We're all in the mood for a melody

Just got a phone call — police found my biological father dead this morning. So, 2022 has begun. As I nurse my two month old, I must reflect on a true untold story of my still unfolding life.

Out of respect, I’ve eliminated some details about my biological father’s struggles with mental illness and subsequent toxic behaviors that would explain the necessary distance in our relationship.

Mobile, Ala. | March 2006 | Age 24

"Hello moto." It was 5 am on a Saturday, and my Motorola Razr rang. I knew it could only be one person.

I answered.

"I'm here," he told me.

"I'll be right there," I said. "I'm wearing my pajamas so be ready."

While driving through the deserted downtown streets of Mobile, Alabama, I surveyed my feelings. Was I excited? Scared? Dreadful?

I felt numb. As usual when dealing with this part of my life, I had no expectations and no hopes.

The sun hadn't risen. The streets were dewy and quiet -- all the partiers had gone home. The bay-front town has some of the gayest night life in the country.

Mobile, accent on the second syllable, sits on the American gulf coast and shares more cultural heritage with New Orleans than with the rest of Alabama. The Catholics settled Mobile, so the people aren't as strict on alcohol as upstate Alabama, which is full of Baptists. I drove past wrought iron balconies with long French doors. Behind them were genteel parlors, linen and lace. 

To a Jersey girl, Mobile was like another country. The trees are bigger, the talk is slower, the food is spicier. There is no fall or winter -- only the seasons of Mardi Gras and eternal summer. Even the air was gentle, the light scattered by the heavy, salty sea moisture.

Whenever my aircraft landed in Mobile, I exhaled tension and inhaled the sweet jasmine air that wafted up the tarmac. The locals joked that the pilots should announce, "You've arr-ahhved in Mo-BEEL. Set your watches back 50 ye-ahs!" 

It it a front-porch-and-iced-cold-sweet-tea city, a place where life is lived on the front porches, not in the back yards, a place to heal or forget old wounds, to reinvent, and to pleasantly pass the hours.

I was there to do all of the above, and launch my career. I landed in Mobile at age 23, broke, eager and fresh off my journalism master’s degree.

The carnival life I'd set up as a newspaper reporter felt fantastical, secluded and as culturally far as could be from the rat race of the northeast.

But my Mobile was about to be invaded by a Yankee. My guest was a bit unexpected -- I'd recently found out he would be arriving sometime, but I wasn't sure the day or hour. 

I pulled up to the Greyhound Station and idled my car alongside a tired-looking group of folks. One particularly tattered man with wild hair lugged a duffel bag over.

He opened the door, and got in, barely fitting into my tiny Ford.

"Andrea! So good to see you!" he said, laughing. He was giddy. I was tired.

It was March 2006. For the first time in three years, I was looking at my biological father.

Fred, or "pop" or the bio-dad, as I called him, had been wanting to see me for years. He lived in New Jersey.

I had first found him when I was 20, but I rarely visited -- I was too busy chasing down an education and a journalism career. Fred's life story of mental illness and addiction depressed me. I could report all day long on other people's problems for the newspaper, but Fred's hit too close to home. His very self challenged my definition of who I was trying to be.

When he complained about my lacking presence in his life, I told him that if he wanted to see me, he should visit me in Alabama.

Clearly, I did not think that through -- I never actually thought he'd take me up on the offer.

But that week in March 2006 he celebrated 13 years of sobriety -- the thirteenth anniversary of his last beer. It was cause for celebration and he wanted to share his joy with me.

How could I argue with that?

We drove down Government Street, which is lined with southern mansions and live oak trees covered with fuzzy resurrection fern.

Fred was in awe of the giant trees and magnolias, just as I was when I first moved south.

I kept in touch with Fred via e-mail, and it was easy to forget how abnormal he is.

He was a tattooed giant: six foot two and 300 pounds. His belly stuck out a foot and a half. His hair was wild. His voice was scratchy, and so was his beard.

His face was acne scarred and pock marked. His clothes were full of holes. He reeked of cigarette smoke. His smoker's cough was an awful-sounding hack.

He had a gold front tooth, installed after some guy bet him that he wouldn't dare. Boy, Fred really showed that guy.

Manners? Bah.

But his eyes were kind and almost feminine. They were soft and green, with blonde eyelashes, like mine.

As we drove along, he talked and I listened.

He told me about how on the bus ride he met the song writer for Pink Floyd. I never knew how true his stories were. He kept a picture of me in his wallet, and told me he showed off the picture to everyone on the bus down to Alabama.

I grimaced and thought back to when he did the same thing once while riding the bus in Washington, D.C., which is where I attended undergraduate school.

Once again, I hoped nobody I knew was on that bus. 

It's not so much that I was embarrassed that he was my father. It's more that he represented a hidden part of my life, not shared with many people, and finding him was my secret that I didn't know what to do with.

How could I explain to anyone else what he meant to me if I didn't even understand it myself? I didn't even fully understand why I kept in regular touch or what I got out of it. And yet here he was, in the passenger seat of my car, by my own invitation.

