Father’s Day 2009

This time four years ago, my natural father Robert “Jay” Jaycox had been dead for nearly five weeks. He was sixty-six years old and his death was completely unexpected and a terrible shock. I was looking forward to seeing him at my June 25 wedding that year, but he departed this world on May 18, 2005.

For the past year or so I’ve been working on a memoir that is largely about his absence and what it meant to me as a boy, and as a maturing boy struggling to become a man. You see, he was absent when I was a boy – he left the family shortly before I turned three – and, he is (of course) absent now. Taken from us as we will all eventually be taken from our loved ones.

We were in touch to one degree or another for twenty-seven years, from the time I tracked him down in Puerto Rico at the age of fourteen to his untimely death when I was forty-one. I last saw him in 1998 when I took a wonderful cross-country trip to see him in Oklahoma City, a dear friend in Los Angeles, and to celebrate my grandfather’s eightieth birthday in San Jose. He’s gone now, too.

I spent far too many years of my life identifying myself as a “fatherless child.” I had been abandoned. Left. I searched for surrogates, replacements, men who could provide what I felt I got neither from my natural father nor from my adoptive father. You never really find it. It finds you. If you’re lucky. And, I was. I am.

Both of my fathers gave me more than I’ve ever given them credit for I suppose.

From my adoptive father, the Rev. John A. Russell, I learned much about theatricality and storytelling, even if it was never his intention to pass those lessons along. But watching him (and serving alongside him) conducting church services provided lessons in theater and storytelling. Listening to his sermons taught me the power of words, of ideas to move people and to inspire change.

As for Jay, he taught me about loving people. Jay was a “people person” big-time. When I first “met” him, he was a sales manager for the Icee drink franchise in Puerto Rico. One summer he took my brother Scott and me on his customer calls and I will never forget how people greeted him when he walked into a store. Jay knew everybody’s names, and the names of their spouses and children. He remembered if someone had been ill or if a kid had broken his arm a few weeks earlier and he would ask how the boy was doing.

So to Jay, to Dad, to Grandpa, and to Paul Donnelley, Richard Pearlman, Mike Degnan, Paul Hauser, John Wulp, Bob Moss, and all the other surrogates who have “fathered” me over the years, Happy Father’s Day, and many, many thanks.

Namaste.