Entry posted by Jean Valjean
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If there was some sort of Oscar award ceremonies of my life, the trophy for "most influential person" would go to my father. The word "influence" is neutral, implying neither good nor bad things, merely that my life would be nothing like it is right now if it wasn't for his involvement. There are many people I would compare him to. In terms of mythology, he's like Hermes and Zeus. Hermes holds the record for being in the most myths, and almost everybody in some way had a relation to Zeus. In the same way, my father's hand has been in everything, and there is so much that I can trace back to him.
When I walk through the graveyard in this old Dutch community, some of the gravestones aren't written in English. Instead they say words like Vader and Moeder. A more recent addition is written in English, and when I was there for the burial I was reminded, as my father helped carried the coffin, that he was as human as I am.
This story starts with my father's childhood. He was raised on a farm with almost a dozen siblings. Grandma says that they were always running around shirtless and barefooted. In the country, he grew to be a boy of character, with bronze skin and a big build. He knew the taste of manure, the hard work of chores, and the fun of playing with a whole crowd of brothers. My grandmother has gone through and showed me pictures of his childhood. It was quite an adventure.
His account of his life in school mostly detailed how easy it was. According to him, calculus was so easy it hardly required thinking. He also had an interest in things like engineering in college, and he is now a carpenter.
Hours spent on a horse, he claims, numbered in the thousands. He has also gone mountain climbing in the Rockies. I do not believe I will be big in either of those.
To fast forward a ways, he met my mother. For the longest time, the only detail I knew about this fabled first encounter was the sweater my father had on, which he was protective of. It wasn't until recently that my mother told me that they met in a bar. "Trust me," she said, "you do not want to meet someone at a bar." This detail of my family history disturbed me.
While my mother was still in college, she gave birth to me. My birth certificate had her surname on it. When my parents married afterwords, my name was changed to my father's.
This is where my story starts.
My earliest memory of my father was when I was one or two years old, waddling around a second-floor apartment in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Like some dreamy image, I can see my father, towering above me even when he is sitting on a chair, handing me a fly swatter to go get as many of them as possible.
Fast forward. It was my third birthday. We still lived in Sioux Falls, but now we had a blue house. I can only remember what it looked like from outside. I was climbing up on the pick-up truck, the same one he owns today, while he was in the back yard. I fell off, lost a tooth, and broke a finger. He was at my side in an instant. I can't remember driving to hospital, but I can remember the doctor having me wait.
Once my father walked around the block with me while I rode the tricycle. It was large block, or so I remember, or perhaps I was just small. Of course, this was in the city, so it could very well have been large. He also enjoyed flying kites with me.
When one day we moved to a small Dutch community in Iowa, I was introduced to the most memorable house in my life time. We call it the Brick House. There are endless memories that rest there now, and if walls could talk, they would talk of so much. They cannot, however, and I can, but I would recollect without end, and the only stuff that needs getting to right now is the stuff regarding my father.
My father had a whip, as well as some sharp arrows. A "friend" of mine got hold of the whip when I was four and ran off with it, and also had fun jabbing stuff with the arrows, including the tired of someone's suburban. Since I was involved in the latter stunt, I got in a lot of trouble.
Somewhere along the line, he got two hunting dogs and trained them. This was after he replaced the rug in the kitchen with a linoleum floor. The dogs were named Pinky and Harmony. They were the start of my love for dogs, especially big ones.
Father was much more into punishment than my mother was. Soon she quit spanking. He, on the other hand, would give me one for not dressing up early enough on Sunday morning. This might have been the beginning on my preference of my mother over my father.
On the subject of dressing up, he introduced me to the Dilbert cartoons when I was young, which I thought immensely funny. Later on in life, this effected my sense of fashion, for one day I noticed a business suit and admired it. To this day, I still wear business suits to school on a regular basis.
Even when I was a young child who was not yet trained to use the bathroom, I received my education on World War II from him. He showed me the airplanes and watched a movie on it with me.
It was in this house where everything ended. I can remember my parents argued often, although I didn't think much of it. To me, they were Mom and Dad, not lovers. I saw the photo of their marriage and it was enough for me. They were married. I took it for granted. One day, Mother told us to pack up, didn't explain why, and drove us elsewhere.
And so it was that the marriage ended in a bitter divorce. It's still bitter.
Several months later, my father had us back. There were further disputes over how the children were going to be divided, and then it was settled. I can remember his ominous figure in the door frame, and I was dragged from my room kicking and screaming. From this point on, I lived with my father. All that had happened before was setting the stage for this point in my life.
My father began to press down his own values on me. When I was young, every day in school was a struggle for survival. The school I went to had an unwritten code of the bigger fish eating the little fish. My father had given me one thing, and it was a tall and strong frame. However, on the other hand, he gave me something that made me much more vulnerable than what my size could make up for. Although he does not quite believe it, he has Aspergers, and he gave it to me as well. It's on both sides of my family, really, so I'm not putting any blame on him for this, but it was still a bummer. Somehow, people knew to turn to me to be their victim. I was brutally beaten on the buss every day. I was excluded from everything.
When I complained about this to my father, he criticized me for being brittle. His philosophy was to have the skin of a rhinoceros.
