Dad

So a reckoning begins.

On the plane to Mexico, I finally cracked my father’s book. I inhaled all but the final chapter in the 4 hours between Dallas and Oaxaca. I saved the last bit to read at the end of my trip.

A few days after I arrived, I sought out someone who might know more about his life and death, and hopefully learn whether there was a place I could go specifically to pay my respects. He’d died in 2020 and neither of us had taken the opportunity to reconcile after a one-night encounter when my daughter was four. Now, I was allowing myself what I thought would be enough emotional distance to finally read this collection of short stories he’d published: a lightly fictionalized, largely autobiographical account of his time in Vietnam, 3rd Battalion, 9th Marines. Three years, two tours, 21 months active duty in country. I’m so glad I did. Our parting back in 1989 was documented briefly but accurately well into the book — when I said to him, upon his telling me he was moving to Mexico, “well, have a nice life.”

Girl, ouch.

I stopped by the Oaxaca Lending Library where I’d heard he’d dedicated so much of his time and left a note with the receptionist that if anyone wanted to contact me about Tom, I’d be in town for a few more days. An email arrived the next morning: an expat Brit named Kevin would tell me what he could. We met at a cafe, and he shared what little he knew, despite sitting across from Tom for three years, the two of them reviewing and cataloging books. “Your dad was a complicated man… hard to know… an icon of the library…superior intelligence…serious and deeply private. Ornery. Obnoxious. Also: could be very funny. Generous — had a totally different side to him I’d heard about, but hadn’t seen for myself.”

I regretted not taking better notes like a good reporter would. But I was entranced by his descriptions. I couldn’t reach for a pen. So private. Till the end. Even Kevin didn’t know that Tom had been suffering with throat cancer for years until after his death.

All of it tracks. I’m not sure if I was relieved his personality on the other side of the world stayed exactly the same as I remember, or saddened by that, but I was struck by a persistent feeling of wanting to hold him in my arms and stroke his hair while Kevin spoke.

Oh, Dad’s book is a beauty, by the way. Heartbreaking, visceral, haunting. Honest and yet, as always, resting in that liminal space he always inhabited: unsure of his own recollections as fact or fictions he’d honed his whole life.

I feel good about reading it. And asking after him. Life is short.

I feel sad that, though he seemed to have found a measure of peace and even joy in his adopted country, he still struggled internally; so tightly wound, brittle. Such is the grip of unexamined anxiety, passed down to eventually grip his grandchild. I feel grateful he was loved and admired, but also that he continued to confound and frustrate more people than just me.

On a remote beach on our last days, I sat in the blazing sun and read the final chapter of his book. It read far more autobiographical in that he seemed to be summoning memories that he no longer needed to embellish or invent names, rather he was firmly establishing a memory from Vietnam so that he could provide someone who’d asked him to contribute to book about Vietnam vets, an accurate accounting of something, anything that came to him.

One memory is of his first and sounds like only, visit to a prostitute. Told exquisitely tenderly. It’s long. Every detail minus any “act” rendered in all its minutiae. At last, he’s standing at a balcony in a room overlooking the mountains in the distance of Da’Nang, Sonny Rollins emanating from somewhere in the room. He’s all of 20 years old. At that point, early in his first tour he had yet to see terribleness of what was to come. Spread out before him he could already see a movie ending exactly as it felt in that moment. Perhaps decades and decades later, he got the ending he envisioned.

The road home was its own kind of obstacle course — blockades, language gaps, airport disorder. I summoned my Dad into all of it. I believe he showed up. We returned home safe.

Lo que tienes es esto.

March 21, 2026

Oaxaca, 2026

Dad’s bio

Dad right after returning home from the war