"You know I feel really bad that I don't have anything saved for your dowry," he said, still marveling out the window.

Dowry? Was he serious? Was this 1900?

I told him not to worry about it, but he continued, "No, you are going to get married one day and that guy is going to expect something from me. So I opened a money market account."

I assured him that if I ever got married, the man would know better than to expect money from him. But he insisted.

He turned apologetic. "But the account is at zero zero. I only make $16,000 a year."

We pulled into a gas station so Fred could buy coffee and cigars.

When I got him home, it was still dark outside and still felt like nighttime. Fred clomped into my antebellum apartment -- a small one bedroom house with a front porch, built before the civil war, with hardwood floors, high ceilings and a fireplace in each of the three main rooms. It was my sanctuary.

First things first. He was dirty. 

He does not shower, he informed me. Only baths. His last shower was three years ago, he said. 

I had him take a bath.

He handed me a plastic bag filled with his dirty clothes and I dumped them in my washing machine, along with two cups of soap. I set the washer as hot as it would go and turned it on.

His bath was quick. 

Despite my insistence that I needed to get back to bed to sleep, he wanted to play for me on my piano.

I'd started taking piano lessons at age 23 from Rebecca Posey, a Southern opera singer with a gray cat, who taught lessons to children (and me) for extra cash. Piano was something I'd always wanted to learn and my parents couldn't afford stuff like that when I was a kid. 

Rent was so cheap in Alabama that I could afford to have an upright baby grand piano shipped to my apartment! The baby grand had become my companion -- it was a wonderful instrument and capable of beautiful things, though at the time I was still struggling with "The Old Gray Mare."

If only for the piano's sake, I encouraged Fred to play.

I plopped on the couch and hugged my knees.

Rock and roll was his specialty.

It amazed me this big oaf, so out of place in my apartment, could sit at the piano and make beautiful music. His hands were big and meaty, with sausage-like fingers. Yet he hit every key.

I liked listening to him sing along, he was so happy about it, totally in his element. And he had talent. I was relieved I could be proud of something about him.

After all, I am the fruit of his loins, as he put it. The proof is in our identical eyes. And in his leg tattoo of an embryo and a scrawling, "Andrea."

Yes. Pause right there. He had a tattoo. On his leg. Of an embryo. With my name on it.  He showed that off to me with pride the second time I met him. At that point, I'd lost the ability to be surprised by anything in my biological expedition.

When I awoke a few hours later, he was still sleeping.

A look around at the state of my bathroom and I tried not to scream. My bathtub was filled with dirt and body hair from his bath. The toilet seat was up and he had partially missed the bowl. I clenched my fists and said a silent prayer.

For brunch, we headed out to Ed's Shed on the Causeway so we could eat outside on the bay. It was one of few buildings left along that road after Hurricane Katrina. 

Eating in public with Fred drew curious looks. That particular Saturday, he wore khaki shorts with a long belt strap that hung to his knee, and a stained red and white horizontal striped shirt. His belly poked out like Smee, the first mate for Captain Hook.

Fred put more food on the fork than can possibly fit into his mouth. He laughed into his fork as he bit, dropping chunks of lettuce onto the table and his lap. He picked these chunks up with his meaty fingers and shoved them into his mouth, leaving thousand island dressing on his mustache.

This is simply how he eats.

The conversation flowed. He made me laugh, mostly. He told wild stories of his drug days. 

One sentence began with, "I remember the first time I picked up a prostitute . . ." and I had to cut him off. Fred always told me too much about his sex life and I had to educate him on appropriate father-daughter conversation.

"You don't tell your daughter these things, Fred," I said dryly.

He thought that was a riot and roared with laughter.

I wondered how many other women like me got to hear their fathers say, "I remember them coming to take me away like it was yesterday. . ."

When we were together, he complained a lot about "the system." He had taken life's blows one by one and felt wronged. This system had decided a schizophrenic alcoholic had no business raising a child, and took me away from him when I was just a baby.

"If I could do it all over, I would have not given you up for adoption. I would have raised you poor," he said for the thousandth time.

I sat there secretly thanking God for that system. Thankful that it had never been up to him. Thankful that I was raised by two old, kind, loving and stable parents. Even if they did die when I was a teenager, causing me deeper heartache than I have ever known, I have built my life upon their stable foundation of love.

There's no telling him my point of view. I just listened.

The bill came and it was $45, which wasn't bad for seafood on a deck over the water.

Fred was hell-bent on paying for the meal, but I worried. Would he tip 20 percent? Probably not, and the waiter had a mess to clean up.

Also, it was very important that he have enough money left to buy a bus ticket back to New Jersey.

I offered to put the bill on my credit card, feigning a need for cash.

And then he surprised me. He tossed me a $100 bill -- spoils from the "job" that brought him south in the first place.

He didn't tell me what the job was, but said something vague about Florida. Keeping track of Fred was confusing and if I was honest with myself, I didn’t really want to know.

As we were leaving the restaurant, he found a toothpick on a chair. "Oh good! A toothpick." 

