considered myself “religious.”  And considered myself pretty righteous, in the midst of all these jerks that just wanted to get laid.  I was better than that.  Haha, right.  I puffed my chest out and was a hypocritical Pharisee.  I’ll leave that alone for now, because at 19, of course I wanted that also.

Anyway, she was simply incredulous, and genuinely fascinated that this was a Christian’s philosophy.  I asked her why that was so surprising.  I was proud that I believed in God and hell, and therefore wanted to do what was right.  She looked at me with deep, dark olive eyes and said, “So the reason you try to be good is because of fear?  Why not be good out of love, because God is your Father and He loves you, and that’s why you love Him?”  I don’t remember whether I was surprised, or embarrassed, or oblivious, but I do remember that conversation like it was yesterday.

So here’s the funny part of the story.  I dated Diane Bau for weeks before I learned that she had an identical twin (and I do mean identical!).  I did think she was pretty moody sometimes, and really, really acted differently on some dates, but I pretty much wrote that off because she was just drop-dead gorgeous in an exotic, ethnic kind-of way.  Anyway, about the time I really started digging her (them), she (they) informed me that she (they) was kind-of into me also, so she (they) really should stop going out because I wasn’t a Jewish guy.  I was kind-of (really) insulted.  This was my first experience of being discriminated against because of my professed religion.

But here’s the deal.. The girl was right.  I was catechized by a Jewish Girl.  Truly this is the essence of our relationship with our heavenly Father.  And since today is Father’s Day, it does seem like a pretty cool day to remember this story.

This is also “Trinity” Sunday, and I imagine the three of them looking down at Earth, and the Father saying with such disappointment, “They still don’t get it.  They simply don’t understand how much we love them.  He looked over at His Son and motioned down to us and said,  “One more time.  This time let’s not just tell them about our how we want them to live, lets show them how to live, how to love.  Let’s show them what love is.  Our Father motioned over to Jesus and explained, “You go down and love them.  Show them how much I love them, what love is.”

Diane was right.  It never would have worked out.  Her “father” would not have approved of me.  Although I was surrounded by it all of my life, I realized it, what love “is” much later in life.  I never really knew my father when I was growing up.  Either of them.  I do now.  And how much he loved me, they both love me, in ways I only now can understand.

dadandmeps

MLK Day, Irony at Half Mast

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halfmastI’ve always flown a flag over my home and my animal hospitals because I enjoy proudly expressing my patriotism and love of the freedom we have in this country.  I’ve been fortunate to travel many places where the freedoms weren’t quite so evident.  Guns have literally been inches from my family’s faces in Northern Ireland, Mexico City, and most recently China.  I often add a second flag beneath the Stars & Stripes to commemorate an occasion.  The Black & Gold of my beloved Missouri Tigers on game Saturdays, Miami Dolphin Aqua & Orange on game Sundays, and the Irish Tricolor on St. Paddy’s and Bloody Monday.  Less frequently you’ll see her flying at half mast to memorialize fallen heroes or tragedies.

Over the years, many clients and neighbors have commented on my lowering Old Glory the third week of January.  Most are pleasant surprises of my honoring Martin Luther King, and numerous black clients expressed their appreciation.  One elderly woman did so just today.

Jean Murray Klein was born in Southeast Missouri on October 4th, 1921 to a family involved in farming for generations.  He graduated from Mizzou, came home from WWII a decorated war hero, married my mom, and overcame the demons of alcoholism and cigarettes.  He always enjoyed game day in the man-cave with his best friends Lee Bowman, and Dick Tongate, and he treasured that football I had Dan Marino sign at our children’s shared pre-school.  But Daddy was a product of his environment and Jim Crow culture.  Let’s just say he didn’t have the tolerant world view his children have adopted.  I don’t think he even knew any black people, or if so he never spoke of them.  Mom had a “colored woman” (Dad’s words) help her around the house while I was young, and I became very close to Beulah.  My earliest childhood memories include her ironing while I was “rockin” next to her on my spring suspended horse, while “Charlie Brown,” by the Coasters played on the radio.  The old man really did the best he could – I later found out that every holiday he would bring her family a turkey or a ham.