The next year, I learned to take my height to my advantage, and adapted to the fabric of the school's society as best as I knew how, which was to prey on the few who were lower on the food chain than me. It's a very uncomfortable background, and for me it's like the European dark ages. I made a victim out of girls, not out of any sort of lust for them, but because they were easy victims, easier to harass, and once or twice I had my allies in this hunt as well. In the meantime, when it came to the guys, I was manipulated and teamed up on, by hey, at least I wasn't the lowest on the food chain.
To best summarize this period of my life, I had a lot of anger in me. With everybody. It just didn't stop.
As it turns out, being less brittle hurt me even more. I was expelled.
The strange thing is, although me father always preached to me to be tough, no never be bothered by what other people say, it is extraordinarily easy to get him angry with any sort of insult. It may make a difference that I am his son, but he's still a hypocrite.
My father is the kind of guy who likes to call other people freaks. When I liked Neopets, he called anyone who liked stuff like that freaks, not knowing how that made me feel. There have been occasions when he will talk to a person and, when their backs are turned, he will tell me that they are freaks.
This is something that I do not want to imitate, however this overall attitude he has exhibited while raising me has taught me to be critical of others.
He seems hostile to fantasy and imagination. Sometimes I will be pacing, and something will be on my mind. Okay, I admit that sometimes I will imagine being in a battle from Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Nevertheless, he will say "What are you imagining?" There's an implied hostility here, because I know what he's said on imagination in the past. I've overheard him say to his own mother once, when she started a sentence with "If only", he said "You're resorting to wishful thinking and you can't fall that low." That's sums up his attitude on imagination.
This carried on to my literary life. I want to write a story that mixes together many imaginary characters and events throughout my life called Journal, because I don't want those to die. It has a very deep sentimental meaning to me. Some things go through my mind, such as what certain people will think. I wonder what my mother would think, what my girl would think, but most obsessively I wonder what my father would think. He's said that everything I say comes from TV, which is ridiculous because I only watch the news and I hate to think that who I am as an individual is limited by what some little box spews out. He's talked negatively of me even when I associated the clothes an aunt once wore with Little House on the Prairie. Case in point: he hates fiction.
Instead, the last book he checked out for me a year ago presents more of his expectations. You see, I can't check out books by myself because minors need parent's permission to get a card and my father won't even let me get a library card while he is still my guardian. This book was by some guy called Studs Turkel. "This guy actually went around and wrote about what other people think," said my father. This guy wrote books like "A Nation Divided."
Es tut mir leid. I tried. That book was impossible to read. There's nothing wrong with writing, and he's promoted it to some extent, but he's presented me with what he wants.
More so than he has pressured me with his views on writing, he has pressured me with his expectations on my life as a whole. He glorifies engineering and farming, and has pressured me in taking classes that would educate me on both, which I have denied. However, his expectations remain.
Earlier I mentioned that there were many characters I could compare him to. In the last year, "Stars" has become my favorite song from Les Miserables, or at least has garnered the feeling of being "my song". Javert has always been my favorite character, and I wasn't sure why. At once, it occurred to me that Javert reminded me so much of my father. Just as Javert has high expectations of people and is slow to forget when people fall, so is my father. Being the son of such a man, I have naturally developed to have high expectations of myself. When told of how easy school was for him, I feel that I should excel as well, which I do. I'm always in the A range, but I believe that an A- is a failure. Would I feel the same way with my mother if I had lived with her? Maybe, maybe not.
In the meantime, my father once called me stupid when I was in middle school and said I should be more like a cousin of mine in the same grade, who is a child prodigy. This only furthered my tendency to use others as my measuring stick. So far, I do not believe that he has ever mentioned anything of this tendency of mine or counseled me in any way.
He has also influenced me in positive ways. He has a strong attitude regarding whether something is worth his time or not, worth arguing about or not, worth thinking about or not. Sometimes, when people give me hot ham and bacon, which is to say they treat me like a dumpster, I know better to not acknowledge them. Of course, it still gets to me, and I'm much better about it on the internet, but this behavior has developed as a direct result of being raised by my father.
He has strong political opinions, and as redundant as he can be sometimes, he always starts to talk about the glory of God in any such conversations. Does he overdo it? Yes, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
My father is Julius Caesar, and I and Augustus. I do not know how that association came about, although I can say that I was born in the month of August, but somehow I always found us symbolically tied with these two historical figures. Their relationship did not directly correspond with our, but for whatever reason this metaphor has been with me.
Father has instilled a deep pride in family within me. There are family reunions often. He will sometimes talk of our Dutch heritage just as my mother sometimes talks of her own mixed heritage. We have a large family. You see its name here and there throughout our community. It's a name that everyone's familiar with. I feel a deep conviction to my family, as well as a determined loyalty to whatever family I will one day start. As much as he is a part of me, I do not wish to repeat some of the same mistakes that he has made. I worry that I might be a bad person to my wife just as he was for my mother. I have doubts in myself.
It all started in the countryside, but do not know where this is going. The story of Julius and Augustus has plenty further chapters to be concluded. He is my father, and that will never change. He did much more than just bring me into the world. He shaped so much of it for me, in ways I have mentioned and in ways I haven't. I can only keep writing about it.
In Thought,
Augustus
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