I woke up on a Sunday in April 2023 feeling an irritability that I sensed was covering up sadness. It wasn’t doing a very good job of it.
It had been a long time since I had woken up feeling like this, and, if there was an explanation, it wasn’t near at hand. My week had been a mundane version of bad: sluggish business, getting the time of a call wrong, not responding to an email. This normally would have prompted action, a brisk fine-tuning of my work habits; it would not normally have prompted sadness. But that morning, as I took our greyhound, Evie, down the back stairs of our condo building — stained concrete, whiffs of rodents having bad days — sadness masked with irritability is what I felt. It was snowing when Evie and I entered the alley. While the snow wasn’t sticking, it stung when it hit my face.
Fortunately, my mind was occupied with a healthy task: I’d recently resolved to select and listen closely to one song a day. I mulled over possibilities as Evie was doing her business. Because the irritability I was feeling recalled my high school mind, I thought of choosing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” But “Whole Lotta Love,” which is just a good rocker to many, was — for me, in the mood I was in — less about emotion than its opposite; it felt like an attempt to eradicate emotion. I also considered selecting some ’70s Who — music which, to its credit, tried to navigate between anger and something more vulnerable and questing. But that didn’t seem right either.
Instead, I landed on something from an entirely different emotional space: “Wichita Lineman,” the plaintive country song by Glen Campbell. It was perfect, but telling you why it was perfect is going to take a while.
I lost my father in May 1973. I cried once, in a moment so significant to me it’s the only moment I’ve included in both my books: Exiting the funeral service, I saw my Boy Scout troop standing at attention. I maintained my stoicism as I passed them and exited the church. But the second I climbed in the back seat of our car, I sobbed and sobbed, in the purest catharsis I’d ever known. I’ve always viewed this as a significant moment, and it is.
But I now think what happened next was far more significant. I retreated to numbness. I didn’t suppress tears. Instead, I became incapable of generating them. For months afterwards, I was clogged with a grief so deep I couldn’t recognize it as such. I became what today we might call a lost boy — vaguely disappointing, sporadically toxic.
Having since grieved my mother, high school friends who died too young, a favorite nephew lost to suicide and more than a few mute, beloved animals, I’ve concluded that grief is not precisely an emotion. Instead, grief is a process, a river defined and discolored by the territory it flows through. Unfortunately, in the case of my 14-year-old self, that river flowed through the inner life of someone who read Mad magazine and listened to Bachman-Turner Overdrive. It flowed through the inner landscape of a chubby kid with a stutter, an unfortunate mushroom of hair and dubiously patterned polyester shirts.
It’s no wonder that, when that kid finally identified an emotion, it wasn’t one of the good ones. The numb junior high school kid became an angry high school kid, prone to self-sabotage in school and self-loathing in his room, a moody proto-adult who was vaguely rebelling and vaguely searching, mixing self-righteousness with incoherence to the delight of everyone around him. I couldn’t decide if I was a debater or a dropout, and so I wasn’t much of either. (Yes, I underperformed at underperforming.)
This was, I suppose, an improvement over numbness. But there was still something off with me — a half-articulated sense of threat and scarcity, of shame and grievance. It wasn’t the whole of me. I had moments of bravery: Despite the stutter, I went to regionals in speech. Despite my self-involvement, I experienced flashes of empathy when I realized how hard my mother worked and how vulnerable she must have felt. But something in me was broken. To my credit, I tried to fix it.
I was lucky to find a peer who shared my pain and suggested a way out of it. With my friend Neal Nixon, who had also lost his father, I embarked on a search for a tradition I could believe in. We located it in the books that flowed from Huck Finn and the music that flowed from the Delta blues. That tradition began to restore us. I felt less lost.
I had other resources: a strong mother and good friends. I moved from one trusted mentor — my scoutmaster, Robert Dunn — to another: my debate coach, Burnell Manley. I didn’t have a father anymore, but I knew what one looked like. I lived in a world of fathers and mentors and coaches and role models and proto-fathers. Some boys don’t.
After high school, I did well enough. I was a good student in college and then law school. But in the third year of law school, about to launch, the familiar lostness returned with a crippling intensity.
I missed my mentors. I felt clueless in interviews and needy on dates. An attorney about 10 years older than me bluntly told me I didn’t know how to dress and I didn’t know how to conduct myself. Drenched in shame and sweat after that humiliation, I realized: I hadn’t been given the manual.
I yearned for a father who would reassure and guide me. The thing is, that guy probably would have told me to pull up my socks and get on with my life. That was the problem with losing an actual father: You replace him with an imaginary one — a combination of Andy Griffith, Esquire and Dale Carnegie.
