Living My Father's Regret, Part 2

At the time in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a U.S. Navy recruiting station occupied the second floor of a building which held our second favorite pool hall; our most favorite, The Ovington Cue Lounge, was just around the corner from the house.  When the mood struck, my friends and I ventured to the building at the intersection of

86^th St.

and

5^th Avenue

to match our skills with the locals.  My skills always not so good put me on one of the long legged chairs lining the walls more often than not. 

On a sunny day, late in May, having said farewell to SUNY Maritime, I took myself to our second favorite pool hall and stopped by the recruiting station, bringing back to the house a few pamphlets.  Well, my father had a fit when he saw the glossy material, in effect ordering me back to college, any college.  He even went so far as to gather a few uncles who talked to me about the necessity of staying in school and getting the degree.  More, he chose the college which I would attend, Long Island University, in Brooklyn, a campus he knew well as many a student of his attended, a few colleagues taught there and he occasionally traversed the grounds after picking up a cheesecake from Juniors, the celebrated restaurant being directly across the street from the school; besides LIU was, still is, in the same downtown neighborhood as the high school where he had been teaching for well over a decade.

Being thrown off tack by this cork-screw of a turn, I was flummoxed in knowing what I wanted “to study” at LIU.  My father asked me what sorts of things I liked doing as a way of coming up with some suggestions.  I was way too intimidated to say scuba diving or working underwater or going to sea; so I said I liked playing sports, which was true enough, but definitely not any passion.  He said that the school had an excellent Physical Education program.  Thus, I was enrolled as a Physical Education major. 

To repeat: When one is uninterested enough in a thing, one should not have to wonder too long or too deeply about the reasons for a rebellion against what one is feeling forced to do.  While I decidedly enjoyed, and was somewhat successful, in the sporting aspects of the LIU experience, the academics of Biology, Math, Sociology, Philosophy, Western Civilization, and especially the strict memorization of Kinesiology, remained too much for me.  I rebelled by trying no harder than what it took to get “gentleman C’s”. 

A custom of this program, and I was told most if not all other programs, was that each Phys Ed major was to take up a competitive sport.  While I was built for football, and loved the game, LIU, Brooklyn, did not field a football squad.  I had to settle for the next best rockem-sockem which was wrestling.  I loved the physicality of it and the training did wonders for my dating life, but it was not the passion success needs.  In other words I was mediocre.  But, I was coming along rather well, in spite of that.  So, in my first, and only, match, I actually won! 

I spent two years on the team, and on an early December Saturday of the second year, the U.S. Naval Academy lost to the U.S. Military Academy for the fifth straight year in their annual Army-Navy football match, resulting the following January in a New York Times story about the Naval Academy opening slots for student athletes.  My father presenting me with the story put on the pressure for me to apply.  By that time I had submerged my passion for the sea and for scuba so I did not look upon going to the Naval Academy as a path to what I wanted to do in life.  Besides, I had been rebelling against academics since I entered college life.  I knew if I were accepted I would do poorly, probably failing out the first semester, which would absolutely ruin my father, and probably not do too well for me, either.  However, against every argument I threw, my father pushed back that much harder.  I applied on the strength of my one win and a good recommendation from my coach.  Incredibly, I got the nomination, but my eye sight, which was 20-20 in one eye but 20-30 in the other, got me disqualified. 

(Here I should mention that a U.S. Marine officer recruiter contacted me about a month after being rejected to the Academy.  He said that if I scored a cumulative point average of 2.3 at LIU for the semester I was completing I would be accepted into the Corp’s officer candidate program.  To be honest, although it was the middle of the Vietnam War, and second lieutenants were dropping like mosquitoes hitting a zapper, I was indifferent to the offer:  If I scored at the entrance level I would have signed-up, but, if not, there would be no tears.  As it happened, I continued to get my gentleman’s C’s, that was that and I had absolutely no regrets.)

I dropped out the next semester and revisited the Naval recruiting station. This time I didn’t tell my father and kept all glossy material away from the house.  Richard Nixon had won the Presidency for the first time.  His play to win the War, Vietnamization, was beginning to bite.  The in-country Navy was being scaled back with Vietnamese manning American equipment.  The blue water Navy in the South China Sea was holding station with the assets already deployed.  In other words, there was far less need for Navy recruits as in times before, meaning that they could be very picky.  And they were:  The final doctor doing foot inspections for recruitment physicals found a problem with my feet!  Rejected, I was because of my feet!  And thus I was rewarded for disobeying my father!

I tried one more time to get on the water.  As it turned out, the brother of a girlhood friend of my mother was at the time the head of the union working tugs in New York Harbor.  I petitioned my mother for an introduction.  But for her reasons, which she did not share with me, she declined.  I meekly accepted having already gotten used to repressing my own wishes for my parents’ insistences. 

Eventually, in my middle age, I got underwater as a scuba instructor, but this was as the entertainment my father envisioned it to be, rather than as a livelihood.  And, unfortunately, it was short-lived, as the lumbar spinal stenosis paralyzing my legs forced me to hang up my fins with only four years of underwater service.

By the time I finished unfolding the narrative to myself the tanker steaming outbound had passed from view as, too, the smaller cargo freighter coming in, the tanker in Gravesend Bay remained at anchor near the channel and for the moment the water calmed of any traffic. 

Reflecting on the story, I’ve wondered how many of us adults have gone through the same experience, sublimating our own wishes, our own personalities, for the sake of what our parents, or others, demanded we do and be.  And then I think of my current education project, putting together an alternative to the conventional way of schooling, and I answer the query myself:  millions upon millions of children over generations have lovingly, obediently, dutifully acquiesced to parents and to other adults in place of their parents as they comply with orders to do as told in school, and at home, most trusting without questioning adult wisdom.  And today, millions and millions more continue to do the same, trusting the wisdom of parents, teachers and school governors.  However, it is a sad fact that the wisdom so demonstrated is mortally flawed:  If my experience tells me anything, it is that parents, and school officers, do not know who their children really are.  They have in mind ideals, perhaps projections of what they hope their, or all, children should be or what they, the parents, and education governors, are not.  

Parents tend to act with the best of intentions; I even credit my father with so doing.  But the best of intentions are almost completely informed by the doubts, qualms, misgivings and failures of parents and they find in their children, in their intentions, a second chance to “get it right”. 

 In this case, my life was shaped, and lived, through my father’s regret, to my own deep and long lasting sorrow.