April 29, 2008

Sudden cold snap, though not cold enough to inspire and worries about the garden.

A’s determination to go to New York prompted me to get in touch with people I know there to pave his way, to open a few doors, maybe provide a few free lunches. I apologized for acting so much like an anxious dad, and he replied, "It is good to have many fathers."

It is not always pleasant, though, to have even one. My sister phones that dad has become nasty and foul-mouthed, and obsesses over his checkbook, though how to deal with it seems out of his ken. He blames her for– something– messing up his system, stealing money, it’s hard to know what. Meanness is not new to his character, but he had gone decades without it, so far as we saw, and it’s sad to see it rearing its head anew. The house in Akron haunts him. He wants to put it up for auction now and get it out of the way. It hasn’t sold in three months in a depressed town in the worse real estate slump in living memory; I don’t see what the panic is. He’s not in need of the money. He wants to sell his van so he won’t have to go to the "damn doctors" anymore. That going to the doctors is the only way to get his pain medicine he cannot seem to internalize. It has always been a trait of his, now clearly uncontrollable, to act precipitously against his own or others’ interests. He has always been a coward and therefore a bully. Or is it the other way round? I search for all these things in my own character, hoping to know the signs when it begins. I am no coward, and hate bullies. In that I am my mother’s. I can certainly be impatient. . . but mean? Maybe impatience will thicken into meanness in time. I have a trust in my own impressions which can make me intractable, and which may look like pig-headedness one day, if it doesn’t now. I have never feared the uncontrolled or the uncertain the way he does. I rather trust them to go my way. I am not obsessed over money. For the most part, I have assumed people to have my best interest at heart, and have been disappointed in that less than one might expect. There are safeguards, anyway. I mean to live ever where there is a deep river and a high bridge.

Grim hope allows me to think that dad is playing my sister, because he sees her as an adversary. I told her to send Daniel of David over. If he is mean to his grandsons, then he is gone. If he’s not, then he’s playing a game that we could ignore. How infuriating it must be to be talked about like this, to be treated as a nasty child (even if you happen to have become one) after so many years of control.

Today may be the most turbulent of the semester. It’s the last day of class, and for my humanities students, anyway, the day which determines whether they graduate. Things will come at me too fast, too many voices, too many excuses, too many appeals, and I will understand the siege laid to my father’s brain.