One of my father's RULES FOR LIFE was to marry a woman who was smarter than you. "I did this," he would say to me, "and you should do it, too. I say, why do all the thinking?
Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.
In 2001, my father finally succumbed to the bone cancer that had tortured him for seven years. His last weeks were a terrible, black icing on the cake, the agony, the slow twisting, thinning and snapping of his skeleton. Everything fell apart.
My father is conservative but has always supported my decisions. He lets me take my own decisions. His only condition while allowing me to come to Mumbai was that my mother must accompany me.
Decades later I would look into my father's eyes and try to reach past the murkiness of Alzheimer's with my words, my apology, hoping that in his heart he heard me and understood.
America had taken my father from me. And over most of the years of his illness, I gradually started feeling this support system from this country who-people grieving along with us.
My father's body lies in a stone tomb high on a hill. People walk by, pause, think their own thoughts about him and move on, back to their own lives. I can never move on. He is everywhere.
Many were starting to use computerized synthesizers & drum machines to produce an entirely new style of music. It was being punted by the critics that the guitar was old hat; I was reminded of the way my father & his clarinets were written off in the...
In the past, my brain would never stop. Now I'm a father; the world no longer revolves around me. When I'm with Bronx, he's got my complete attention. He's the only thing that occupies my thoughts.
I want to say that nobody accuses their parents of abusing them without justification to do that. I didn't just make it up. A lot of things were true and abusive and horrible things that happened to me that my father did.
He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.
I was convinced that acting was for fools. I was on the stage when I was eight with my father, he was playing one of those Greek blind guys that sees things and warns people, whilst I was in a blue skirt. I think there were 5,000 people in the theatr...
My father had spent years fighting cancer of the head and neck. He had numerous operations, and he was reduced and reduced and reduced. By the end, he had a growth so big under his eye that it hurt to look at him.
I was angry about the fact that my father would beat my mother on a daily basis, that my mother would take it in turn and beat on me. I was an abused child. I was mad about all those things, very bitter and very angry.
My father is from Jamaica, and as a child I spent many holidays there. I remember the weight and drenching wetness of that hot rain, as I experienced it in my childhood, not only for itself, but for what it represented for me.
My father was a drill sergeant, and I've always had that mentality drilled into me of 'you've got to do better, you've got to do better.' I just try to listen to the characters. That's what works for me.
All my life, in nameless, indeterminate ways, I'd tried to complete my life with someone else--first my father, then Hugh, even Whit, and I didn't want that anymore. I wanted to belong to myself.
I just found out last week - my sister told me - that my father had some Beatles records. So I must have heard them quite a bit, but it never registered, really. Now I listen to them with new ears.
My father made me who I am. He gave me a basketball and told me to play with the ball, sleep with the ball, dream with the ball. Just don't take it to school. I used it as a pillow, and it never gave me a stiff neck.
Beautiful is the man who leaves a legacy that of shared love and life. It is he who transfers meaning, assigns significance and conveys in his loving touch the fine art and gentle shaping of a life. This man shall be called, Father.
There was something so immensely redemptive and exciting for me to imagine that my unknown father was not just a man who had abandoned me but a noble man of adventure who had no choice.
