Authors note: Moms are so very important, and I love mine very much.
Growing up isn’t easy, but it comes with a greater level of difficulty when your name is Barry. You’ll have to take my word for it. It’s not a smooth title. Unique, a hint weird, and a wee bit “uncle-ish,” the Barry name can put you into some awkward spots during adolescence. Girls were never hip to it. Guys teased me at times, calling me Larry or Harry, only because those names rhyme and are (somehow) equally rough on a kid.
Imagine if Paul Newman had been Cool Hand Barry. What if Mark Hamill played Barry Skywalker instead of Luke? See what I mean? It doesn’t work. Barry Gump? (Eh, maybe.)
As a result, I always felt out of place as a kid. I know it had much more to do with who I am as a person rather than my name, but fortunately, I always had someone in my life that I could partner up with to face the challenges of the world. There’s always been another Barry.
If you don’t know, my father was Barry Aruda long before I was even a gleam in someone’s eye, though I’m not sure I was ever a gleam? ‘Worrisome flicker in someone’s eye’ seems more accurate.
But it was November 23, 1955 when my father was shoved into this crazy world. Yeah, you’re probably thinking, “Mid-fifties? Those were great times!” Well, you’re partially correct. It was 1955 when Kermit the Frog was created, but it was also that same year that the United States decided to start producing intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads. Way to go, country.
My father was born the second youngest of four siblings, but I don’t know much about his childhood, believe it or not. I know my Uncle Wayne fancied himself a scientist and that my father was always watching his older brother blow stuff up, but outside of that, I’m not well educated on what life was like in Wilmington, Massachusetts in the mid-to-late 1950’s. Luckily, that’s not what I’m here to talk about.
Let me pull this back together.
I’m the child of divorced parents. When that split took place, my father moved from North Andover to Lawrence for a brief stint, before packing up and heading to a little town in Maine in 1986. I was five years old. It took another decade before I became upset about the move, crying on the phone and asking him why he had to move so far away from his only child. He didn’t deserve that—I was just raging with hormones and developing into something of a man. Couldn’t help myself.
What’s interesting about the Maine move, is that it actually impacted my life in a positive way. I was not so much spoiled at home in Massachusetts, as much as I was sort of left on my own to run wild in the neighborhood, causing havoc for my friend’s parents. And while that was all well and good, I did need to figure out that life isn’t all about being a menace—at least not full time. My summers in Maine started off sort of lonely—just Dad and I sitting around the house, or maybe playing on the tire-swing. He’d fling me around and laugh like an insane person. All the while, I would scream, convinced that I would surely die up there among the willow branches.
It was soon thereafter that my father developed another little family in the tiny podunk town, and maybe this article should pay some credence to them as well—if not only for their kindness toward me, but for the way they affected my father, helping him grow as a person, provider, and a man. Dad may not have taught me how to split wood, relight the pilot on a furnace, or how to play sports without looking like an asshole, but he did one better: he went about his business with confidence, focus, and care, allowing each of us to observe him in both his good times and bad.
I remember one particular morning when Dad was very grumpy. He was making breakfast for us kids—frying bacon and eggs, toasting four slices of bread at a time, and crushing oranges for juice, right in his tight fist. I sat at the breakfast bar waiting (somewhat impatiently) and repeatedly called out to him, saying “Dad” over and over, for reasons I don’t know. A minute or so went by as my old man continued his demolishing of the juicy oranges, and then something unexpected and violent happened. He snapped, pounding his fist into the counter and barking, asking me what the problem was. I asked him why he was angry and he proclaimed (equally loud), “I’m hungover!”
I didn’t know what hungover meant at the time, or why it would make someone so grumpy, but the memory has stuck with me through the years. I own a house now, though I am not a father (yet?), and I think about my best days and those other days when I’m not so strong—sometimes thinking back on that morning with Dad in the kitchen. He wasn’t perfect, but he always, always, always did what he needed to do in order to make sure us kids were taken care of. He broke his back long hours driving a truck and working in the warehouse. He kept the house upright and bright, and he made breakfast all the time—damn good breakfasts at that.
The man let me fail when I needed to fail. He gave me support over the phone when my grades sucked, and when he shoveled the dead cat off the pavement in front of his house as I watched from the bushes in hiding, he silently taught me that life wasn’t perfect. It’s a lesson as beautiful as it is ghastly. We are the things we aspire to be, even if those dreams are, in reality, delusions. Maybe he could’ve been a better father, and I sure as hell could’ve been a better son. We all could be better.
I’m thankful he’s always wanted to do everything for me, and continues with that desire to this day. The impossibility of parenthood is difficult to imagine when you don’t have a child of your own. That being said, I still know it starts and ends with love. I’ve never known a man with more of it inside his every inch.
Tell your Dad how much you love him this Thanksgiving. And hug your mother tightly as well.