October 13, 2007

Brahms on the CD in the dark of the morning. Have been thinking of the trip home to visit my father. I watch movies where on one of their deathbeds father and son reconcile and finally say "I love you," but I do not imagine this happening to us. I have no conscious need for it to happen. I don’t even think it is true. I have no sensation of my father ever loving me. I’m not waiting for him to reveal some healing secret he has kept within his heart. I’m fairly sure there is no such secret. It’s like waiting for the cats to sing: one does not expect it; one does not grieve for the lack of it; one would be uncomfortable if it happened. I think he loves me now, in a way that has something to do with need, the growing dependency of old age which reaches out for support, and which support I hope I always have the gallantry to give.

At worst, in our day, he was cruel, petty, arbitrary and destructive. At best–and I think he is at his best now–he was genuinely curious about who my sister and I were, genuinely interested in the things we were doing and how we were doing them. Appropriate and also cruel, then, that my first and lasting weapon against him was secrecy. I don’t blame him for any of this, but neither can I attach the radiant concept "father" in my mind to my real father. He was often a good caretaker, within the limits of his selfishness (based on fear, I know, but the reason does not change the trait), and his brutality was only periodic and based, again, on fear. He did try to overcome his ignorance of –I should say innocence in–the world, and he never stopped us from bettering our lives. His notion that he was an exemplary father astonishes both my sister and me, but there seems no reason at this point to correct it. I believe he was so, according to his own perception of things.

After tormenting my mother with vicious bickering about money, after making my sister and me live with the notion of deprivation and penury, it turns out he is a millionaire. He chooses his restaurants because they are cheap, does not remember to tip, and can barely enjoy his new computer for fear the screen is burning up unnecessary energy. Reaction against this attitude has made me a minor spendthrift. I don’t blame him for that. I certainly prefer it to being a miser. I blame him for meanness, for spinning webs like an old spider around a treasure he will not use either for himself or for others. When he dies with it clutched in his hand, my guess is that it will be more trouble to my sister and me than benefit.

This is not to say I do not love something about the man. It is, I see now, an oddly impersonal love, but a strong one. I love the stories he tells about himself as a kid and a young man. That man I could have loved. The little boy lost in the hollyhock garden he took for paradise. Coming to Akron and sleeping in unlocked cars. Scurrying with his game leg past a graveyard to court a girl. His long memory of a girl with red hair who danced with him even though he was lame. A boy working his way down a hill of loose stone to get to school. A boy on stage winning a prize for elocution. A boy joining a community chorus in Akron as it was long ago in order to make friends in a new place. Even as an old man he is admirable: his garage door turned into a mural of twilight and coming darkness–his own life, I suppose. The neighborhood kids coming over, knowing he is always ready for a game or a treat from the refrigerator. He had an admirable life in brackets on both sides of the time I knew him. He had an admirable life even when I knew him, when he was not among us, in community involvements which I didn’t know then and which I am surprised to hear of now. When and where I knew him he was not admirable. He was mean and frightened. He destroyed that part of me which should have known how to form human bonds. But I do smile thinking of the man he was before me, and I grieve, even now as I write, for whatever it was shoved him from what seemed a bright path to what we know for certain was a dingy and narrow one. It is probably true that I do not have a son’s feeling for the man who begat me, nor he a father’s for me. I can speak for nothing more on his part. But on my part, I’m glad he lived long enough to tell me about a man I could have loved, long ago, in a world which turned out to be too hard for him.

I think of these things most when I’m in Twinsburg, standing beside my mother’s grave. My sister and merely woke up in the midst of it. She must have, at some point, desired and chosen him. She must have thought all would be well. She must have thought she would be happy.

What will I do when he dies? I’ll weep for the little boy lost in the wilderness of hollyhock, for the little boy stumbling on his bad leg down the treacherous stone.

A Dream of Adonis gets its first review, from Mountain Xpress. It’s titled a "book report," but I suppose that’s the same as a review, however it harks back to the 4th grade.

http://www.mountainx.com/ae/2007/review_a_dream_of_adonis


The hydrangeas, set back after the spring freeze, are just now putting forth tentative, pale clusters of buds. I pray the freeze doesn’t get them at both ends.

Virginia King is dead. She and Jane Bingham sat in the dark of the green door and laughed the laughs of sibyls at the antics of the young.