Note: The following ran this week in my newsletter, a-clue.com and drew such a reaction I decided to offer it here as well. (Picture from a French fractal artist.)

My late father was no saint.

But consider the record.

Frederick H. Blankenhorn (1920-1999) had an 8th grade education yet raised four children in suburban plenitude. Among us we have seven college degrees, four marriages, no divorces, no felonies, and our kids are all doing all right. How many Hiltons or Kennedys or even Bushes could say the same?

My Dad had an unerring ear for what was coming. He got out of TV repair just before computers made it obsolete. He built a water garden and a mulch pit in the 1960s when such things were unheard of. He was into heat pumps in the 1950s, and our homes always appreciated in value.

But he had what we would now call ADD and dyslexia. He hardly ever finished what he started. He had a violent temper. Our home was filled with books but I never saw him reading one. The shop was a mess, clouds of dust, opened TVs lying everywhere, a metal paint tray filled to the rim with screws and nuts that had lost their homes. He was charming to strangers, but infuriating to his family, often scary to me. After I left for college in 1973, I stayed thousands of miles away from him for the rest of his life, except for brief visits which often left me angry and discouraged.

The only way dad knew to show love was to give people stuff. The last time I saw him, in 1997, I tried to hug him at the airport, knowing it was likely our last time together. He flinched as from a blow. Yet when my baby daughter visited him, in 1989, he bought a flat of strawberries, pounds of chocolate and whipping cream by the quart, making her enough chocolate strawberries dipped in cream to choke five babies. She's a teen now, but laughs with me about granddad every spring when I make some for her.

In business he always saw himself as the key man, an idea man, and he had great ideas. But he also fought for the last dollar, and often did business with ruthless men from The City (New York), businessmen who said "trust me" and left him broken. We hid from bill collectors. My mother cried wondering how we'd afford food and clothes, where the mortgage payment was coming from. He broke her heart, and mine too.

I saw this close-up. I worked at his TV shop, called Tower TV, for most of my young life. Some summers I was with him 60 hours a week, stocking shelves, trying to help fix sets, going on service calls, staring at a box of phosphors for hour after hour. You'll never get me doing that, I said.

So in my own life I avoided big commitments. I didn't go into business, I thought, I just wrote. I spent modestly, tried to work for many different people at once, and never let them get deeply in debt to me.

In my working life I want to trust, I accept that I'm giving stuff away for mere social acceptance, and while my mom may have been the rock my father's waves battered, I think of my wife as a rock I'm securely anchored to.

The last recession forced a change. By mid-2003 I had no work and no prospects. My self-published book didn't sell, this newsletter was losing readers to spam fears, my new blog had barely started. I had no money coming in and felt my writing was screaming into a strong wind, unheard.

So when a New York sharpie promised great work for big clients, and giant checks, I grabbed hold. I put his name on my letter, I blogged on his site, I encouraged friends to join, I even tried to get into the marketing of his business.

In terms of the work, he delivered on the promise. I found myself helping the kinds of big clients who matter, the kind who can change the world. True, most of my influence was negative. My fulsome praise for one product moved the client to tone down his claims, which he finally realized he couldn't meet. My call for a "platform strategy" fell on deaf ears with another client, who just wanted a tactical fix. My proof that yet-another client was going the wrong way moved him to kill plans that employed hundreds, and I was never able to get across my growth plans. Still, I saved these people hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions in embarrassment. It was very rewarding.

Yet when I submitted my invoices, when the clients paid their bills, I saw nearly nothing. And when I confronted the boss in New York over this, he said, "trust me." He gave me a check for some of what he owed. It bounced.

Those words, though, stuck. Trust me. I had no idea how deep they stuck.

Months went by. The work went on. The money stayed in the north. And finally we finished the "big project," the one we were convinced would get us over the hump. A week later, I got an e-mail, then a phone call. The company is changing its name, "so you'll be paid," the boss claimed. "Trust me."

It turned out to be a Chapter 7 filing, in which roughly $37,400 in money I was owed, my whole year's salary, was being thrown in the pile and burned. It's just a technicality, I was told by the man in New York, a tax thing. Trust me. We'll have more work, and you'll get your share.

Long story short, I blew up. I called this man a thief, a con artist, a scam, a fraud. I called him this to his biggest client. I said, I've been robbed, don't do business with this man. And then I briefly betrayed my client confidence, to soothe my own ego.

This was wrong. Within 24 hours I blew up a promising career, doing something I enjoyed, and destroyed any hope I might get some of that $37,400 back. Maybe, if I just kept my mouth shut...

But I couldn't do that. My dad did that. My dad did that, repeatedly. It broke his heart. It broke him. He stayed in his small business until frailty and his own incompetence forced us to pull the plug on it. And then he lost the will to live. When you're in your 70s and lose interest in living, dying is just a matter of time. He wanted to go, and did on the day before Halloween, on the eve of the Millenium. I still haven't cried over it. It was his choice.

Then I think, what will happen to me, 20-30 years from now, when something happens and I can no longer write? H.L. Mencken suffered a stroke in 1948, and years later was sitting with a friend, remembering old times. The friend mentioned a mutual acquaintance, who had passed away in 1948. "Ah," said Mencken. "That was the same year I died."

What's the Clue from all this? Maybe there isn't any. We are what we are, our parents' children. No matter how far we run we have to accept that. But I'm lucky. My father was brilliant, he was ahead of his time, he did everything for his kids and stayed married to my mother for 49 years.

I work very hard to avoid his mistakes. I'm careful to hug my kids, tell them I love them. They don't work at my shop, they work for themselves.

But I realize now I'm Saint Fred's son. It's a gift like dark chocolate, bittersweet. When there are strawberries, with whipped cream, it's delicious. When there aren't, there is always this phosphoring computer screen before me, and stories I can tell.

It will do. Love you, dad.