The Laughter and the Tears

Edward J. Dodson

What follows came to me in a dream sometime during 1967. For reasons that have no easy explanation, I awoke, found paper and pen and wrote down what I dreamed before it would have surely been lost to me. I leave it to each reader to decide for yourself whether this holds dark humor or has a deeper psychological meaning.

A young man in his early twenties steps to the podium to deliver a speech on an unannounced subject. His fellow students are restless and not particularly attentive, but his initial words catch their attention.

"I would like to dedicate this award to someone neither I nor any of you know -- my father.

"Sadly, my father could not be here today. My father has no arms. He was seriously wounded in the war.

"Having no arms would not have kept my father from being here today. But, sadly, my father has no legs. He was seriously wounded in the war.

"Having no arms and no legs would not have kept my father from being here today. But, sadly, my father has no body. He was seriously wounded in the war.

"Having no arms and no legs and no body would not have kept by father from being here today. But, you see, I really don't have much of a father."

The above story came out of one of those strange events we cannot explain and never really fully understand. These experiences are, I suspect, loosely associated with our day-to-day realities. My relationship with my father was never a close one. He was not a person I could easily talk to. He had a very quick temper and not much patience with his children. Why he was such a difficult person to make contact with no one seemed to know. His own childhood had been unusual, in that his mother spent most of her adult life engaged in court battles to recover a lost family fortune. His father was a small-time homebuilder; however, during the Great Depression the family either purchased or leased a farm for a few years. At some point they abandoned farming and moved back to the Pittsburgh area to resume work in the building trades. In 1942 my father enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corp. and fought overseas against the Japanese. He never talked about his military service, but I always suspected that something affected him even though he had not been wounded. He did suffer a partial loss of his hearing, which caused him great frustration as an older man.

There were times in my youth when all I wished for was to get away from my father. As I became a man, I came to realize that he had taken on more responsibility in life than he was emotionally prepared for. I suspect he felt trapped with no way out. He and my mother had five children, and periodically during the nineteen years I remained with my parents, they experienced the kind of financial pressures that many U.S. working-class families experienced.

I suspect also that the times had something to do with this dream. The United States was in the midst of the anti-communist crusade and the war in Southeast Asia. People my age were being drafted into the military and then sent to fight in Vietnam, a war that seemed to me to be mostly about the preservation of Old World imperialism and monopolistic control over access to natural resources than about bringing liberty to the people of the region.

In any event, at the time one of my college courses was on public speaking. So, I decided to deliver this short message to my classmates. Would they feel something? Would they get the punch line? I spoke the lines slowly. Looking out over the audience, I saw tears in the eyes of a few of my female classmates. And, then, my final lines came. There was silence in the room. I glanced at my professor; the look on her face was hard to describe. And, then, from two or three of my male friends came ... laughter. They got the joke. They understood the irony.