Patrick Says

Went to Wendy’s last week for lunch. I got a big order for the office and brought it back. It was short one chili, one salad and the soda was root beer instead of the Diet Coke I requested. Listen, and this is for you working the window. I know that if you’re working at Wendy’s, maybe your life didn’t turn out the way you expected. Heck, I was supposed to be Bill Gates. Didn’t work out that way.

But could you possibly, just one friggin’ time, get my order CORRECT! Maybe, just maybe, if you actually acted like you gave a crap about my food order, you might someday have a shot at management. Here’s a couple words you should go ahead and add to your arsenal: ‘thank you’, ‘have a nice day’ and occasionally ‘I’M SORRY I MESSED UP YOUR ORDER, SIR’.

Dear Pat,

I hope this letter finds you well. There are a lot of things I would like to have told you before you died, but mostly I would just have liked to ask some questions.

• Why weren’t you around more than a couple weekends a month?
• Why couldn’t you and my mom actually get together and be a family?
• Do you have any idea how many times I played alone in the attic with my Star Wars figures when I really wanted to go play catch outside with anybody?
• Do you have any idea what it’s like to find out six years after the last time I saw you that you had died some four years earlier and to have no idea what you died of?
• Do I have a whole side of my family that I don’t even know and who probably don’t know about me? Do they see my name in the phone book and wonder who this guy is who has the same name as you?

I have a son; maybe you’ve seen him. He’s getting older and he’s starting to look to me for guidance. And I have no idea what to do. Maybe if you had been there to show me what a dad actually does, I wouldn’t be the screwed-up adult I am now. I needed you, dammit. I was a kid, why couldn’t you and Mom figure out that it wasn’t about you two? It was about raising this little boy. Mom tried her best. Being the last of six children, she was tired.

I’m not writing this to whine. I don’t have the time for that. I am who I am and I deal with that as it is. I just wanted to say some things that I’ve carried around all my life. I have these fond childhood memories of you I think are so much more extensive than they actually are. I’d throw every memory of you away just for one minute for you to actually acknowledge that I was your son and you were proud of me. I won’t make that mistake with my boy. He’ll know. That’s all I got.

Patrick

[Note to the rest of you... I originally wrote this letter on the 12th of December. I posted it for three hours and then unposted it. I felt I was giving too much to the blog. After considering it, I realized that putting this here will actually help me work through some personal issues. (A point I think Lisa made on her blog.) Welcome to the new hardcore blog. I'll try to lighten the next post.]