Enjoying new time with my father

My dad used to live somewhere else. I didn't come home after school in 7th grade and wait for my mother and father to get home. It was only my mother who came home. In 96 he moved to Venezuala to work for some oil company. It was not a very complicated situation from my perspective. He lived overseas and worked, and every few weeks we'd get a paycheck.

This was my life for 10 years.

My father would come home a few months out of the year, and it was just enough to maintain a positive relationship with him. We (my brother or I) never became alienated from him because we knew that he'd be coming home, and we'd get to catch up and have a good time while he was around. Then he would leave and life would go back to normal.

So early this year he decides to give up this job. The details of him quitting are a whole other story, and I don't know enough about it to explain it. He was now home for good. His presence has been really cool. I get to wake up now and say 'hey' and sometimes he makes me breakfast. He's like a cool roommate. There are times when he's more like a dad than like a friend, but those moments are necessary and they dont occur often. Just this evening we went out for Sonic fast food, and he told me stories about guys who worked overseas or offshore and the worry that kind of work caused them. He explained that they would all line up to use the phone on the rig to call their girlfriends and wives. He recalled how his good friend's wife was living with another man in the house they had purchased together, and how mad his friend got. The guy asked him to "help hide the body after he killed his wife." He laughed and told me he responded with "We're close friends, but not that close!"

This post has evolved into something interesting, because I used to think about my mother or father ever wondering about each other's faithfulness to each other. I know my mom was faithful, and have a good feeling that my dad was too.

As my Sociology professor says, "I'm done."