In April 1996, I received a phone call from a TTY telephone operator.

She introduced herself and asked if I had ever worked with someone like her.

“No,” I replied.

“On the other end of this line is someone hearing-impaired,” she explained. “When she wants to call someone, she contacts me and then types what she wants to say into a device. It then appears on a screen in front of me. I’ll read it to you. You reply to me. I type it back. It’s a slow process but it allows her to ‘talk’ to you. Ready?”

“Yes,” I replied hesitantly.

She then — in a stilted, halting manner — read the words as they traipsed across her screen. Not waiting for full sentences to appear, she pronounced each syllable as it materialized, like someone reading a news crawler on the bottom of the TV screen; with the caveat being that the text was scrolling too slowly. Not only was it a sluggish process, it was eerie, and unnerving.

“My… name… is… Mary…” read the operator. “I’m… sorry… to… tell… you… that… your… father… has… passed… away…”

Some background is in order.

Over the nine years I’ve been publishing this weekly column, I have written about my wife, mother, children, grandmother, aunts; even my pets. However, there’s a glaring omission: my father.

Obviously, I had one; and yes, I knew him. However, we didn’t get along and my rebellion manifested itself as me growing up to be his polar opposite. Over the years, I invested a great deal in therapy to release myself from the behaviorial bonds that I felt shackled me to a person I did not want to be.

Fathers and sons have had differing viewpoints since Adam and Abel.

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