My grandfather had five children: two daughters and three sons. My father was his second son; if you recall from the previous chapter, he thought something important would come through his second son. While I will not give you my father’s name, he is named after one of the archangels and a priest of the Jewish faith. My father was a typical man of the time, born in the 60s; my father wouldn’t have lived in a world with a lot of technology. So, he was the father who would tell us to put on multiple layers to fight against the cold instead of turning up the heat.
In fact, for the longest time, my father was technologically deficient. I remember when my parents got me my first Nintendo gaming system. He could not figure out what was so appealing about it or how to work it. I remember playing Legend of Zelda, beating a boss, and getting excited. My father was looking at me and wondering how I could be so enthusiastic about something mundane. I told him that playing a game was like reading a book but getting much more into it because you were visualizing the things going on instead of imagining them. But he never really got it.
This was, of course, until I brought StarCraft home for the PC. I didn’t know what it was about that game, but my father could not stop playing it. He loved setting up bases with the Terrains and finding ways to defend from outside forces. I think it had something to do with his love for army men when he was a child and the elaborate scenarios he would set up with his younger brother. The thing my father loved to do was create multiple nuclear silos and then send ghosts into bases and nuke the base down. I don’t know why that brought him so much joy, but it did. There was this one mission where you had to protect the Zerg from the Protoss, and when you finished the mission, the Zerg rushed your base and destroyed it. Somehow, he figured out a defense wall so that the Zerg didn’t touch his base at all at the end of the mission.
My father met my mother in high school, and he stated he instantly fell in love with her when he attended his brother’s graduation ceremony and saw her cross-stage to get her diploma. It was as if they were created for each other; they complimented each other’s faults and made each other better people just for being around each other. My father would ask my grandmother for permission to marry my mother shortly after they got together, and initially, my grandmother said no. This was not because she didn’t like him, although there might have been some of that thought in there, but she didn’t want to give up her daughter, hoping to keep her in her home forever. My grandmother was paranoid and had some mental issues after my maternal grandfather died when my mom was six years old due to an accident at a steel mill. This worked in my father’s favor, as she would receive a notice from somewhere one day. The detail is a bit murky, but it would somehow convince my grandmother that she could no longer afford to live in a house with both her and my mother, so my father told her that he would get married to her to take the burden off of her hands, and she agreed.
My parents were married in June 1983, my mother being 20 and my father being 23. They were only married for about a year and a half before I was born. My father would, in front of my friends, describe my birth as a mistake, although he didn’t quite mean it that way. My father didn’t always have the firmest grasp of words, sometimes contrary to what some may think. What he meant to say was that I was unplanned and that he wanted to have me later in life. Still, contraception wasn’t as good as it was today, so he ended up having me a lot sooner than he thought he would.
Around this time, something that happens to my father is essential to the story. My father had to sleep on his bed backward, with his feet pointing to the headrest. I asked him why he did this, and he told me it was due to two things. One, when he was a child, he had seen the movie Poltergeist. The scene where the clown grabs and pulls him under the bed terrifies him, causing him to think something might grab his feet and pull him under the bed. But the second thing was, in the weeks and months between my conception and my birth, my father would start to have dreams. In the dreams, he would be confronted by dark creatures that he described as being “all fangs and claws.” Every night, he would have these dreams where they would grab him and pull him under the bed. My father had no idea what to make of it, but they stopped when I was born. This is something that I have thought about for a long time. Was something sinister trying to prevent me from being born? It was always interesting that these things started and ended in the months leading up to my birth. Of course, it could be a coincidence, but I have never been a person who believes in coincidence.
My father’s story intertwines with mine. I often think my story is just as much his story as mine. As I continue, you will see him show up a lot in this story.
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