The Father's Mentorship

My pops has always been there. That's the first thing I have to say about him, because I don't think I appreciated it the right way until I got older. You don't always know what life is like without something when you've always had it. I've always had him.

Last Monday, on a random weekday in May, I sent him a long text. I told him I loved him. I thanked him for every mistake he'd made and every one he was going to make. I told him not everybody has a father figure and damn sure don't have him, because I have a one-of-one father. I didn't want to wait until Father's Day to say it. He wrote me back and called me his franchise player. Said if he was a general manager picking one, I'd be his pick. That's the kind of relationship we have. Two grown men. We talk.

We talk in the car. We talk on the phone. We talk waiting on the reservation to get called at dinner. We talk at football games and basketball games and family functions and on the August trip we've been taking together since 2015. He's the one I call when I'm in something I can't see my way out of, and he's the one I drive with when I just want to be somewhere with another man who knows me.

He's the reason I'm a leader.

When I was younger I used to complain about my friends always making me pick. Where we going. What we doing. I wanted to coast for once. I told him that. He told me to embrace it. He said if they keep putting you in that seat, that's trust, and you need to read it as a positive, not a burden. He talked leadership into me before I had the language for what he was doing. I'd hear it in the car, at dinner, in passing. Lectures I couldn't stand at the time. Lectures I grew to embrace. By the time I got to high school, college, every community group after that, I knew how to lead because he'd been pouring that into me for years.

I worked with him at his company, EL Plumbing and Mechanical. When he wasn't in his office, I'd sit in his chair behind his desk and tell myself one day all of this would be mine. He reinforced it too. On the rides to the office, on the rides to pick up a check, he'd talk about legacy. He'd tell me he was building it for me and my siblings. That image stayed with me longer than any speech. He's also the reason I think two or three steps ahead, and the way he taught me wasn't a lecture. It was a question. Anytime I came to him with something, even when I just wanted to vent, he'd let me vent, and then he'd say: okay, what's the plan. Every time. What's the plan. What's the plan. After enough years of that, I never showed up to him without one, and eventually I stopped showing up to anything in my life without one.

He also held court. That's a piece I haven't heard another man describe the way my pops did it. When we got in trouble as kids, he didn't just react. He made you state your case. He let you explain how you got there. Then he handed down the consequence. Sometimes that was a whooping. Sometimes it was a book to read. Sometimes it was an essay. Sometimes it was a lecture. And when it was a whooping, he'd tell you straight up: I'm not chasing you, I'm not running after you. Stay there, give me what I want, and you're fine. Patient even in the discipline. I didn't know it then, but he was teaching me due process. He was teaching me to hear people out before I made a decision. I run rooms today that work the same way.

He's coached me through things. Eviction. A court case I had to walk through. Disagreements at jobs. Relationships I didn't handle right. He'd play devil's advocate and make me look at it from the other side. He never stayed disappointed in me long. As the head of the family, there are people who disappoint him way more than I ever could, and he carries that. So when it came to me, he'd let me know if I was off, sometimes by drawing a line, but he didn't linger. After my first year of college didn't go well, he told me he wasn't funding the party anymore. I told him cool, I'd figure it out. I did. He let me figure it out. That was the lesson.

What I kept from him is patience. The instinct to take care of people, to pick up the check, to make a room feel good. The love of a live game. The discipline to be the man who actually does what he said he'd do.

What I'm doing differently is the family timeline. He had me young. He never got to know what twenty-something years of being a grown man with no kids and no baggage actually feels like. I do. He reminds me to enjoy it. He tells me to live what he didn't get to live. That's the kind of father who gives instead of takes.

He also watched what holding the truth wrong did to the men in our family, and I watched too. That's why I'm honest with the women in my life now. I saw the cost of bending it. I decided not to pay that bill.

When people meet him in the world, they tell me, "Man, your dad is solid. Your dad is cool." That carries weight. A man whose word means something to people he doesn't even need anything from. I learned that from him too. If he says he's going to do it, it gets done. He's the reason I built my life on the same code.

He's the only parent I have left. I cherish him with everything I've got. And watching him pour into my little brother now reminds me that the way he raised me wasn't a moment in time. It's who he is.

I'm still learning from him.

Still his franchise player.