Anyway, Dad certainly didn’t have any problem cheering for the black athletes who led the St. Louis Cardinals and the Missouri Tigers to success, but that was pretty much the extent of his comfort zone.  I belly-laugh when I remember my sister Maureen showing him a picture of her with a huge black man, whom she told him she had been dating.  It was actually a picture of  a football player she had taken for him, but the narrative changed, “Because it would be really funny.”  Daddy almost had a heart attack, then forced a laugh about it, pretending he had known all along that it was a joke.

Cancer took my daddy 7 years after he had laid down the non-filtered Camels, on January 16, 1998.

So you see the obvious irony.  Daddy was buried the third week of January, which “co-incidentally” turns out to be Martin Luther King day.

Yes ma’am, I do fly our flag today in memory of one of this country’s finest men, I’m as proud of him as you are.

I thought you should know…

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“Billy, um… have you looked on Facebook lately?”  my brother Steve was calling me on the phone.  Not shocking, but certainly an infrequent occurrence.  “I thought you should know what Cullen posted.”

Being called “Billy” always startles me just a bit.  I haven’t called myself “Billy” since the 7th grade, so it generally means family or a childhood friend.

One of the few famous people I know actually called me out with that moniker in college, and I was forever treated differently afterwards.  Fraternity hazing was still a popular sport in 1977, so at the University of Missouri Theta Chapter of Alpha Gamma Rho, I was “lower than the fish-shit scum at the bottom of the ocean.”  I can still smell the foul mouths of Kevin Shopher and Jim Famuliner as they shouted at the tops of their lungs what an embarrassment I was to the upperclassmen, and that I might as well quit right then, because I just wasn’t cut out to be one of the “finer gentlemen” of Ag-Rho.  “Ha ha, what a bunch of jerks; If these two can make it into this frat, any one can!” Dave McKee and I used to double over laughing at these idiots when they weren’t around.  But during the “evening activities,” we’d “Sir, yes sir!” and complete the obligatory 24,410 push-ups (we actually counted that pledge semester) that were required to get our ticket punched.

Anyway, I was in Schnucks Liquor store in Columbia, Missouri, with my “big brother,” Don Cupps and several others who loved me dearly, getting the beer, etc. for the football game pre-party at the frat house, when someone shouted, “Billy Klein” from all the way down the aisle.  I cringed hearing this childish name that I had graduated from, knowing my “brothers” now had new ammunition to tease me with.  We all spun our heads around to see James Wilder, the BMOC running-back for the Mizzou Tigers, who was in the midst of taking us to the Big 8 (later the Big 12) conference championship, and an unprecedented number 4 in ranking polls.  Jersey number 32, known as the “Sikeston Train,” was a giant physically, and as it turns out, a really nice guy as well.  He would later be drafted by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (keeping #32), and in breaking all their records, rescue them from being such an embarrassment.  His son James Wilder Jr, also wears #32 for Florida State (I do wish the Rams had drafted Wilder instead of the Bucs; Jr would be playing now for my beloved Mizzou Tigers, instead of the ‘Noles!

What nobody knew until that moment, was that I had grown up with Wilder in Sikeston, Missouri.  Number 32, as you can imagine, was quite a sensation in our home town also.  “The Mule” shattered every known record and the Sikeston Bulldogs went to the State finals for the first time in over 30 years!  We admittedly weren’t the best of friends, because that was back when blacks hung with blacks, and whites hung with whites; we also never met until 7th grade, since I had gone to St. Francis Xavier Catholic School for the first six grades.  But we did know each other from school, parties and athletic banquets; out of 365 kids in my senior class at Sikeston High School, only 5 went strait to the ‘ZOU, and so we certainly were acquainted.  So when James called out to Billy Klein, my esteem zoomed immediately.  Funny how life works.

