Looking back, on my 60th birthday, about being a Father

Kwame, 1975 Boston (Roxbury). Namandje, Penn's Landing, Philly 1981, Tia, South Philly 1985.

Dear friends,

Here I was, 1965, on a very hot July day, in the Roxbury section of Boston , sitting there, all by myself, on the concrete steps of my seven stories-high building, in the Mission Hill Extension Housing Projects, with no one else in the whole world around.

All of my friends, or even cats who I didn’t run with, had gone somewhere with their fathers, including those whose fathers didn’t live with them.

Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I said to myself, "I don't have a father."

While I was a precocious and tough kid - and a knucklehead wherever I was, I still did something that was totally out of character for me. That is, I grabbed my face in my hands and started crying uncontrollably, while, simultaneously, wailing repeatedly, "I don't have a father!".

This went on for about only a minute or so, before I pulled myself together and started sniffling and wiping away my tears, while still reminding myself, "I don't have a father.".

There was still no one around. No one to console me. I wouldn't have wanted that anyway. I was too tough!

Yet, when I finally stopped crying, I said to myself, "When I grow up, I'm gonna be a father, and I ain't never leavin' my kids...and I'm gonna teach them how to do EVERYTHING."

As is now, 49 years later, public record, I kept my word to the 11 years-old boy/myself.

Moreover, when recently asked: Whom do you most admire?...I answered: I admire my three children.

In 1993, the oldest, my son, Kwame (38), who was already a legend in Western Mass., during his senior year at Amherst Regional High School, was both the Western Massachusetts 100-meters dash champion in track and field, and the Western Mass High School Chess Champion. He later became an undefeated professional boxer who fought on TV a couple of times. In January (2013), he returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army.

My oldest daughter and middle child, Namandje (32), is a highly-regarded scientist and professor at the world-renowned Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md.

The youngest, my daughter Tia (29), is about two or so years away from finishing the prestigious MD/PhD program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.

And I am the only person on the planet Earth who was there with each of them, from the moment that s/he was born, until they were legal adults! Most of all, at least for me, my children are not my property; rather they are my legacy.

Cheers!

G. Djata Bumpus