My father wears a tartan kilt on certain occasions when he's golfing - I love that I can say that out loud. Perhaps, it’s a shout out to his partly-Scottish bloodline; mostly, I think he enjoys making an entrance. He's funny. Really funny. His conversational zippy responses, instant humor calculated on the spot, surprise his listeners, drawing out of them a bawdy, spontaneous laugh.
He's created a variety of vocal impersonations on his home voicemail, greetings comprised of celebrities and quirky original characters, all performed by him, who appear to be answering his phone for him; I picture him calling himself to listen, laughing uproariously.
My dad fancies himself a cartoonist and is in fact quite good at it; I would bet on my impression that he has had at least one of his drawings published. I can't back this up with research at the moment.
He's written more books than I know of, which is embarrassing for me, and he has a catalog of work that highlights his prolific career as a singer for the last 70 years. His name is often mentioned alongside of Elvis’s as their career ran simultaneously for quite a while.
He has supported the dreams of, and personally looked after, innumerable friends and family members in every way possible, and he was in love with my mother for his entire adult life until she passed six years ago.
Notably, and most meaningfully to any child, he listened to my stories. He was able to distill my voice out of the mix of four busy-minded girls; I felt like he liked me, and his warm grin and smiling eyes convinced me. My dad took a lighter view of minor infractions, and seemed to understand what some adults might size up as the banal interests of a young girl. When I mentioned later in life that I thought I had been a bit too much as a child, he looked honestly saddened, adding, "Mama was so busy with all of you girls, and she might have been frustrated with your energy at times, but I always thought that if your behaviors seem to communicate that you needed attention, then maybe you actually needed some attention. It wasn't too much for me to spend some time with you." Sounds reasonable, right?
Unless you consider that this particular father was making one recording after another and filming movies while he was actively building a family of 6 with his high school sweetheart, performing in a weekly variety show in New York city, and graduating Magna cum Laude from Columbia University. A high achiever, my dad is happier when he's working, influencing, writing, projecting and preaching than he is being pampered or entertained himself. When he slowed down to chat with me, or took me along to drive the cart at the golf course, it always felt like an enormous gift.
My mother functioned at a frenetic pace when I was small, ducks in a row style. The pictures of the Boone Girls tell the tale: pixie haircuts, taffeta and bows, bobby socks and patent leather, poised and posed delightfully in vintage photographs. At least once, she fell prey to this trending-but-bizarre haircut for her daughters, bangs with zig-zaggy points as if they had been cut with craft scissors. It was a statement, communicating control over the details, every hair in place. She ran a tight ship, and being a child, it never dawned on me how she may have learned those skills by being thrown into an environment for which she was entirely unprepared. I knew she loved me, and I also knew that I danced on her last nerves. She was always juggling. She took care of the household; daddy was a star. And he was my favorite. It really wasn't fair, but he was fun, and he laughed a lot.
Adding to the complex souffle that has been my relationship with my father would be the spiritual mandate to raise us right, to answer the call to mold us, and to create in his image daughters who would have the same values, and carry on his sense of purpose in perpetuity. This is not uncommon for fathers, I suppose.
His paternal values combined to form a gentle blend of southern and Biblical expectations, a dash of "yes sir" and "yes ma'am," folded delicately into "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not." When I was little, he wasn't always heavy-handed with these guidelines; they were expected, and they were understood. His requirements straddled an ideological fence between obedience and respect, both related to each other, but differentiated by the behaviors aligned to each category.
There was a measure of finesse and clarity offered within the composition of ingredient one, obedience: certain slang words were non-negotiable, skipping church was unacceptable, and dating requirements were unbending. But the protocols did not always present the same way when mixing in ingredient two, respect. To further torture the baking metaphor, breaking a rule might alter the flavor or texture of our souffle, but disrespect would pierce it like a toothpick.