(Back to that phone call)  So on that day, when my 16-year-old son Cullen “came out” on Facebook by saying he was “bi-” and “in a relationship” with a boy, it was rather upsetting to the fam.  I wasn’t thrilled that he had made the whole thing public, especially since Mom was alive and actively keeping up with all of her beloved family through FB, but I certainly wasn’t shocked.  I had known for years which team he’d be playing for, and as I’ve explained earlier, had anguished over every angle, and every “alternative.”  When we were going through the divorce, it was just horrible for everyone, and Cullen, as expected, acted out with some rebellious stuff, so I did take him to Anthony Feretti, a local family therapist to have “someone to talk to, and work things out with.”  (It would be disingenuous of me to deny that I would have thought it quite a relief to learn, in working ‘things’ out, Cullen had discovered he was just ‘going through a phase,’ and that he was now ‘normal,’ and playing for our team.)  Dr. Tony soon told me Cullen was fine, very healthy, and just a really good, sweet kid.  God knows I knew all of that already.

I was well aware that even then, long before Allan Chambers would abandon Exodus, that reparative theory really did originate from a loving approach, but was horribly flawed in its theory.  Sure, I blamed myself, blah-blah-blah, but I had read enough and educated myself well enough that none of this was supported by facts.  Just as many straight kids have horrible parents, and just as many gay kids come from supportive, interactive, loving, functional families.  Chambers and I have become friends, and I hope the world lightens up on him, as everything he did was out of love and honest integrity.  Remember, in the 50’s physicians appeared on TV commercials promoting cigarettes as a healthy way to relax.  It’s not lying if you believe current evidence supports your position.

Anyway, I’m not really sure what Steve thought I could do.  Get him “into therapy?”  Disown him?  Throw him out?  Give him a spanking, or at least a “good talking to?”  I know I’m being snarky, but it truly is as frustrating as hell, as well as all the other emotions I’ve described elsewhere.

But what about my poor dear Cullen?  It must have been so frightening, lonesome, embarrassing, and so many other emotions that I’ve had so vividly explained to me by so many gay people who have recently “come out of the woodwork.”

Having tossed that ball around in my head for so long, I replied with the only thing I could reply with.  Remember “Pascal’s Wager?” this is my play on it.  Weigh one horrible extreme against the other, and choose between the two possible tragedies.

“Steve, I’ve thought long and hard, cried many tears, and prayed many tears about this.  I have come to the decision that I’d much rather hold my son’s hand as he’s lying there, dying from AIDS at age 30 than walk into his room to find him hanging from a rope in his closet at 15.  So we’ve decided, God and I, to accept him, support him, and love him unconditionally.  I’ll be there for him as much as he allows me to be, support him, and love him unconditionally.  I’ll cherish the small time I have with him (since he seems to prefer to stay with Debbie), I’ll support him as best I can, I’ll pray for him, and I’ll love him unconditionally.  And Steve, I ask that you pray for him, and us, as well.”

Steve really didn’t know what else to say, and I’m sure was , at that point, a little embarrassed.  I hope not, because he also acted out of love, the best way he knew how.  I did thank him for calling.

Every post I write seems so full of regrets, but how I reacted to the call, and Cullen’s coming out isn’t one of them.  It was the very best I was capable of at that time.  I love(d) him unconditionally.

I do however regret not telling Mom.  I also miss her so very much, and her warm loving smile, compassionate voice, and healing embrace.  In wanting to spare her “the hurt,” I robbed her of that true loving, honest relationship that she would have wanted.  I effectively kept my son and my mother apart.  I kept him from knowing her unconditional love.

I kept her from her reason for living, to love her family unconditionally, because she would have.

My mom was a true witness for God’s unconditional love through His son Jesus Christ.  If I really did love Cullen unconditionally, and I very much tried, it came from her.  Thanks Mom, and I’m sorry.

———-

Just a couple of footnotes.  None of my family, my brothers or sisters have never have had unkind words that I’m aware of (at least as adults), and all actions have clearly been rooted in love.  Feretti is a very competent therapist.  I do wish James Wilder, Jr. played for Mizzou.  Regardless whether or not you agree with his personal opinions, Alan Chambers is a good person.  Alpha Gamma Rho is a wonderful organization, and it does “build better men.”  I would join her again, in a heartbeat. I do miss my mom and my son.

Although I have lots of life regrets, I do have lots to be thankful for and feel very blessed.