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Jul 13, 2006 - 11:43 AM |
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My dad. |
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So, since leaving for the United States at the age of two and a half, I had no memory of my father. I finally met him May 31st of this year, when he picked me up at the Guatemala International Airport. I knew that once my life restarted after nearly three years of prison and jail I´d have a whole new start, but it´s really been an entirely brand new life.
It´s really amazing how, although I had absolutely no relationship with him my entire life, we can be so much alike. (To basically sum it up, I was kidnapped and hidden from my father by my mother and taken to the U.S. back in ´84.) And even though he´s my father, I´m not going to sit here and put him on a platform, but he really is one of the, I´d say top five, most intelligent people I´ve ever met in my life. The man knows shit I wouldn´t have even thought about learning about, and the things I consider myself well versed in he can more than hang with me on. I´ve learned more in the month and a half I´ve spent with him than at any other point in my life.
So I´ve met six of my eight sisters, one´s in San Francisco and I´ll see her in September or so. They´re all college educated, he took good care of them. I have them, about fifteen nieces and nephews that I´ve met so far, and an aunt. I still have a lot more family to meet. Sadly, my only brother on my father´s side was killed back in 1991 at the age of 19.
I´m happy to have regained all this, a lot of what I felt inside as having always missed in my life without really knowing has been filled. Unfortunately, being the gloomy bastard I tend to be, it´s depressing because I´m constantly reminded now of what I´ve lost, and, most of all, what I could have been. And I can never regain that. Never.
So really I don´t know what the fuck I´m going to do with my life. At least I´m still relatively young. My two kids are in Las Vegas and I´m over here and how the hell am I going to help them? I always swore, growing up, I wouldn´t let any child of mine go fatherless the way I did, and now look.
When I die, I can only hope to be half the man my father is.
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