Excellent post about your father @owasco.
I can imagine that it was indeed difficult to write parts of this as you mentioned early in the post, as you took a lot of traumatic pressure being the oldest.
Walking on eggshells because of explosive unpredictable rage is a feeling I can relate to, being also the oldest of 5 growing up (later to be six but the majority of growing up was five of us.) It's interesting we share a similar dynamic in our early life that way. The implications are different for a female with that same type of pressure though.
Your father was a prominent man in the town and undoubtedly felt the pressure of this, creating a need to maintain control, and any feeling of loss of control or a potential for loss of control induced a type of loss of control in a controlled environment. He must have carried around a lot of anxiety that he kept hidden from the general public. It's probably not very uncommon with men who've garnered levels of success like he did.
I think you wrote this gracefully and in line with how our stories never really end in a way, it's more like chapters that continue on through our children, and we just have to make sense of how things played out in the most digestible fashion possible.
Thank you @futuremind! I love your thoughtful comments. The last paragraph here, especially.
I don't remember your telling me you were the eldest of five!
That's the truth. I wonder if we rewrite the past when we do so.