Teens feel restricted
 Setting priorities
 Enough to make you go insane
 Going overboard

 Thanks for helping us stand
 Resisting pressures of popularity
 Double standard
 Long-distance

 The 1999 issue home page

     In honor of Father’s Day weekend, a paternal tribute will be paid today. I have known many fathers throughout my life, and many of those have taught their children marvelous lessons. For each individual family situation, though, the father is the guardian of the past and it is his responsibility to provide his children with an understanding of their obligations and roles as well as potential. Instead of illustrating this concept with abstract ideals, I will depict my father, who kept me grounded so I could fly.
     My father is a Conch, the name given to a true native of my hometown. Frighteningly similar to the island he has inhabited his entire life, my father is unique, proud and dependent on strong roots to keep his ground. My father is an improbability and a living contradiction. From this man I learned the majority of what I know today.
     I was born and raised on a 3-mile wide rock that some ancient earthquake had left stranded at the end of an archipelago known to the rest of the world as the Florida Keys. Its name is Key West, which I assume originated from a brilliant man noting that my home was the western-most of the keys.
     On this island, a deity’s skipping stone, my father taught me what it meant to be a Conch. I was the "Lucky Seven" generation of my family to take a place in the eccentric community, and my history loomed larger than my future.
     The Spanish name for Key West is "Cayo Hueso," reflectively perhaps the most concisely accurate description of the island ever minted; "Isle of Bones" is the exact translation. Childhood in Key West was like growing up in a graveyard. The gates were locked with no escaping the past. You couldn’t even move quickly, really get running, because you would trip up on the headstone of someone before you.
     My father only contributed to this state of mind. While other 3-year olds went to bed to Mother Goose, I learned about my grandfather’s escapades in bringing cable and radio to Monroe County. While other 5-year olds struggled with phonics, I developed knowledge of my great-grandmother’s founding of the Key West Red Cross. My father taught me politics before I could ride a bike. He taught me my place in the world when my spit of sand was still the only world I knew.
     My father gave me roots. I became one of the giant poinciana trees that were scattered about the island’s crumbling cemetery, the trees that depend on the thin, rocky soil for everything and from it sustain nutrients to grow to tremendous heights. But like those trees, I couldn’t be moved without fatal risks. I was strong only because of my roots.
     My father taught me that was the only way to be a Conch, the only way to continue the legacy. Like my father and his father and his father, I developed a symbiotic relationship with the island, feeding off of its past as it devoured my present.
     By the time I was 13, my father had taught me to "feed the ducks" with the best of them, to answer to the right people and which rules to bend, break and keep holy. I could stretch time and space to my own benefits and I could walk proudly through the pathways of what would eventually be my final resting place.
     My father taught me that you didn’t have to get out of the gates to grow and that you didn’t have to separate yourself from death to live. From him I learned how to survive as I do today, how to flourish in Key West. He taught me to accept that you can’t get out but to go up instead: dig my roots deeper into the limestone, and reach my branches further toward the sun.
     My father is a Conch, and after maturing under him from the time I gasped my first breath, so am I.
     A popular cliché in parenting classes today is to provide your children with "roots and wings." Today I honor fathers for doing just that. Glory be to fathers – for teaching us where we come from, who we are and who we can be. Every child wants to soar, thanks Dads for helping us stand.