Robert Elliott:
CLASS OF 1972
Robert A. Millikan High SchoolClass of 1972
Long beach, CA
Robert's Story
Hi! Thanks for checking in with me. I live with my wife Segan, our dog Rosie, and three cats beside a river in the Cascade Mountains. Life here is radically different than Southern California and also strikingly familiar. There's a small-town feeling similar to what we experienced growing up in Long Beach. I don't play tennis anymore (too many knee injuries), but I'm still able to have fun hiking in the forest, biking on the back roads, swimming in the river, and chasing Rosie (or maybe she chases me!) around our property. I am amazed by how quiet our home environment is. This natural calm has been quite healing, which has given us plenty of room to live our lives. I can listen to myself think and feel more deeply, which has helped keep my creative spirit alive and get my writing done. Thanks for reading! I wish you well!
Here's a piece I wrote and performed for a benefit for a homeless shelter in Santa Monica, "Step Up on Second," many moons ago. I've rewritten it and edited it some. I hope you find it affecting. With love, Robert
At the Door Of The Wrong God
I always expected my dad to be something other than he was. I wanted my dad to stand like a tall skyscraper: someone that stood above everyone else -- especially other kids' dads. I wanted my dad to know what it was like to soar, to breathe in the high stratospheres. I wanted him to be on friendly terms with astronauts, in contact with Mission Control and President Kennedy, and be comfortable speaking on the hotline with Khrushchev. I wanted my dad to reach down with hands like King Kong's and hold me to his chest, ready to bare his teeth and growl at anyone or anything that tried to hurt me -- willing to take on a whole city ...Expand for more
or the world if necessary: to pick me up and take me back to the jungle where he came from and introduce me to Tarzan and teach me how to swing from trees and open coconuts and talk to Jane -- especially that.
But my dad didn't do any of these things.
When I was in high school, he would come into my room after I had been out on a date, flop out on my bed, stoned on the prescription drugs he had taken because of the terrible pain he was in: my dad wasn't a well man, and he would tell me about the girls he didn't bring home to meet his mother. Eventually, I would put his arm around my shoulder and guide him into his room and back into bed. I want to think I kissed him on the forehead before returning to my room. Because, though, at the time, I wasn't aware of it, I believe my dad was reaching out to me -- his spirit was trying to contact me through his pain, his failures, his narcotized state.
Like in his hospital room a few months before he died of lung cancer, I sat with my dad, my chair at the end of his bed, and he spoke to me straight from his heart; he wanted me to know. "It's strange," he said, "to have a growth this large inside your body and not know it." I changed the subject, not wanting, I thought, to talk of something that might trouble him. But no, it was me. I was the one who didn't want to hear what was about to be said because I wasn't there. I was waiting at a different door for a different voice to be told in a different way - that which I so longed to hear: that my dad loved me and that he cared.
I forgive you, Dad, for not being who I wanted you to be, I forgive myself for not accepting your blessing, and I forgive us both for what we didn't know.
- Robert Elliott
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