The Bible says if you spare the rod, you'll spoil the child, and his mother, my Nana, sure didn't spare him, not one bit. When you're little, you don't evaluate the rules; you just avoid the consequences. Maybe, I was performing simplistic benefit-to-risk analyses when confronted with the urge to rebel. I pushed back a bit, but not on principle.
I just wanted more.
Stealing, smoking in the bushes at school, having spiritually forbidden practices like seances in hidden places on my 5th grade school campus, and reading horoscopes... I learned what would happen when I pushed back. Grounding wasn't a thing when I was young. I would lose privileges, like television, but most of the time it would be spanking. Until I was a little bit older. My dad got creative when I was caught stealing ten bucks at my school: he designed a perfectly reasonable plan for me to earn back every cent of it by doing chores at home. 5 or 10 cents at a time, depending on the chore. (I fully support this as an adult who understands how powerless I feel when someone tries to steal my money, through fraud or a email scam.)
As I got older, the infractions weren't as visible to my mom and dad. But I still had parental voices in my head telling me what I could do and what I couldn't do, and what I would be judged for for all eternity. Yes ma'am, no sir.
Daddy's disciplinarian voice developed a persona, a life of its own, creating an imaginary authority figure, a flat character who existed only in my mind, and would never become fully developed within the storyline. His avatar, rigid and unbending, could never become as human as his vibrant origin self, and my origin self zipped me right up into a sheltering cocoon, driven to perform a fiction meant to emerge eternally pure. He was never so small as to shrink into that cocoon with me.
My father has remained fun loving and creative, paradoxically both bound to, and freed by, a permanent spiritual paradigm. But his heart is not rigid, and these days, he cries over the smallest things, sweet things, tender things. He lost his beloved wife and sweetheart 6 years ago when my mom's heart gave out. She had surrendered and softened so much over the years that she had become my favorite. My favorite listener, my favorite lap upon which to lay my head.
But in the years of my breaking, I kept my evolution, or fall from grace, to myself. I assumed that messy version of me would be rejected, talked down to, abandoned by my parents. By my father. Once you're beyond spanking, what's left? Exile?
Life bullied me around a bit, and my impulsiveness and lack of wisdom in general started to drive the bus. Compulsions. Addictions. I still wanted more. There might be people in my life who knew who I was and what I was going through; certainly I shared most everything with those closest to me.
But not my dad.
I couldn't let him down.
During the time when I packed my bags, and my children's bags, and moved away to another town while my husband and I were separated and were deciding what to do next, I nurtured an enduring friendship with a lovely, crisp Chardonnay, and leaned against the heat of my rented, brick fireplace, smoking and journaling, early in the morning, and off an on through the night.
Would we stay together, or would we separate? Could we heal, or was our life together too broken? It was, but we tried again. I was convinced it was all my fault. This is not a discussion one has with one's patriarchal evangelical father, but gradually, I started to let the cat out of the bag. I was headed in the general direction of going down the drain.
When I was 9 or 10, our beautiful German Shepherd Heidi had a fetish for tennis balls. I mean, it was an addiction, and throwing a tennis ball could elicit only one predictable outcome: she ran. Putting two and two together, it occurred to me that I could put my skates on, leash Heidi, and throw the tennis ball up the sidewalk five or six houses and enjoy the thrill ride. It would be an easy ride, too, until the sidewalk was going downhill and the tumble was uncontrollable.
In the 90's, my downhill spiral had picked up speed and I felt I couldn't slow it down. Velocity like that is hard to control; I plowed the tips of those unsteady skates toward each other and held on to my leash, and tried to hold myself together. Until I couldn't.
I settled into the notion that I would live alone for a while with the children, I got a job, and I tried to manage the undertow of swirling vortexes of loss with divorce papers waiting for a signature on my desk. Sometimes, uncharacteristically, I went out with friends to blow off some steam.
I went to a comedy club in the city one night, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes because we could do that back then, in clubs. After the show ended, and before we left our table, a local journalist was wandering around asking people questions about their lives and snapping pictures. I imagine now it must have been a style piece on nightlife offerings, but what I remember is that one of my friends betrayed me by telling the guy about my family members. "She's famous, you know." It sounded like a joke the way she said it, and it was.
