Woe unto me.

[doc_destructo]

This is about me meeting my dad.

You see, I've never met the man responsible for my Y-chromosome. My mom seems to fondly recall their first meeting: She waited tables at a restaurant near Fort Knox and the other wait staff had called in for some reason. So there she stood, a short, 22-year-old brunette bustling around a burger joint filled with impatient servicemen. Well, my future sire makes with some smartass joke or another and she tells his whole table that the rest of the waitresses weren't in so if they wanted to eat, they could damn well place their own orders. Well, lo and behold, pops donned an apron and started taking orders, even bullying a couple of buddies into pitching in as well.

That first meeting encompasses most of the knowledge I have about my father. The rest involves the circumstances of their good-byes. Which is largely that he was assigned to go over to Korea before they even met, that he rode his motorcycle through the blizzard of '78 to see my mom when he found out she was pregnant, and that after some correspondence his attention wandered and didn't return.

It's been said that I bare a strong resemblance to him. That we share similar senses of humor and near-sightedness. I've learned that I must've inherited the tendency for pyloric stenosis from his side of the family. He, apparently, was the one who wanted me named "Joshua." But that's it. I've never actually seen a picture of him. Mom says that the only pictures she had (him standing in front of one of the memorial tanks at Ft. Knox) burned up in the first house fire. And while it's been a passing fancy all my life, I've never really felt the strong inclination to seek him out.

I've given the idea more thought since the birth of my own son. Like Pooh sitting on his Thinking Log, I got down to serious thinking. And the more I've thought about it, the more I decide to not think about it. But in writing some silly stuff, the topic's circled round again. The two of us aren't as young as we were 10 years ago and I'm wondering if I should just bite the bullet and write the son of a bitch.

Ugh.

This kind of crap is tiring.