Without a thought to how it had gotten there or where it had been, he picked it up and stuck it in his mouth.

Later that day, I gave Fred a tour of the newspaper. It was Saturday, and so he met some of the weekend staff, including Ron Colquitt, the adored police reporter who kept a human skull on his desk, and took collect calls from the locally committed serial killer. Ron sat next to my best friend, Susan, who was also a Northwestern journalism school alum, and teased her about being a Chicago yankee.

Ron's job was to listen to the police scanner all day. The weekend police shift is either nuts or mind-numbingly boring. Most reporters do it their first couple of years until they get promoted to something more prestigious.

Because I had a head for numbers, I had skipped the cops beat altogether and instead reported for the buttoned up business desk.

Ron was in his 60s and had chosen to be a cops reporter his entire career. This would be your first sign that he was eccentric. Meeting him in person would be the second sign.

Ron's eyes bugged out of his head when I introduced him to Fred.  "This is your father?"

"It's a long story," I told him.

Ron looked gleeful, as if he had stumbled upon some great secret of the universe, revealed. 

I quickly ushered Fred out of the newsroom and concluded our tour.

Our next stop was a crawfish boil that a newspaper friend had organized for Fred’s visit. If you have a somewhat crazy secret family, and you wish to introduce them to your coworkers, there’s probably no better profession to work in than journalism. Writers love deviations from the norm. Fred was many things, but he was not boring.

That night, back at my apartment, I wrote the notes that form this reflection. I didn't have anyone to talk to about it. And it was hard to explain the dichotomy of my professional life and newspaper career with Fred's unstable, abnormally strange, mentally ill world.

Fred completed another bath, on my urging. 

As I was typing in my journal, Fred came into my room, proudly holding a black T-shirt.

"I got this T-shirt when I got my tattoo! Do you want it?"

It displayed a dragon and gold letters, "Studio 9 Tattoos. Freehold NJ"

He added, "It's got holes in it, but I figured you'd want a T-shirt from your old man. In case you go to a painting party or something."

I thanked him, folded it and put it on the floor. Then he offered me a pair of his socks, also with holes. I turned them down because I have standards.

He plodded back to the living room, apparently satisfied and pleased that I accepted the gift.

I went to sleep that night with Fred snoring loudly in the living room. The next day, he accompanied me to church.

My beloved genteel church grandmas left me alone that Sunday and I assumed that they assumed that I had invited a homeless man to church. I wore my usual: a Sunday dress and hat. Fred wore his usual: holey, smoky clothes.

I was relieved to not have to explain Fred to these women. It was bad enough for me that I wasn't conceived under an Azalea tree and couldn't trace my roots back before the Civil War. To many people I met in the South, roots meant everything and "where are you froh-um?" was a question fraught with peril for me. The answer, "New Jersey," often took care of it -- that I was a Yankee was all they needed to know to draw conclusions.

My church grandmas loved me in spite of my shameful Yankee roots, and I loved them. They reached up to hug and kiss me every Sunday, and would openly muse on why I was not yet married. Plotting to find me a "hay-ndsome young may-an" had become mission and ritual. Lest my self-esteem suffer, they reassured me of what a sweet thing I was, particularly when I wore a Sunday hat. 

In return, I worked on my drawl, and dressed as a lady is expected, and listened to their stories. 

Nobody asked me about Fred. Wise, they were. I loved them even more after that. It must have been difficult for them as they were all terribly nosy.

On Monday morning, I dropped Fred off at the greyhound station. He bought a ticket back to New Jersey.

I was eager to send him on his way because my apartment was descending into dirty chaos. But, it ended up being more emotional than I had expected.

When I pulled up to the Greyhound Station, he told me that he remembered saying goodbye to me 23 years prior, just before the judge ordered that he wouldn't be allowed to see me again.

"You gave me this little kiss, and I never forgot how it felt."

I never know how to act when he talks about losing me, because it was very painful for him, but I remember none of it.

Plus, what he recalls as the worst moment of his life was probably my luckiest.

He got out of the car and gave me a giant hug. "My little girl is all grown up."

His eyes were pink and tears streamed down his face. He had neon plastic sunglasses on his shirt collar.

"There's a reason for these," he said, and put the sunglasses on to hide his tears. And then he walked toward the station with his duffel bag, his shoulders slumped.

I felt so bad for him that I got in my car and cried. Not for sorrow about anything in my life, but for him.

A song that came to mind was the hymn, "One bread, one body."

One bread, one body, one Lord of all.
One cup of blessing which we bless.
And we, though many, throughout the earth
We are one body in this one Lord.

All these different ages and different life situations. Little skipping girls, skinny older men with canes who can barely bend their knees -- they all kneel at the communion rail. 

It comforted me when I thought of Fred crying there in the parking lot. Fred’s life and my life were so different, yet we were connected.

But so is everyone, connected through one source of Love.

I only saw my biological father once more after that visit. He never met two of his three grandchildren. He was found dead on January 4, 2022.