One of my favorite stories of my father is one he liked to tell on himself. Seems like he and my mother, when they were dating, drove out with a couple of friends to the newly-completed Grapevine Lake, just north of Dallas. At some point during the outing, my dad and his friend Jack dared one another to scale the spillway. 

I'm told they didn't get far before they both tumbled back down, becoming a couple of strawberry-covered white boys in the process. Knowing my dad, I'm fairly certain beer was involved, both before and after the inevitable spill.

 I've never been to Grapevine Lake, but looking at the picture I just found on the interwebs (taken during the drought, evidently), I'm thinking he must have gotten into trouble just about where you can make out that Texas-flag-looking graphic in the center of the shot. (I found this photo of the Grapevine Lake spillway here.) This is funny to me, one, because it is something I might have tried, at his age, and something that it wouldn't surprise me to hear my own son might try (pleasee don't, son!). (However, on an ugly night in 1979, I, along with some classmates and a couple of cans of blue and gold spray paint, wrote "Seniors '74" on a trestle over FM 1845 after a loooong night of drinking, and such. And though it hurts to look at it, I still have my son't 21st birthday party invitation saved away somewhere, to frighten me back to sobriety when I'm feeling a bit too blessed and lucky.) Like those stick-fetching Jack Russell's, we Banks boys are nothing if not true to our pedigree.

My dad died young, at age 58, without ever knowing the latest to carry the Banks family name, a young man who is like my dad in so many ways. They would have become fast friends, had not cigarettes taken my father's life. My mother once said to me "You are the only thing he ever wanted." Such a remark stays with you, and if this was ever true then it would have been revised had he met Travis. I wish I had not lost my dad so early on, but it is a bitter regret that he never had the joy of knowing Travis. 

I watched my dad drink a lot of beer, and I stank of cigarette smoke throughout my childhood and adolescence. But I rarely saw my father drink beer with his friends when he was out on a lark, such as being the first man in history to tumble off the dam at Grapevine Lake. I never saw him when he was footloose and carefree. It seems to me that we don't--we can't--know our parents, except as parents. As a parent my father was dutiful and intent, intent on providing us with the sort of life he envisioned, the "American dream" so sought after by those of the "Greatest Generation" (an appelation that usually makes me wretch, but I'll make an exception just this once for his sake).

When other dads were showing up to watch their sons play ball, my dad was usually on the road. For a substantial portion of my life, he was a route man, and a stranger in the house between Monday and Friday. He showed up for a track meet once, when I was in 8th grade, and that one track meet is something I'll never forget. I jumped a personal best in the long jump (didn't place), and ran that day in the mile relay, as usual (we placed, but I don't remember where). I also ran the 2nd leg of the quarter-mile relay, a last minute substitution by Coach Clay, as I wasn't really fast enough to run that distance. But I ran my ass off, made a perfect handoff, and against all odds we placed 4th. I have rarely been so proud as I was that day, the day my dad took off work to see me perform.

From time to time, I hear stories of my dad, the young Good Time Charlie who sounds a lot like me. Who sounds a lot like his grandson, for that matter. I laugh at the story of how he moved into an apartment with his sister and her new husband over in South Oak Cliff. The only furniture he brought with him was his trusty  television set. The old timers used to laugh that my uncle was happy to help my dad move out the next year when he married my mom, but he missed having the television.

My father quit high school to join the navy. He was a fireman during the latter part of World War II, where he saw no action but put out some runway fires, and saved a few luckless pilots in Alice, Texas, where they trained them. There's a story I've heard about the time he and a bunch of his navy buddies took a bus to Brownsville for a night of tequila and fun in Matamoros. After the night was through, and back in the bus station in Brownsville, they say my dad thought he was already back on base and took his pants off right there in the station, before going directly to sleep. (This is strong evidence for my theory that tequila makes people want to spontaneously undress. I have additional proof that I choose to withhold at this time.) Later in life, he mostly tried to stick with beer, he said, because it was easier to keep track of how much alcohol he had had. One doesn't want to disrobe in more than one bus depot per lifetime, I suppose.

I was an adult--and he was dead--before I learned he had married and divorced someone else before he met my mother. Family members tell me she attended his funeral, but they only told me that much, much later. 

In fact, I knew so very little about him. A gregarious man, a salesman, and yet pensive and preoccupied, the man I experienced growing up. His death is something I suppose I've never recovered from completely, and partly this is because I feel he was taken away before I could completely know him. He makes frequent appearances in my dreams, though. Sometimes, he advises me. At other times I find him sleeping in his la-z-boy lounger, the one I remember him sleeping is night after night, before finally standing up, turning off the test pattern on the tv, and drifting off to bed.

Missing my dad is a little like looking at that test pattern all these years. You don't ever see those anymore, the ubiquitous television test pattern of yore, broadcasting it's constant message of despair. With it's droning one-note accompaniment, it says, in no uncertain terms: it's all over.