Published in the June 8 – 21, 2016 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Marty Cheek
Photo courtesy Marty Cheek
Marty Cheek and his father Raymond practice the violin in their Hollister home.
Father’s Day is always for me a bittersweet day of remembrance. There have been years when on that Sunday in June I’d drive down to the I.O.O.F. Cemetery in Hollister and put flowers on my dad’s grave and recall the old man who shaped my early life as a child and teenager. I’d stare down on the stone marker and wonder what he might think of how his son turned out.
Like most parent-child relationships, ours was a complex one of discipline and love. We were never “buddies” like I saw with my friends and their dads. Some people said he was often harsh on me in his discipline. But I always took it that he wanted me to grow up into a man he could be proud of.
He was 55 years old when I was born and so people often thought I was his grandson. When he was 67 and I was 13, he had a major stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body and damaged much of his brain. Suddenly, the roles were reversed between us. The son needed to care for the father.
He lived on for nearly a full five years, but at the end of 1984, we all knew he was dying. That year he would see his last Christmas. He suffered a series of heart attacks and spent days in Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital’s intensive care. I brought him Poinsettias one afternoon and we talked about his life and memories of his own childhood and growing up on his family’s ranch in the Central Valley. And then I went home and turned on the TV that evening to watch the Christopher Reeves version of “Superman” on the ABC Sunday Night Movie.
There’s a scene where Clark Kent has just been bullied by high school football jocks. Frustrated, he runs home super fast from school and meets his father Jonathan Clark at the dirt road leading up to their small farm. Played by the actor Glenn Ford, the old farmer puts his arm around Clark and gives him some fatherly advice: “There’s one thing I do know, son, and you are here for a reason. I don’t know whose reason, whatever the reason is, maybe it’s because… I don’t know. But I do know one thing. It’s not to score touchdowns.” Immediately after these last words of wisdom given to his son, Jonathan Clark grabs his arm and collapses from a fatal heart attack.
That scene from the movie hit me hard when I first watched it as an 18 year old and was contemplating what I was going to do and who I was going to be when I finished high school and moved on to the next stage of my life.
Ten days into the new year, my dad died. I learned about it when I came home from high school. The news hit me hard. I met my mom at the hospital and she told me to go into the intensive care room to say my goodbyes. Alone, looking at his body laying cold on the bed, I heard the theme from the “Superman” music start playing in my mind. I smiled and thought about Clark Kent coming home from high school and starting his own journey to save the world after losing his father. “Mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet,” I said, and started laughing and crying at the same time.
I had never skipped a day of high school before, but the next morning I asked my mom if she would call the principal and say I wasn’t coming in. I needed some time alone to think and deal with dad’s death. It was a crisp winter morning when I got into the family’s Dodge Omni and started driving, just driving, not having a destination in mind. I found myself heading on a road through the heart of San Benito County ranch country. There was the sign for the Pinnacles National Monument and I realized I had never visited that rugged wilderness park before so maybe now was the time discover it.
Scenes from the movie “Superman” kept going through my head as I hiked. I went through the rock caves to the Bear Gulch Reservoir, and from there climbed up the trail through otherworldly geological formations of the towering needle-like peaks formed by molten lava poured from a volcano millions of years ago. I imagined myself like Superman, somehow exploring his home world of Krypton. I had the park all to myself that day. I considered that hike the “Fortress of Solitude” moment of my life, a time to be alone and figure things out.
When I came home after an intense day of trekking in the Pinnacles wilderness, I walked through the front door into a stark quiet house and felt a particular feeling.
That day I had somehow dramatically changed as a person. My boyhood was now over.
It was time to figure out what might be the reason for me to be on this planet. I didn’t know what it might be, but I was pretty sure my dad would have told me it was not to score touchdowns.
