On Father's Day

Thoughts on Mortality from a Son to a Father

Alan Kennedy Borse—15 June 1934-27 September 2013:

A Remembrance by a Son

Vigil Service with Vespers

St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church

Alice, Texas

2 October 2013

remarks by Gregory Alan Borse

I am Gregory—Al and Diana’s eldest son. (Adjusting the microphone) I am also the shortest.

Thank you for coming here to remember my father tonight. If you ever showed a kindness to my father in this life, thank you. If my father ever harmed you in anyway, please forgive him. If my father ever showed you a kindness, thank you for helping him to be the man he was made to be.

That you are here tonight means that there is not much I could tell you about my father that you probably don’t already know.

We are a story-telling family. We got that from our father. In fact, we tell so many stories that I sometimes lose track of which ones I’ve already told six times. I try to pay attention to my children’s eye-rolls to signal that they have heard one or another story too many times. So, if you have heard this story, I hope you will forgive my sharing it one last time.

The story I want to tell is one I never told to Dad. I hope, in the end, you will understand why.

As many of you may know, there was a period in my Mom and Dad’s life when they lost just about everything that the material world values the most. My father’s business failed. My sister Cindy, who worked for him, lost her job. My Dad lost his source of income and my family lost their home. In fact, they would have been homeless were it not for the generosity of a truly great man here in Alice, Arnoldo Salinas, who gave them a place to stay—a little house about 10 miles north of town, just off of highway 281. Two little rooms with no heat or running water. Just electricity. No bathroom. Just enough room for two sets of bunk-beds and my parents’ bed, a table to eat on, and cabinets for dishes and stores of food. My mother hung shelves for books. Clothes were kept in laundry baskets on the floor. There was just enough room for a refrigerator. My mother had to haul water every day for cleaning dishes and bathing the little ones in a little pool outside. The family had to use an open-air chemical toilet my Dad set up for the family amongst the Mesquite trees and yucca. They had to burn their trash. Since there was electricity, they were able to plug a dryer up on a little porch. My mom did the wash at a laundry-mat in town and then brought wet clothes home to dry. My sisters Cindy and Laura, and I, had already moved out of the house—but Sarah, Chris, Rob, Linda, Emily, and Katy lived with my parents this way for several years.

I was a freshman in college when this first happened and I wanted to quit school and come home to help the family. But my parents wouldn’t let me. My mother wrote me a letter explaining why they didn’t want me to come home—and, Mom, I’ll never forget this line from that letter. You wrote, “With everything falling down about our ears, we have discovered that no one can take away from us anything that really matters. Stay in school. It’s where you belong.”

And it was true. And so I did.

Despite the hardships, my father continued to provide for the family in any way he could. He made money through consulting work that he did with clients as far away as San Antonio. For a rather lengthy period, I knew that he was traveling each Monday morning to San Antonio, working all week there, and then returning late Friday nights to spend Saturday and Sunday with his family in that little shack they called a home. Then he’d travel back to San Antonio and do it all over again. Week after week. Month after month. For several years.

I thought that I understood the kinds of hardships my mom and dad and my younger brothers and sisters were facing. And I was amazed and inspired by how happy they all were despite their circumstances. But I never really thought about what life was like for my Dad during those times—I mean, for him as a man.

When I would travel home from college to visit during this time, I would get myself to wherever my Dad was working so that I could make the two and a half hour drive with him from San Antonio to Alice. I did this because I cherished the time alone I got to spend with him. It was during these trips that I would ask his advice and tell him my stories and listen to his.

Once, when I arrived at a business for which he was doing computer programming, I had to wait for several hours before we could leave. While he worked, I found a place to read a few of the books I’d brought with me from school. At one point, I asked him to direct me to the bathroom but then didn’t really pay attention to what he said. As a result, I went down a hallway and opened a door I thought was the bathroom and found myself in a utility closet. I began to back out when something behind some stainless steel shelves caught my eye. So, I stepped back into the room to peer behind the shelves.

In the corner, behind the shelves, I saw a rolled up piece of foam on the floor. And a pillow. A neatly folded sheet and a thin blanket lay nearby. A few of my father’s nicely pressed shirts were hung from the back of the steel shelves. There was a suitcase and Dop kit with toiletries and an alarm clock on the floor.

I stood there for a moment trying to understand what it was I was looking at.

Then I had a kind of epiphany.

After a long moment, I slowly backed out of that little room and shut the door.

I didn’t say anything to my Dad about what I saw that day. Nor did I ever mention it to him in the long years since.

Over the years I have thought a lot about all the things my father taught me—especially during those car rides home from San Antonio. But I have returned perhaps most often—and most often in moments of crisis or failure—to what my father taught me in that little room in that business on the second floor of a strip mall in some anonymous neighborhood in San Antonio, Texas. I have struggled for years to articulate for myself what my father taught me in that little room that day.

But now I can finally say it:

I cannot tell you what a Man is—but he keeps his promises.

Thanks, Dad.