by Sam Harley
June 16, 2017
I remember when our first child was born, I broke down for a minute or two. Partly because I had been waiting so long for that moment, but also that’s when it hit me: this is forever. Once you are a father (or a mother) that relationship never goes away. No matter what I do from this moment on, I will always be this boy’s father. For good or for bad. Even if I run away and disappear forever, I’ll still be the father who disappeared and there will always be a dad-shaped hole in him needing to be filled. Friends, even spouses, can come and go. But once you’re a parent, that’s never going to change.
My relationship with my own father was distant. He was a good man, and tried to take care of us, but remotely. He wasn’t easy to talk to, unless it was about politics or social issues. He was preoccupied most of the time.
So joining a church where Father was a very important word, a central word, brought up its own set of issues. I was angry that I didn’t know how to express my feelings any better than my dad did. And I was mad at him because he couldn’t embrace all of me. He could only relate, it seemed, to the part of me that could make intellectual sense. And there are large parts of me that don’t always make sense, it’s just how I am, it’s how we are as people. We are contradictory.
So I had some issues with the Heavenly Father that we prayed to. Easy to believe He was good. Not so easy to believe He was someone I could be close to, or at ease with. Or someone who wanted to be around me all day. That certainly didn’t fit with my experience.
It took a long time to start a family, It was 1996 when our first child was born. My one big regret was that my parents both died before they could see their grandchildren.
I was working at Manhattan Center at that time, when the urge to do theater hit me again. I looked around and found a community theater group in Scarsdale doing a play called the Foreigner. Auditioned, got the part. We did weekend and evening rehearsals for several weeks, then performed. The theater group had been around for 50 or 60 years, and a whole raft of people came in the last week to help hand out programs, iron costumes, put on makeup and so on.
On the final night, a gray haired woman whom I hadn’t met before approached me backstage.
“Your name is Sam Harley.”
“Yes, it is.”
“And is your father named John?”
“Yes.”
“And your mother’s name Pat?”
“Yes!?”
“My husband and I knew your father. He used to come visit us from Montreal every couple of years.”
I had never heard about this, not in the 30 years since my family had moved to Quebec. Never knew my dad had an old friend in New York.
“We thought it might be you when we saw your name in the program. He used to talk about his son named Sam.”
I was speechless. Somehow out of the hundreds of theater groups around New York, I had picked the one where I would meet friends of my father.
“You’ll have to come over for lunch. Are you married?”
“Yes, and we have a son, 6 months old.”
“Oh, wonderful.”
We exchanged phone numbers, and a week or two later, Miyuki, Diaperzan (‘Tarzan in diapers’ -one of many nicknames we had for Brandon) and I went to their house for lunch.
I don’t remember what we had for lunch, but I do remember seeing what the husband had had for breakfast, displayed on his shirt. His hands resembled lobster claws due to arthritis. He was very friendly, and excited to see us. He was a retired doctor, actually a member of the board who evaluated all the doctors in the region.
He had known my dad when they were at Harvard together, and they had kept up with each other through the years. Brandon, our little one, was busily navigating the rug as we talked. With delight, the man picked him up with his lobster hands and talked to him. He held him for a while, beaming at him.
I remember wondering at that moment “Why is this man so excited to see us? I didn’t even know my dad had a friend in New York. And why is he so happy to see Brandon?”
And as I was thinking this, it hit me. My father was here. Somehow, I had been guided to this town, this local theater club, to meet this man who had been a good friend of my father’s. And here he was, holding my son, the way my father never got to before he died. And I knew my father was there at that moment, enjoying his grandson through this old friend of his. The joy I saw on his face was a mixture of his and my father’s.
Wow.
How much unseen work goes into setting up moments like this, I’ll never know. Maybe when we get to spirit world we’ll get to see the replays of what it took.