With awe, even now: Yeah, that’s my dad

Last week, a woman asked me, “Are you related to Charlie Clack?”

“Which one?” I asked.

“He worked for the Sheriff ’s Department.”

“That’s my father,” I said with pride.

The woman’s brother had also been a Bexar County sheriff’s deputy and was good friends with my father, and, she says, talked about him often.

She tiptoed around the inevitable question, “Ah, is Charlie …”

“He passed away, five years, ago,” I answered. “But, yeah, he’s my Dad.”

On Mothers’ Day, I wrote that in the neighborhood where I grew up, there were, with two exceptions, no fathers because of divorce, death or desertion.

My parents divorced when I was 4 or 5, and Dad, after leaving the sheriff ’s office where he was the first Black investigator, spent most of the rest of his life living and working outside San Antonio, including when he was a DEA agent. So we didn’t have a lot of memorable moments together.

Dad apologized to me, more than once, for not being around during those years. It was an apology not asked for but appreciated.

But one memory that has never faded is from a morning when I was in kindergarten at Carmelite Learning Center. We were playing outside when striding up the sidewalk to the gate came Dad in his sheriff ’s deputy uniform — khaki pants, long-sleeve light blue shirt, tie, white Stetson hat and a holster with a gun. I can still see him opening the gate, making sure it closed, then walking toward me.

I’d left home without something, and he was bringing it to me.

The playground went silent except for the “Oohs” and “Awws.” I think it was the first time we, as children, experienced awe. Because everyone now knew this was my daddy, it was the first time I felt pride. After he squatted to give me whatever it was I forgot and kissed me on the forehead, he left, and some of the kids followed him to the gate, watching as he got in his squad car. Others gathered around me and transferred their awe to me.

If kindergarten had a bar, I wouldn’t have had to buy a drink all year.

Dad told me he learned of the Beatles because I went around the house saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” At that same time, through Dad, I fell in love with Muhammad Ali, the first person I became aware of outside of my family. We’d spend hours, and then decades, retelling Ali stories and reliving his fights.

On the night of June 3, 2016, I called Dad in Houston to tell him Ali was dying. Dad had just been released from the hospital, was in pain and hadn’t heard about Ali’s condition.

“Don’t tell me that, son,” he said before going to bed.

A couple days later, he was readmitted to the hospital, then to a rehab facility where he passed away that November. Of all the regrets of things said and not said, of visits not made or left too short because of my impatience, one of them is that we didn’t get to talk about Ali one last time. Or talk in depth about anything.

I never lived a day doubting my father’s love for me and hope he never doubted my love for him, but I didn’t visit or talk to my father in the three months before he passed because I took his presence for granted.

Sons spend lifetimes in consideration of their fathers, trying to understand them and navigate the roads leading to their approval or away from their disappointment.

Because fathers are often their sons’ first heroes, they are also their sons’ first lessons that heroes are flawed.

Those lessons can quicken harsh and bitter judgments that are tempered with time, maturity and the sons becoming aware of their own imperfections and the clay of which their own feet are made.

A son’s consideration of his father doesn’t stop when his father leaves this world, nor do unresolved issues disappear.

But deeper and stronger grows the admiration and love, and the gratitude, that you were blessed with such a life as his to consider.

Charles Edward Clack Jr. Yeah, he’s my dad.

Courtesy photo Charles Edward Clack Jr. later apologized for not being around much during his son’s early years. Yet his love was never in doubt.