I Never Sang For My Father

From the book,  ( I Never Heard The Blackbird Sing)

His fondest memories of growing up on the farm  was the times he spent with his father working in the fields, driving the tractors and the silent moments they spent together.  Learning to drive the tractor at an early age he became his father's prime asset in working the fields after the older boys left home.

     Graduating from high school with a desire to further his education was a painful experience for his father.  It was his father’s expressed desire that he remain on the farm and help him.   Providence must have prepared his father for the moment  when he would leave home.  After being the youngest child for nearly fifteen years his mother gave birth to a set of twin and another son to take his place as the youngest of the family.  His days quickly became filled with helping his father in the fields and helping his mother with the three boys. 

     Before leaving home to further his education, he made a tearful and solemn promise to his  father that he would return and help out on the farm.  This was a promise that he intended to keep, but there were those who knowingly and unknowingly did everything in their power to prevent this from happening.

     That closeness that once existed between him and his father became a victim of sibling rivalary, that produced an intense hatred.  It seems as if a giant eraser was used to blot out and reconstruct his formative years, and create a persona, a person that was alien to him.   It was a hatred so great that many times he had chosen to run and hide.   A hatred born out of the misstatement of an aunt who learned too late of the Hell she had unleashed, and fuelled by the fact he was younger but the first of his brothers to graduate from high school.

          Many years he had shied away from family gathering and family reunions.  Living only thirty minutes away from the home place, years would sometimes pass without him visiting his mother and father.

     They knew him in the nursing home as the young man who would come in and sing to his father.  Day after day, month after month  he sang to the emasculated form of a once vibrant man lying on the bed.  In that process of time he made one more tearful promise while holding his father's hand not yet cold from the grip of death.  He promised he would sing, “Further along  we will know all about it, further along we will understand why…”at the close of his service.  It was another promise he was not allowed to keep….