Over the next few years, Dad and I talked a lot. This process was helped immeasurably by his retirement. As a city planner, my father`s favorite topics of conversation had been things like regional development compacts and the need for coordinated national planning policies. Such topics interested us kids about as much as the price of rice in Siam. In retrospect, I`m not sure how much they interested him. Because within a year after he retired, Dad had put his planning books in storage and begun writing poetry. This has been his principal occupation for the last 15 years.
Shortly after Dad retired, I enrolled in a Dale Carnegie course to write an article about it. Our concluding assignment was to talk on a topic of general interest. My classmates ranged from a flower shop owner through a Burger King manager to an appliance refinisher with a greasy pompadour. Most were men.
I chose to talk about sons and fathers. In previous speeches I`d sometimes had trouble holding my audience`s attention. Not this time. Now my listeners stayed with me from beginning to end. Afterward the appliance painter said haltingly, ”You know, that stuff you were saying about your dad. I think that`s something any man can understand.”
In conversations with men generally, I saw how potent the subject of sons and fathers could be-a blasting cap setting off bombs of memory. Men generally are deft at sticking to safe topics of conversation: baseball, the price of corn, stock options. When talk turns to fathers, however, a hush settles over the crowd. Eyes look off as thoughts turn inward. Even the most glib talkers grow tongue-tied when discussing their fathers. On more than one occasion I`ve seen a man start, then stop because his throat grew too tight. Even more than sports and money, the topic of sons and fathers is a male universal.
Among the pieces of writing I`ve collected by sons about their fathers, the eulogies stand out for their eloquence. In the first flush of loss, a torrent of dammed-up words bursts free. It is hard to read such poignant tributes to dead fathers without feeling something for our own. The essays written by sons of living fathers are a bit more circumspect-understandably. Their authors are in far greater danger.
After profiling his late father in Harper`s, Larry King noted that he`d spent years trying unsuccessfully to write about the man when he was still alive. ”Goddamnit, I`m intimidated,” King explained to his editor, Willie Morris. ”I guess I just don`t understand him well enough.” Morris conceded the first point but not the second. He was right. Two hours after his father`s funeral, King told his editor, ”I can write it now.”
Although writing about a dead father is less risky, it can also be more frustrating. Some of the most affecting memoirs are those written by remorseful men whose fathers are no longer around to hear their son`s confession. One reason that the movie ”Field of Dreams” struck such a powerful chord for many men was its portrayal of a 36-year-old man struggling to reach a dead father whom he now regretted alienating.
A friend of mine, whose father died unreconciled with his son, told me that this was the first movie in years to make him cry. I said that hadn`t been my reaction. ”Is your father alive?” asked my friend. Yes, he is, I responded. ”Well, there you go.”
To understand ourselves we must first understand our fathers. Accepting ourselves means accepting him. At some point in his life, every man looks in the mirror and sees his father. I did, and it unnerved me-at first, anyway. While growing up, the cornerstone of my identity consisted of not being the man my father was. He was usually late, I was always prompt. Dad never fought, I often did. He was soft-spoken, I raised my voice.
As the years passed, however, my guard dropped. Now I have trouble being on time. People frequently ask me to speak up. Accepting any and all invitations to fight has come to seem more stupid than manly, even though avoiding conflict puts me in danger of feeling like the chicken I`d imagined my father to be.
But Dad no longer seems to be quite the pushover I thought he was. He didn`t change; my attitude did.
Dad and I were at Mom`s bedside when she died two years after their 40th anniversary.
As much as I miss my mother, the best years of my relationship with my father have been the ones since she died. Partly this is because we now could talk directly, with no intermediary. Partly it`s because without Mom`s effervescent personality as a buffer, Dad became more outgoing.
As he grew older, it became easier for us to talk. It turns out that my father has a lot to say. Or perhaps I`m just listening better. Dad tells me how his own absentee father was kicked out of the house by his mother when he was 4. He and his sister saw their father only sporadically after that, usually in hotel lobbies. Though he grew close to his father in later years, Dad says he could never quite shake his mother`s ”programming” of him to hate her ex-husband. She was a difficult woman. My father has told me often about the night he was awakened by his mother, who was pretending to be a policeman come to take her 4-year-old to jail for throwing a cow pie at a friend. A few years later she bade her son farewell as he left for Boy Scout camp with a tongue-lashing that left him weeping on a friend`s shoulder during much of the train ride.
Since his mother never worked outside their home, my father grew up in virtual poverty. His grandfather refused to lend him money for college on the grounds that young men should make their own way in life. Dad did. He got through college by waiting on tables, stoking furnaces, framing pictures and selling books. In his early 20s my father hitchhiked around Pennsylvania and West Virginia, checking into hotels knowing he could only pay his bill if he sold some books. While he earned his Ph.D. during the Depression, Dad and Mom lived on what was left from the $90 a month he was paid as a graduate assistant after they`d sent much of this money to their mothers.
As I learned more about him, I began to see my father differently. I noticed the devotion of his friends, men and women of all ages. ”Your dad is one of my favorites,” the man who handled his medical claims once told me.
”Did you know that he wrote a poem for me?”
His friends see something in my father I have sometimes overlooked: not just a gentle good nature but integrity to the bone. In time, my own perspective has changed. The mildness I`d mistaken for passivity has come to look more like quiet self-possession. My father is a basically uncomplicated person. There is no difference that I can detect between his inner and outer self.
He has difficulty sustaining a conversation with his grandchildren just as he had trouble talking with his children. Kid talk is not my father`s strong suit. This is part of his integrity. He talks the same way to everyone. Dad does nothing for effect, partly because this would violate his sense of honor, partly because he just doesn`t know how. He lacks guile.
I wish that were more true of me. I have different faces for different situations and have cut ethical corners. Someone once asked me what type of man my father was. Without thinking, I responded: ”He`s high quality. I wish I had half his quality.”
Our relationship has grown easier over the years. By now it feels like friendship. Dad calls me to discuss his poetry, what kind of car to buy,and whether or not he should remarry. When together, we sometimes just sit quietly. There are few people in the world with whom I`m that comfortable.
Although Dad was always taller than me, he has shrunk in recent years, and we now share clothes. The first time he passed along some undershirts to me, it felt good to wear them-both the idea and the fit. We are still not too good at hugs and kisses and ”I love you`s,” but we do the best that we can do.
The key to our current relationship lies in my father`s genes. The fact that he has lived to be 82 has allowed us to navigate perilous seas and end up-him old, me middle-aged-as close companions on a safe shore. For the past few years Dad has had bladder cancer. Rather than let this disease take its course or limit himself to a single treatment approach, he has sought various opinions, tried different therapies.
At one point, Dad contacted a friend at the National Institute of Health and became a candidate for experimental treatment there. Although he wasn`t accepted, I admired the spirit of his attempt. It seemed that my father was trying both to increase his odds of survival and to make his illness have meaning for others.
It turns out that my father is the model I always wanted. When talking to my own two sons, I often hear his voice emerge. ”If something`s worth doing, it`s worth doing right,” Dad tells them through me. Or, ”Come on, push like you meant it,” when putting on their shoes. Following his lead, I don`t deny myself the last piece of candy for my children`s sake, with bills for self-sacrifice coming due later. And I hear echoes of my younger self when my 12-year-old moans that his father sure can be boring.
Reading what sons have to say about fathers has made me wonder what my own might write about me. That sort of question is hard to avoid when reading sons on fathers. Hopefully, sharing other men`s experiences with their fathers will make it less difficult to deal with our own. Reconciliation may not always be possible. Understanding is.
