Havre de Grace

Houston,

22 November 2016

One day, while on vacation, my wife and I headed up I-95. The day was beautiful; the weather was sublime. There was no traffic to speak of. We were making great time, and with any luck, we would make it to Hartford by the end of the day.

Everything was going well for us, until a sign appeared on the side of the road, indicating the next exit. The sign read: "Havre de Grace".  My blood ran cold, and my heart began to pound. I pretended not to notice. It will all be over in just a few short minutes, I thought.

I was wrong.

My wife just had to pipe up at this very instant, much to my chagrin:"Kenny, isn't this the town where your father lives?"

I knew it was. I knew right well it was. Things only got worse.

I gave her a to-the-point "yes, it is" reply, hoping to God she would just leave it at that.

But she didn't.

"But don't you want to get off and see if you can him?" she continued.

My heart ached. I was scared, nervous, upset, felt guilt-ridden, and I felt angry.

Once again, another sign indicated that if I wanted to get to Havre de Grace, I had better turn my wheel and get off right now.
Part of me really wanted me to turn that wheel. We could arrive in Hartford later - I knew that.

Part of me feared what I'd find if I got off and tried to look him up. After all, it had been many years since I even heard from him. And I feared those 2am calls by that drunk man that, if he got ahold of my address, would most certainly take all of my money, and might very well beat me up in the process. 

No... I didn't want to find out.

I was scared - the kind of scared that a little kid gets from open closet doors late at night, or from walking through the woods expecting a bear to jump out from behind every tree.
It was the most powerful fear of all: the fear of the UNKNOWN.

If I turned my wheel and got off this highway, what might I find? Maybe he died a few years ago! What then?

A thousand questions, fears, and doubts ran through my mind within those few minutes. 

I looked at my wife, and she looked at me.

"I don't know if he is alive or dead." I said, not really answering her question. Not really.

In a second, the exit had passed, and I continued onward, ever onward, and it was quite a while before either of us uttered a single syllable.

•

As fate would have it, my Dad called me a few months later.

It wasn't at 2am. And he wasn't drunk. We had a long talk, and when he asked that most feared question - if he could come down for a visit - I reluctantly agreed. I was, at that time, the very age he was when he and my mother broke up. The man I saw in my mind had been frozen in time, and the image I saw was not of a man, but of a monster.
I saw him through my mother's eyes, and she did not want me to have any contact with him. 

When he and his wife came to see us later that year, and I got to know him. I found out that he was not the person I had imagined. Not at all! 

He had his side of the story, which I never heard up until then. I found out that things were not all as my mother had painted them. 

I found out a lot. 

I saw my father now for the first time as an adult. He had missed just about all of my childhood, and I grew up without a father. Nobody asked me if I wanted to grow up without a Daddy, and I signed no papers.

Those first visits and contacts changed much about the way I viewed him, but there was still this deep-seated fear and mistrust that took me many years to diminish.

Truth is, it never really went away ... Not all of it. and Dad knew it.

•When the truth finally comes out, it is often too late to make amends. Even if closure happens, nothing can ever replace the time lost, and all that entails.

The truth has more than one side, and more often than not, it has more than two!!

I know this all too well!

I eventually told him about the day we drove past Havre de Grace, and how I wanted and didn't want to turn that wheel. He had a bit of mist in his eye. He looked straight at me and said: "Son, you have no idea how much I would like you to have turned that wheel and gotten off that highway. But you're here now, and that's all that matters.

I guess that the best time to have done something to get back in touch with my father was when I saw that Havre de Grace Exit sign. The second best time was when we met up, and again became father and son.