Fathers and Sons

I am not sure why David was chosen for me when I was born, but my middle name is Gerald after my Dad.

It is a middle name that has caused a lot of amusement over the years, perhaps because it was never really fashionable and perhaps because it wasn’t what people associated with me. To be honest I always assumed the worst of people who laughed at it, but that probably reflects my secondary school experience where pretty much every student and the majority of the teachers never missed an opportunity to bully me. I have learnt over the years, however, to differentiate between those who do that with affection and those who do it with malice.

The irony of it is that no one, apart from his sisters, ever called my Dad Gerald, he was always Gerry. Something of a force of nature, he was tough as nails on the outside and a charismatic leader in our Scout troop. The scouts always respected him and occasionally feared him, but they all knew that he had their best interests at heart. To them, becoming old enough and trusted enough to be allowed to call him Gerry rather than Skip was a much appreciated rite of passage. No one would ever laugh at him for his name, but in any case he would give them short shift if they did. He was in the Navy for 15 years and as a younger man was very handy with his fists apparently. No, Gerry was a name that suited him and that no one ever questioned.

On the surface we couldn’t have been more different. He was ultra confident, I had very little, he was popular and respected, I was anything but. I both looked up to him and was nervous of him, as sons tended to be of their fathers in those days. As I grew older I started to realise that what was on the surface masked a depth of feeling that revealed a person who was incredibly complex. The vehicle for discovering that complexity was The Wonder Years, a programme we both became huge fans of. It was a ritual for one of us to ring the other just after the programme was finished each Sunday and discuss it. Jack Arnold, the father to central character Kevin, played so beautifully by Dan Lauria, turned out to be the catalyst for finally understanding my Dad. He admitted that he found Jack’s reactions to life in general and his son in particular very familiar. The inner emotional core that occasionally broke through was seen as something to be hidden because men of that time did not show it on either side of the Atlantic. To some extent they still don’t. Occasionally an episode would send my Dad off on an anecdote I had never heard before, but every episode seemed to bring us closer to understanding each other. The final episode really upset him because the final voice over reveals that Jack dies very young, not even in his sixties. He thought that was a poor return as years of hard work were finally starting to pay off, but his well earned time to relax and enjoy it in the future was snatched from his grasp. As I now reach the age my Dad was when he died, when his own retirement and his time as a grandfather was snatched from his grasp, I feel that I really understand his reaction at the deepest of levels.

So, a name that I used to hide because of the expected comments is one which I am now quietly proud of.