I didn’t know it at the time, but the trip to Modesto was a final pilgrimage of sorts, my dad savoring the last month of his life as best he could behind a fog of medications and a swelling pain from the cancer that was slowly devouring his insides.

We rented a van so he could lay in the back for the bulk of the journey and find some semblance of comfort from his ailments as we descended out of the low mountains and thick forests of the north end of the state to the parched valley where he’d become a man so many years before.

I was 15 and drunk on resentment. I’d lived the bulk of my life in fear of him, petrified at any given moment that he’d misread a comment of mine, or of my mother’s, and respond violently. Countless plates had been flung across steamy dining rooms because Dad’s disease — paranoid schizophrenia — would convince him that even we, his most immediate family, who loved him desperately despite his flagrant fits and episodes of rage, were plotting to humiliate, disrespect or destroy him.

A relaxing jaunt through the countryside in the family car would too often be suddenly punctuated by a ringing backhand, his stained silver ring ripping my upper lip because he misheard something I’d said, or because what I can only imagine as a cackling chorus of sniveling voices would tell him in their heinous, whispered poison that I was mocking him, or, somehow worse, calling him a liar.

Yet as he’d aged, even this beast was mellowed. And once he’d received the diagnosis of inoperable cancer, first colon then liver, I sensed even then that he began to review and regret the way he’d been, despite the sad and terrible fact that it was beyond his control. So this trip was a means to an end: Travel back upriver like a salmon seeking its headwaters, to complete the crooked, broken circle of his life and say goodbye to his loving mother, and to reach out to his youngest son and try to build a bridge over the now swollen and uproarious river of misunderstanding that had become our relationship.

None of this was expressed to me in so many words, and at the time, the fact that I was a focus of this trip was beyond my capability of understanding. Yet years later, the true intent of this final mission became clear as I myself became a father and, like him, attempted to pass on a bit of what I am to my own children.

It was the last day of our Modesto visit when mom drove the two of us to the McHenry Avenue music store. It was the same store he’d haunted years before when he’d first donned the pomade and Levi’s to become a rock star like all his heroes, where he’d purchased the much-lamented Rickenbacker he’d tell stories about, as if it were some mythical, magical treasure that had been lost in war with forces of great evil. The truth is, hard times led to desperate measures and he’d pawned the thing. He missed a payment months later and the collateral was seized.

This portion of the trip was for me, I see now. The one intersection between him and I creatively was through our mutual love of music, and he’d somehow managed to squirrel away a couple hundred bucks to buy me a new electric guitar, here, in the last few weeks of his life. For us then, as now, a couple hundred bucks was not pocket change. It must’ve taken sacrifice.

I of course was tickled to be getting a new guitar, but even in my joy I was guarded and distant, anxious for the new toy but afraid to show him real gratitude or worse, let a late connection form that would make his imminent passing more painful than it needed to be.

So though I read the look in his eyes, and did my best to show him some cardboard affection, he sensed that even this substantive offering was too little too late to repair the damage done from years of disconnect, trauma and abuse.

After we returned home, his death was short in coming. Three weeks later he was cold in the ground and a year later, without as much as a second thought, I traded that Les Paul copy, made in Mexico, for a slightly less nice, but much cooler seeming Chinese Strat copy.

It was only years later that I regretted that decision, and by then the guitar was long gone and irretrievable.

I was reminded of this episode this past week when I was besieged suddenly by my two kids asking for impromptu guitar lessons on an old mangled acoustic I keep laying around. I could sense in their eager questions a desire to learn, sure, but even more, a desire to connect with me over something they know I care a lot about.

For a minute I was the rock star I ‘d always yearned to be, and in the sweet eyes of the most important people on the planet. I taught them three chords apiece and watched with pride as they struggled to raise callouses on their tender fingertips.

As I’ve grown older and mellowed myself, made my own mistakes and at times hurt those I love, I’ve come to rue the sad fact that in my arrogant youth and self-righteous anger, I couldn’t afford my flawed but still loving father that same sense of paternal connection to me when, as his days were waning, he was so intent on making up for something he couldn’t control, nor avoid.

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James Faulk is a writer living in Eureka. He can be reached at faulk.james@yahoo.com.