When the ghost of your real father doesn’t measure up to that impossible benchmark, you get even angrier. My drinking, which had been a weekend embarrassment, tipped into the daily bondage of alcoholism.
Alcoholism is a disease with a décor. For six years, I did a nominal portion of my drinking in the way you’d expect an urban 20-something to drink — with friends after work in stylish downtown Minneapolis bars like Runyon’s and Urban Wildlife. But the vast majority of my drinking was at much less fashionable places — neighborhood bars and dives. If my fellow 20-somethings visited these bars, they did so ironically. But there was no irony to my quest. I drank in humble bars because they were the kind of bars my father drank in. They were the kind of places that might have “Wichita Lineman” on the jukebox.
The drinking quenched the anger. But it didn’t eliminate it, because my anger was structural. I thought I was drinking at a co-worker who had clashed with me a few hours before or a woman who’d rejected me a few months before. But I was, in fact, drinking at something much more basic. I was angry because, despite my many other advantages, I felt cheated. I walked through the world in a nimbus of irritability.
It was a truth articulated by another fatherless Irish American boy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a writer whose own politics were rooted in his abandonment by his father. “A 5-year-old boy needs a father,” Moynihan wrote. “If he has to live without one, he has been cheated. It does not matter if he goes on to become a Supreme Court justice or a brain surgeon. He has been cheated.”
To say that I felt anger suggests I was getting into touch with my feelings. But that’s not true. Without quite realizing what I was doing, I was adopting a strategy for not having feelings in the first place. Anger was a prophylactic, protecting me from the more vulnerable emotions. And that persisted even after I stopped drinking.
But then, on Christmas Eve 2000, nine years sober — a day filled with bright sunlight and sparkling, seemingly weightless snow — when I was once again unaccountably irritable, I had a realization, in the literal flow and metaphoric forgiveness of the shower: The reason I was irritable was that it was Christmas and I missed my Dad. I missed the man who gave the best Christmas gifts ever — tabletop hockey games and one-man band contraptions and Fright Factories, the man who drove me to hockey in the next town and celebrated my science fair projects, the man who shared my enthusiasm for Christmas, the man who gleefully sang novelty songs like “Tennessee Birdwalk,” the man who was buoyed by the steadfastness of his wife and his eldest son and the knock-knock jokes and rock-and-roll dancing of his family.
And I missed the man who, before a car accident shattered his body in late high school, had known the joys of the athlete. I missed the man who, after they had repaired the initial damage from the accident, knew the satisfactions of the farmer and the exuberance of the Saturday night dance. I missed a man with a goofy, untutored sense of style — salmon or emerald socks, a Christmas-themed tie — which shone even more brightly in our conservative farm town, a man who loved Dutch Masters cigars and Hamm’s beer and small-town bars — what Seamus Heaney called “the mesh and murmur of voices in the gregarious smoke.” And I wept in the choking, sobbing way you weep when you have spent 25 years approaching those feelings but never reaching them.
And then, more than 20 years later, I realized why “Wichita Lineman,” a song about infrastructure, was the right song to summon on a cold April morning.
The songs I considered before landing on “Wichita Lineman” were, in the violence of their music, songs of negation. I paid no attention to the lyrics of “Whole Lotta Love” — I focused on its excoriating vocals and guitars — and very little to those of “Behind Blue Eyes.” But I did note that song’s microdrama of self-pity resolved by violence. In that, “Behind Blue Eyes” is a song of grief. And that was the problem.
Grief screams, “I have lost something.” It is concerned with the damage to the self. It is an assertion of victimization, related to grievance, sharing the Latin root, gravis, which means gravity or oppression. Prompted by death, grief is literally grave. But if you’re not careful, grief can make you petty. Its pain is real, but its focus is the self. Grief is about Kevin.
“Wichita Lineman” is, for me, a song about mourning. Mourning is about Maurice, who died at 51, his life compromised by injuries and shortened by death. Mourning is about the man who wanted to be the man in “Wichita Lineman,” who wanted to be one of the generation of men who after World War II tended to the infrastructure, whether they were farmers like my father or railroad men like Neal’s father or actual linemen like my Scoutmaster, Robert Dunn.
I did not need to hear a song about the bitter absence I have felt far too often since 1973. I needed to hear a song that honored the life Maurice Fenton lived for the 52 years he walked on this earth.
On that Sunday morning, I picked the right song.
Kevin Fenton lives and writes in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of the memoir, Leaving Rollingstone, about his upbringing in a small Catholic village, and the novel Merit Badges. His novel Cyan Magenta Yellow Black, which tracks a young advertising executive as he reconsiders and rebuilds his life, will be published in September 2025.