Independence Day

SUNDAY, JULY 4, 2010


Independence Day

I thought my real Independence Day came in the summer of 1968. It was not on July 4th.

My dad and I had a relationship where he tried to exert his dominance over me, to mold me all through childhood and into college. I was not enamored of the concept.

I constantly rebelled. I fired the first shots at Lexington probably in my first or second grade. I continued to the North Bridge in Concord. It was a long and bloody war.

Thru high school the battles raged on. Dad was my Gage, my Howe, my Cornwallis, my Clinton, my Burgoyne, never my Cornwallis. I had authored my Declaration of Independence the day of my high school graduation. Dad did not attend the ceremony and we did not talk to each other until the Christmas break of my freshman year of college. It bothered me but I was too much like him. I would not yield. It was a case of stubborn stupidity on both sides.

I was more than strong headed. So was dad. I remained counter to his every proposal. We started the war and there would be no Yorktown, no Treaty of Paris.

At the end of my senior year of high school, Father Bonaventure, a most passionate Passionist convinced me to spend some time in the seminary at their monastery in West Hartford. He told me if I entered the seminary there would never be a point in my life where I wondered if I should have.

I put in exactly one year of college getting up before dawn to chant the psalms in the candlelit chapel. We spent a lot of time kneeling, shouting back and forth side to side. I think it was Thursday mornings at about 4AM the fellows kneeling across from us yelled: “Blessed be he that shall take and dash thy children against the rock”. I spent a lot of time either going to or coming from that chapel. Doing the Gregorian Chant when other people were snoring, going to bed or getting ready for a meal. My knees got very sore and it seemed like everything I wanted to do or did do was a sin.

In the summer of ’69 I quit college and dropped out of the Passionist Seminary. I abandoned my brief attempt to be a catholic priest. Dad, as usual, was not happy. I had decided it was senseless for me to continue in the seminary since I was positive I could not do without women. If I was to be a Roman Catholic priest that was part of the deal. We had a joke at the seminary and that was that we all thought they said passionate when we signed the recruitment papers.

John XXIII had died back in 1963. Although he had continued the Second Vatican Council, conservative Paul VI was unlikely to follow John’s dream of bringing the Catholic Church into the twentieth century. Catholics would remain mired in the Dark Ages. I would not.

Dad thought I should go back and give free seminary college a second chance. He presented his argument more on that basis… that I was getting a very good free education, less on any impression that he thought I would make a good priest. I agreed with him on that one point. I would not make a good priest. The free education was not nearly as important to me as him.

I came home from work that summer day and left the helmet on the seat of the shiny red 300 Honda Dream. Dad came to the front door and told me to get that damn motorcycle out of his driveway before he broke it up with a sledgehammer. I moved it because I believed him.

As soon as I came inside he laid it out for me in no uncertain terms: I could not keep the motorcycle… I could not continue to live on South East 11th St. unless I toed the line. He was right on only one of those observations. I gathered my belongings into a couple of grocery bags, mounted up and rode off. I still had the motorcycle and I did not live on South East 11th St.


It was Christmas of that year before we talked again.

He changed all of the locks in the house and let it be known that no one was to even talk to me on the phone. If I called and he was home my sisters only said that dad was there and they could not talk.

My mother was hurt and worried by my rebellion. She talked her father into coming by where I worked to have a talk with me. Grandpa only said that he knew how hard it was to live with my father since he and dad had the same kind of thing going on all the time too. He asked me to try to think of my mother and how much it hurt her for me to be as big a jackass as I was all the time. I talked to him a month later and he had moved out from under the roof of Herm’s house as well.

Lawrence had an ongoing war with Herm of his own. The final straw was when dad got off work and came home and told grandpa that he was going grocery shopping. Dad wanted to know if mom’s dad wanted anything from the store since grandpa was kicking in so much for the groceries and the running of the household as part of his keep. Grandpa told my father he wanted a big jar of Smuckers strawberry jam.

Dad came back from the store and grandpa was in the kitchen removing his toast from the toaster. He asked dad for the Smuckers. Dad said he didn’t have it. Grandpa wanted to know if dad had forgotten it. Dad assured grandpa that he hadn’t. Smuckers was going on sale later in the week. Grandpa told dad that he didn’t care if they were giving away the strawberry jam by the case later that week. He wanted the jam for the warm toast with the melted butter on it on the plate on the counter.

Grandpa took a few of the empty grocery bags into his room and packed his things. He called a real estate agent then called a cab. He bought a house that afternoon. Grandpa and I had several more talks that summer until I decided to follow my destiny and moved to Atlanta to further my career with the smörgåsbord restaurant where I had worked since I turned 16.

That plan did not work so well. I decided to abandon it and ride my motorcycle back to South Florida for a Christmas visit. The motorcycle did not work so well either as I left Atlanta headed south on I-75 in the snow. There was ice on the roads. I followed as close behind the semis as I could, drafting them to try to get out of the wind.

I had to stop in a roach hotel because it got too difficult to drive through the blinding snow in the cold after dark. I knew if I didn’t layover I would become a permanent fixture on the back bumper of some truck that did not even know that I had previously been following it too closely.

When I got up and I loaded on every stitch of clothing I could manage. The rest were in the grocery bags strapped to the back seat of the Honda I couldn’t kick start that morning. Our family liked to use grocery bags for luggage. I found a hill and rolled the bike down, popped the clutch and roared off and up the interstate ramp headed for the warmth of South Florida. I thought my butt was going to freeze to the vinyl seat as I rode almost an hour shivering in the cold, trying to keep the motorcycle headed straight behind one semi or the other.

There was a huge boom and I was covered with oil. I was lucky and got it shifted into neutral and glided up an off ramp into a truck stop in Valdosta Georgia. This was the first of many disasters that happened to me in Valdosta later in life. I could not find a ride for the Honda and me with a trucker. They were all carrying full loads. I did manage to sell the Honda for a hundred and a ride in a semi cab that was headed to Miami.

Dad and I had arranged a truce for Christmas after I told mom over the phone, when he wasn’t home, that I had enrolled in college and was accepted for the spring trimester. Dad and I had not talked but mom made it clear that I was welcome to come home if I got rid of the motorcycle and worked until I could leave for college. At least I got rid of the motorcycle.

It was a long ride home in the tractor of that huge truck. The driver was a nice guy and about the age of my dad. He listened as I talked and I talked a lot. He drove the semi to our front door down the dead end street and let me out. He started backing up as I went to the front porch. It was 3:30AM. The light was on and the front door unlocked. I went in and threw my bag down.


Dad was sitting in his chair. The first thing he said was: “I didn’t hear the motorcycle.”

I threw in the towel. I had been defeated. I loved my dad. The war was finally over.


Well almost. I gave my sisters Doors albums that Christmas. Dad hated Jim Morrison and it wasn’t just for the music.


I guess that Christmas was really my Independence Day.


© 07.04.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg


POSTED BY SRPLUS AT 3:25 PM