On the day after Father’s Day, I was thinking:
When you marry a creative woman, you should expect a creative divorce. A certain former Mrs. Noonan was sufficiently innovative to cover a whole stable of Mrs. Noonans.
One stipulation in the nearly 20-year-old divorce from the Mrs. Noonan who delivered most of my sons was so unusual as to be unknown before or since.
I presume the downtown Superior Court judge who signed off on this artistic document — a legal hoodlum on loan from Weight Watchers using the name Richard (deleted)— has made other couples equally miserable.
When you suffer, you see, your discomfort can be ameliorated by the presence of a crowd.
I Remember His Leer
Let’s not even talk about my counsel, known here by his stage name, Cutthroat McGraw, out of respect for the dead, which he is and I nearly was the moment I became his client. Unbeknownst to me, Cutthroat, or as his mother called him, Sidney, had been successfully sued for malpractice by a very recent client in a divorce case.
Between Judge Denman and Cutthroat, my almost ex-wife could have saved the exorbitant amount she spent on Florence Nightengale to represent her.
You have heard of divorces where one parent may only visit with the children under chaperoned conditions. Our divorce was, however, the opposite. How far away can you run?
For the boys and me, in order to merit a fortnight of summer vacation, we were ordered to spend the time outside the confines of Los Angeles County. If we were discovered lurking in this County, the boys’ saintly mother was empowered to swoop down and clasp them to her loving, conniving bosom.
And so one fine summer’s day, visiting one of my bombastic relatives where we were camping out or hiding out, Ms. Bombast erupted, declared us persona non present, effective five minutes ago.
Ignoring the messy passionate side of this little vignette, the boys and I quietly returned to my abode that I had acquired from the Extremely Humble Realty Co. I don’t know if Sherlock Holmes was a distant ancestor of the debatably honest former Mrs. Noonan.
But, we only had been home for minutes — this was before the days of caller ID — when the telephone rang. One of my boys lunged and announced, “Dad, Mom wants to talk with you.”
To condense a book-length version of this sorry scene, a delegate of the aforementioned lady, turned up with admirable precision on my doorstep. The boys were swept up before I could stutter.
Father’s Day
All of this is prologue to what unfolded yesterday morning.
At the appointed hour, Diane and I drove up before a certain address that, these days, makes my heart flutter. My most self-effacing son, no longer a child but working in the banking industry, stepped into our car, wordlessly but smilingly.
Stoic at all times, almost embarrassedly he reached toward me and thrust an extraordinary gift into my hands. It mattered not that the same scene was being re-enacted between millions of other American fathers and sons at the very moment. They have a storehouse of memories. We don’t.
Even though the boys are 28, 25 and almost 20, we have a thinner history of Father’s Day gatherings than Robinson Crusoe or Henry James.
There is no room bulging with family mementos from earlier, happier times. There were only earlier times.
I teared up. My son started to do the same. Even though it was not yet 10 o’clock, my Father’s Day had raced to the pinnacle of fulfillment.
