A Father By My Name

J – Jennifer Juniper

I’m named after the song by Donovan, Jennifer Juniper, that came out the year I was born---a testament to the symbiotic relationship my father had with music. It started at twelve when he earned a drum set by cleaning out the coal furnace in the basement, then formed a band. The neighborhood kids eagerly bought tickets to their lawn concerts.

E – Emily Anne

My mother, thinking Jennifer Juniper sounded “too hippie-ish,” wanted to name me Emily Anne. Naming me Jennifer Anne, my father said, was the one compromise of their brief marriage.

But I go by Jennifer Juniper because I am my father’s daughter. I have his passion for words, his green eyes, long legs and his olive skin--like a Crayola crayon called Eternal Tan.

N – Notch

Blood rivered down his knuckles. This didn’t usually happen when my parents fought and it’s not what scared me most. It was the guitar slung across his back that said he was really leaving.

The notch where he’d punched their bedroom door greeted me whenever I came out of my room. To my four-year-old eyes, it looked like an open mouth, so I talked to it inside my head. Why did you leave, Daddy?.... Why?

That hole in the door marked a hole in my life that I felt myself falling through. (And in some ways, I still am).

N – Newspaper

In his twenties, my dad had a music newspaper, The Emerald City Chronicle, and under that masthead is Van Halen’s first U.S. cover. Their close friendship shows—it's autographed like they’re signing his yearbook. The story goes. . . my dad was chatting with his friend—the sound guy at a bowling alley in Madison, Wisconsin—during sound check when the singer came offstage and invited him to stay and catch the show. Dad tried politely declining, but the long-haired blonde insisted, “We’re pretty good.”

That cocky confidence changed his mind. That blonde was David Lee Roth

I – Into My Life

he would drift. When I was eight. And then back out of it. Back in when I was twelve. And then out. Our relationship written in Morse code: dots of time together followed by dashes of distance.

F – Faith

The constant that carried me. I tucked into the comfort of the stories told in Sunday School. Putting my dad back into my life seemed a whole lot easier than making a blind man see. Jonah trapped in a whale was like me stuck in the chair in the window where I waited and watched. And pray that this time my daddy will come. Like he promised.

As day turns to night, my tears start to form. Rain begins to fall, streaming down the window and mirroring the waterfall on my face. I look down at the grass as it bounces and bends with each drop. The clovers twist and take shape. I see a face. Drying my eyes to get a better look. It's smoking a pipe. Next a tophat forms and a cane. A little leprechaun dancing a jig—a Lucky Charms cartoon just for me. I giggle at the scene. Soothed, my tears stop. God had heard me and came to fill the void Himself.

E – Ethos

Dance now, sleep later. Daddy babysitting meant dancing around the living room in my nightgown singing our daddy/daughter duets. At the first flash of my mother’s headlights, he’d whisk me off to my room and tuck me in, both of us giggling.

"Do what makes you happy." He’s passing me my cone in the Dairy Queen drive-thru—our Sunday afternoon tradition—and I’m asking his advice on a career path.

"A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." Every time I got my heart broken or societal pressure threatened my singlehood, this was Dad’s steady reply. Helping me to move on and refocus back on myself.

R – Ringing

In the middle of the night, a phone rings the shrill sound of dread. I strain my ears toward my mother’s distant conversation. Felt the heaviness before I heard it. “Motorcycle accident?. . . ICU . . . on our way.”

J – Junior in High School

Reaching through the tubes and the unconscionable words, “He may not make it through the night”—I’m careful but desperate. Sharp scents cut the snot I’m snuffling back. My tears splash onto the plastic brace holding his broken back together.

"You gotta make it, Dad. You’ve just gotta."

The machines click and beep.

"Please," I whisper and pray.

Click. Beep.

U – Unmoored

Seven years later, when I was just out of college, his dying unmoors me. Sends me spiraling and searching again for comfort from religion—a stronghold I could grip while I stumbled along. “God works in mysterious ways…” didn’t really work for me.

“At least he’s not suffering.”

But I am. His suffering just moved over here on top of me.

My faith went underground, buried in grief in devastation. If God took away people I loved, then I would take myself away from God.

N – Never

I never got to ask him how a daddy could leave his daughter. I was afraid he’d say what I had always figured anyway. That he didn’t love me enough to stay.

He never got to walk me down the aisle.

Never got to prop me up with his ‘fish without a bicycle’ pep talk when my marriage dissolved into divorce.

I – Inspired

Some wise, kind soul shared with me the poem, Death Is Nothing At All. It said death didn’t even count. A dead person was even quoted as saying they’d only gone into the next room.

Did we have death all wrong? Oh, I hoped so! With an open mind desperate for truth, I went deeper, broader. Beyond the religious topography of my childhood. Past the physical world and into the spiritual realm. Where everything's connected all the time. And eternal.

P – Physics

Energy can be converted from one form to another, but it cannot be destroyed.

E – Eulogy

A fellow journalist from the newspaper knew my dad well and had the eloquence a eulogy commands. “Michael was like a firecracker spinning on the ground on the Fourth of July. You watch it in wonder, amazed at its beauty, its energy, its spark. But you also think to yourself, it can't possibly last.”

R – Remembering

My dad appears differently to me now. Through songs, synergies and serendipity. Communicating in nuances and nudges. Especially when I tap into the gypsy blood he gave me….

I’m walking up to the desk where the receptionist of the RV dealership has called my name. My salesman, a very tall, slim, tan man is leaning against it. It’s like looking at Dad (if he was still alive and not in a wheelchair). At close range, I read his nametag: Michael. Not Mike. Michael.

We walk out to tour the inventory. Don’t say it, Jen. You’ll weird him out.

But such strong resemblances, and one of those nudges, makes me spill it. Wistfully. “My dad’s name was Michael.”

He chuckles warmly back, “That’s funny. . . Jennifer is my daughter’s name.”