Between The Miles - A Daughter's Perspective

The Story I've Waited My Life To Hear

     I can't tell you exactly how many hours I have spent in coffee shops but it's probably a shamefully high number. In my early twenties, when I returned from several years of traveling, I wanted to connect more with my parents. I think it was easier with my mom because of the mother-daughter thing. We had all kinds of things we could do together like shopping and ceramics, but when it came to my dad (I wasn't about to take up running), I needed to find another way to spend quality time together. I started asking my father to have coffee dates with me.

     At first, it was uncomfortable to sit alone in a coffee shop with my father. Without it sounding like a bad thing, I was never 'daddy's little girl.' With so many people coming and going through our house during my childhood (my parents taking in anyone who needed a place to stay), there were few times that any of us could be alone with our parents. At twenty-two years old, I can honestly say that beyond the letters we had written to each other while I was on tour, my father and I had never sat down together to just talk. Fortunately, we did start meeting up for coffee often and in as many different little spots as we could find, though we had our favorites, which we frequented. It very quickly became a special tradition between us. 

     Our coffee dates now are times that I treasure and look forward to very, very much. Most people (my mother), don't understand how my dad and I can sit in one set of chairs for hours (usually 3-4), and just talk. The coffee dates soon became opportunities for me to ask him questions about himself, things I had always wondered about and wanted to know. It had become increasingly more evident that I knew very little about him. To me, he had always been the main provider, the disciplinarian, the task-master of yard work, and an elite athlete who seemed mostly off-limits to me. I had caused my share of grief as a child and didn't know if he saw the changes in me. There's no pity-party here. 

     My dad always came through for us kids when it counted, and it was because of him paying my full tuition, that I was even able to travel as a student for a year in Up With People. Looking back now, I would say that our relationship blossomed within the coffee shops we visited in; El Dorado, Diamond Springs, Placerville, Shingle Springs, Cameron Park, El Dorado Hills, Folsom, Rocklin, and several Java Houses in Southern California. 

Coffee Shop Conversation: Glendale, Ca

     Pop was an "All American" sports guy who had played baseball, football, and competed in advanced levels of wrestling. My dad also grew up playing sports but as my father grew older, he slowly lost interest in most of them. For example, my dad told me he realized wrestling wasn't for him, this one time when his face was being smashed into the moist and hairy armpit of his freshman opponent. That, and the fact that the lowest weight class was ninety pounds and my father wasn't more than seventy-five pounds, soaking wet! It wasn't just the armpit thing that lead to him to quit but he also contracted impetigo while wrestling. Look it up. It's gross, and it sounds to me like a perfectly reasonable reason to quit the sport! 

     For the real beginning, let's go back a bit earlier to his freshman year (the summer before school started), when my dad went out for football. The summer football tryouts had started with my father lined up on the field, as Pop had expected him to. My dad was willing to play, despite how small he was (only about 5 feet tall). He knew that he was fast and agile and had athletic ability, but as fate would have it, he wasn't built for high school football.

     "I was either going to sit-the-bench for the whole season or get killed in a single tackle," he told me. He thought it had been about ten days into training camp when the football coach put his arm around my dad and took him for a little walk across the sports fields, to introduce him to the cross-country coach. Subtle, and effective. Coach Joe Brooks was the cross-country coach at El Cajon Valley High School in San Diego, California in 1961. That fateful day, the introduction to Coach Brooks, was the beginning of a wonderful mentor-ship between coach and athlete. My father became friends with Coach and his family; cutting his lawn and taking care of his house when they went on vacation. While my father found a lot of joy and early success in running cross-country, when Pop found out that his son was no longer on the football team, my dad said that Pop would barely speak to him. The relationship between father and son disintegrated over the next three years, my dad says, because of that single switch in sports.