STOP THAT, MISS BRIGGS!

With Friends Like These...

It wasn't just the small quantity of friends that was a problem for me growing up. There also were serious problems with the quality, in my youth on into my middle age years.

There have been some very nice exceptions, to be sure -- foremost among them my high school pal who accepted the tree-nuke analogy and my many other quirky observations. Still, I have often settled for less than a person deserves and needs in friends.

I don't know to what extent the abuse by Miss Briggs contributed to this problem – it was largely pre-existing.

Often, I have overvalued others' approval of me. This is a primal flaw caused by a father who left us – more to the point, he left me, the only other male in the household, and when I was so young that his being gone was the unfortunate foundation of my self-appraisal. He had the glamorous job of television newscaster, which would  have been the coolest job any kid's father had in our neighborhood of Ward Cleaver dads – except that the city where my father anchored the news was 1,200 miles away and there were no such things as YouTubes or video streaming in those days.

Our move into the neighborhood being about 10 years before the divorce boom, the question of exactly who our father was and why he did not live with us was a mystery to the other kids. And though I knew where he was, it was quite a mystery to me why the most accomplished and educated father anyone on the block had was also the only invisible one.

From age five (which is how old I was the first time in my conscious life I saw my father) on through my 40s, I would see him in person about every 10 years and converse sporadically by letters or the various evolving electronic means of our times.

In more recent years, I have learned through some old legal filings by my father over child support, and his self-published memoirs of his career and life, that he was no one to miss. Though he could be pleasant, glib, and exuding of intellectual freedom -- and he sometimes gave me good personal advice -- at his core my father was heartless and unrepentant. In a book he published just before his death at 83 about his TV career and personal life in the cities where his name was a household word, he omitted any mention of Mom, my older sister or myself. Yet, he wrote in great detail about some of the women he had extra-marital sex with, coming close to identifying one.

Only awareness of the Third Reich's evil legacy kept me from wanting to burn the book, so hurt was I. Instead of torching its pages, I burned any bridges to the confusion of my fatherless childhood. His final statement being one where he affirmed in writing his absolute neglect of us, I was now able to disconnect from him with surgical precision. I owed him nothing. And being emotionally debt-free has been terrific! All I think of now is how good and strong Mom made our family.

Growing up, I was happy and grateful for the home and mother we had (despite the usual childhood "I hate you" tantrums).

Still, I had this feeling that regarding the other parent, I had been expelled from of a Garden of Eden, where emotional abundance beyond what could be provided by any other father's identity had for a brief while been mine, but now I had literally nothing. Though I have never craved having a famous father, that would certainly have been interesting (he was the best known person in the state where he lived during most of the '50s and '60s).

One summer evening in our neighborhood while I was hanging out with other kids amid the fireflies and warm dusk air, it came to pass that I said my father was a TV newscaster.

"What?" responded a talkative, pudgy boy from down the street, who was a couple of years my elder. "Where did you hear that? Your father's a radio DJ!"

That was what this kid honestly believed; he wasn't intending to cut me down. In any normal situation, a son's standing in a disagreement about his own dad would have blown away such misinformation. But realizing that my credentials to explain my  father were so weak that this boy felt fully authorized to "correct" me, I broke down into tears of anger while trying to argue back.