All of the sudden, he wanted everything, my name, my details, why I was there by myself, and he wanted to know why I was in this small town, sitting at this table. He prodded, why had my father gone off the rails, wearing spiked leather and tattoos? (It was to promote a big band record he had just released called In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy). I laughed, and we spoke about my father’s sense of play, and his odd friendship with Alice Cooper.
Interviewer Christopher Hearne: What really has people buzzing is Boone’s still youthful persona and hunky bod.
Me: Don’t think that didn’t delight him to show his pecs on national TV. He’s in good shape. He’s a physically strong person and he takes care of his body. Always has.
Hearne: And the $64,000 question: Does he have any real tattoos?
Me: No, he does not. Unless he slipped one in on me in the last week or so. You never know with that guy.
This was the night I realized that I had begun to relax, to let go of the leash and let the skates take over. I felt gravity shift downhill, gliding almost easily, without a man in my life telling me what to do, and for some reason, I was still on my feet.
I had a conversation with my father, my hero and my favorite, later that week and I told him about my adventure. I told him about the picture in the article and that I hope he wouldn't be embarrassed. That, at the time, I may have been outed for smoking and drinking in public, and then, I said these words out loud: “I don't want to embarrass you, Daddy. I'm a Boone girl, but I'm a Boone girl who smokes and says shit."
Something like that.
On his end of the line, my father laughed, a little bit nervously, perhaps, and said, "Okay." Not in the sense that these descriptors were okay with him, or that it was okay that one of his children would behave in this way, but in the sense that even in my current messy, heartbroken state, he and I were deeply and always okay. Shockingly, okay.
Maybe because I’m retired from teaching and my children are adults, I've been able to spend a little more time in thought and meditation. There's some newly claimed space between my triggers and my reactions. I find myself to be so paranoid about what people think of me, or my writing, or my gray hair, or my older-lady-figure, that I can almost hear the recursive tape recording about what any person or family member is thinking. I have an internal response to those thoughts, like panic or fear or shame.
But here's the thing: with those few more seconds available to me as I age and practice awareness, I'm starting to realize that these people (my father, my family members, my friends, my readers) aren't feeling these things about me at all. I couldn't possibly know what these people are thinking, or feeling, about me unless they explicitly say so. The versions of them that live in my head - the voices of ridicule, the unpleasant evaluations of who I am and what I do - those messengers are fiction, made up replicas that I enable like a puppeteer. I am the man behind the curtain.
And my made-up replica of my father who lived for decades inside my mind alone, we're finished. Both of us have been replaced by real, living, flawed flesh and blood human beings. He’s still my favorite, and we're okay.
Impressive storytelling. On more than one level
Laury,
I promised I’d truly read your piece—and I did. Slowly, fully, openly. I let your words find their place in me.
What you shared goes far beyond storytelling. You didn’t just tell me about your father, or your childhood, or the weight of expectations—you invited me into the texture of it. The plaid of the kilt. The zigzag of the bangs. The ache of wanting more. I saw you, not just as a daughter, but as a person making her own map with a shaking hand, and still moving forward.
What stayed with me most was the image of your internal father—this flat, fixed figure you carried for years—and the quiet relief of realizing he doesn’t hold you there anymore. That moment when you told him you were a Boone girl who smokes and says “shit”—and his okay wasn’t approval, but something braver. Acceptance. Love without correction.
You wrote all of this with such care. No need to exaggerate or explain. You just let it be seen. And in doing that, I saw you. I really did.
Thank you for the depth you offered here. I’ll carry it with me.
Jay
P.S. Pat Boone is a name that even with me has rung a bell (I am German). I know my mother liked him better than Elvis, though she preferred dancing Rock & Roll with Bill Haley. That name, that era—it hovered somewhere in the background of my early life.