Like so many fathers in the 1950s, mine lived on the outskirts of our family. He worked a lot, traveled at times and didn`t have much to say when home.
Mom was the garrulous parent. She discussed our day, put Band-Aids on our cuts and lavished praise on our finger painting. During the summer Dad would occasionally dig out a flat old baseball glove and play catch with his three sons. Sometimes he`d drive us all to the beach.
When we were little, my two brothers and I once took turns tickling my father as he dozed on the sofa. Without opening his eyes, Dad made a game of trying to catch us with a swooping hand as we screamed and giggled and dashed out of reach. But that sort of thing is rare in my memory. I just don`t remember a whole lot about Dad during my childhood. To me he felt present but not accounted for.
This wasn`t what I had in mind for a father. What I had in mind was a guy who took up more space. Someone who could hit home runs. Stare down the bad guys. Handy with a hammer, handy with his fists. At an age when bullies were picking on me, I wanted a model, someone to imitate when it came time to stick up for myself. I`d been hoping for Superman but had to settle for Clark Kent. One episode stands out in my memory as an exception to Dad`s mild-manneredness. When I was 6 or 7, we were at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, which had a full-sized car simulator. My older brother and I couldn`t wait to try it out. But a potbellied guard brushed us aside as ”too small” to use the simulator. He then helped a comely blonde get behind the wheel and showed her how to steer. My father went over and talked to the guard. Dad spoke so softly that I had trouble catching his words but thought I heard, ”There was no need for you to be rude to my children.” I was shocked. My dad! Sticking up for his kids!
But that`s the only such incident I can remember. Mostly I remember feeling that to be a member of my family was to be easy pickings for little Lex Luthors. With a soft-spoken father and an older brother who regularly got chased home from school by the Doyle brothers, I resolved early on to never, ever, run from a fight. And I didn`t. I lost a lot of fights but felt that I`d made the distinction clear between me and my family. This became the theme of my childhood: letting the world know that at least one of my father`s sons would put up his dukes.
For a long time, this approach served its purpose. I reveled in the many times a pal complimented me for not being a sissy like the rest of my family. But as I got older and wanted to pick my fights more selectively, I found that I didn`t know how. I still don`t know how. It`s counsel I wanted from my father and felt like I never got.
Our relationship picked up a bit after I started high school. Dad had an easier time talking with me once we could discuss Adlai Stevenson`s presidential prospects in 1960 or the emerging civil rights movement. In time we settled into a genial relationship but not a close one. Our chief topic of conversation was current events. Anything else I looked for from Mom.
I got a glimmer of something different when Dad`s mother died during my junior year of college. His relationship with her had been difficult. My father clearly was not eager to wrap up his mother`s affairs, so I offered to give him a hand. He accepted my offer without hesitating.
During our few days together in Pittsburgh, Dad reminisced about the troubled years he`d spent there sharing his mother`s dark apartment. At one point he moved out, into a room at the YMCA, then spent his nights drinking in a bar across the street to numb the guilt his mother heaped on him for
”deserting” her.
The time we spent together in Pittsburgh gave me a new sense of my father. It was the closest I`d ever felt to him. That interlude suspended our rules of conduct. Afterward, those rules were restored. Our conversations reverted to Eugene McCarthy`s presidential prospects in 1968 and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
After college I began to feel frustrated by this meager relationship. During the intensity of an ”encounter group,” I realized that the most vivid image I had of my father was of him reaching out to shake hands with me as we met, always keeping an arm`s length between us. As I cogitated about where we stood with each other, I couldn`t come up with much. To me we felt more like cordial boarders in a rooming house than father and son.
About this time I read writer Burt Prelutsky`s eulogy for his father in West magazine. Prelutsky`s tribute was brief, direct and profoundly moving.
”I didn`t think I would, but I shed tears,” he wrote. ”I cried because he had worked too hard for too long for too little. For many years I had resented him because he had never told me he loved me; now I wept because I`d never told him.”
Reading these words tightened my throat. I was not alone. Prelutsky`s eulogy was among the most clipped-out articles of its time. It was passed from one male hand to another, kept handy on desktops, folded and put in wallets so that it might be pulled out and shared. My own copy went into a newly created file folder labeled ”Sons & Fathers.”
The second item I put in this folder was Larry King`s essay ”The Old Man.” This Harper`s magazine article was also destined to become a classic.
”The Old Man was an old-fashioned father,” King wrote, ”one who relied on corporal punishments, biblical exhortation and a ready temper.” King`s memoir described a more complicated relationship than did Prelutsky`s. But both ended up in the same place: Post-funeral remorse and empathy.
Men treasured these two articles as if they were vintage Mickey Mantle cards. One friend told me of writing a fan letter to King right after reading his memoir on an airplane, even though his tear-blurred vision made this hard to do.
Reading the eulogies by Prelutsky and King made me realize how eloquent men can be when writing about their fathers. Some of the best reading I`ve done since is portraits of fathers by sons. Perhaps this subject is just too important to sully with poses or pretense. As examples of good writing, if nothing else, I began to gather prose and poetry by sons about their fathers. During the last two decades this has been my hobby.
When I mentioned this hobby to a prominent poet, he wondered why my collection was limited to sons and fathers. Is that relationship so unique?
Why not include sons on mothers? Or daughters on fathers? I can`t imagine that he himself believed those relationships are equivalent. There is no doubt in my mind-or the minds of most men-that the way we feel about our fathers is singular. Although such feelings are very strong, they are seldom expressed. Athletes never mouth, ”Hi, Dad!” to television cameras. No biker has ”Pop” tattooed on his arm. Few men ever say ”I love you” to their fathers, no matter how much they yearn to. And they do yearn.
”My only regret,” Dwight Eisenhower wrote shortly after his father`s death, ”is that it was always so difficult to let him know the great depth of my affection for him.”
This is true of most men. Conditioned to play our cards cagily in an imagined poker game with our father, we don`t say enough to him while he`s alive. Only when it`s time for a eulogy do we realize that our tongues were tied not because we had too little to say but too much; not that our feelings were too weak but that they were too strong; not that we loved our fathers too little but that we loved them too much. It is usually not until a father dies that unspoken words finally get said. ”I wish I could have my father back, even for just a minute,” eulogizers often conclude, ”to tell him what I`ve just told you.”
Few men are able to let a living father know how they feel about him. Yet feelings for his father can be a man`s strongest. Time makes them more so. For lack of an outlet these feelings grow explosive. When thinking about their fathers, men can feel as though they`re sitting on a rumbling volcano. Sensing this intensity had something to do with my drive to gather son-father writing as I once collected baseball cards. Perhaps reading about other men`s fathers could make it easier to deal with our own.
The most common theme in such writing is frustration about the distance so many men feel from their fathers. ”There was always a stiffness in the air between us,” observed writer Adam Hochschild, in a memoir about his father,
”as if we were both guests at a party and the host had gone off somewhere without introducing us.” Talk between sons and fathers tends to have a strained quality. The crosscurrents can feel treacherous. They communicate through codes and symbols, glances and grunts. Or by putting words on paper that are impossible to say aloud.
”My writing was about you,” wrote Franz Kafka in a letter to his father. ”In it I only poured out the grief I could not sigh at your breast.” This emotional paralysis is not one-way. Sons can have as much trouble talking to fathers as fathers have hearing them. But many men see their fathers as too remote to allow them even to try.
When men gather to discuss common concerns, they return insistently to the emotional abyss so many feel separates them from their male parents.
”Father hunger” is what some call this feeling. Much attention is currently being paid to the topic of preoccupied fathers and neglected sons. One man spoke for many when he said of his childhood: ”My father would come home, tired; he gave it all at the office. He had nothing left at home.”
This was similar to what I`d experienced. When I looked at my relationship with my father, I mostly saw a void. Would this gap stay unbridged forever? I hoped not. In letters I told Dad that I wanted to get to know him better. During my next visit home, he spent the first couple of days following me around the house, recounting one story after another from his childhood. I had no idea why my father was telling me these stories. Finally, I asked him. Dad said that he was trying to let me know him better, as I`d requested.
This clumsy rapprochement between father and son was hard on my mother. By custom she was my parents` spokesperson. Traditions die hard, and Mom was visibly unnerved by seeing her husband and second son huddled in conversations that didn`t include her. She dealt with this by taking charge. ”Why don`t you two guys go off by yourselves?” Mom would say heartily when I came home to visit. ”You know, `father and son.` ” We did anyway.
