Back on the Grid-2013 Curious to find myself in this sixth decade of my life returning to memories of my father

It has been curious for me to find myself in this sixth decade of my life, returning to memories of my father, as if I see him now as someone who had a much larger affect on my life than I had noticed.  I assumed that my mother was the major influence in my life simply by the amount of time and energy I had devoted to reconciling myself to her ‘unusual’ disposition.  Now there you have it: whenever my father consciously avoided saying something critical of someone, he would resort to the word ‘unusual’.  “An unusual looking woman” was code for she wasn’t attractive by many standards.  Another lasting memory was from the earliest years of my marriage and I was pregnant for the first time.  In the home space of my parent’s living room I announced that I had to pee.  He responded with the memorable words: “Marguerite, we must keep up the amenities.”  These two examples sum up a lot about this man who was born in London in 1917.  He came from an era and culture that were to define him throughout his life.  His dad was a WWI veteran who suffered from PTSS and died from the effects of mustard gas poisoning.  His mother married his father’s widowed brother and they emigrated to America when my father was around twelve, bringing with them their custom and culture, which they carefully preserved in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.  

So what is it about my dad that resonates for me this past year?  I could start by pointing out that somewhat like myself, my mother was a woman who put obligation and responsibility first, and was not very good at having fun.  Now my father was just as responsible yet he considered enjoying himself an integral part of daily life.  It was known that he would have preferred in life to be a concert cellist, yet he got his masters in accounting at night school when my mother already had two children.  He worked for a big corporation his whole life, had seven children, and in his retirement bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate the last college tuition payment.  Yet, if he couldn’t be a concert cellist, he made Sam Goody’s rich with his vast collection of classical music.  The neighbor across the street said there was nothing she enjoyed more of an evening, than watching through her window, my father conducting some symphony in his summer pajamas.  He was careful with his money but made sure he had the best Fisher stereo that money could buy.  He brought us to concerts and ballets in New York City or Paris.  He loved good food, could recite the exact menu of a meal eaten in some restaurant in France where we lived for four years back in the late fifties when he was transferred to the Paris office.  He was a man who could be maudlin, wiping the tears off his cheeks at weddings and funerals.  He never once hit me.  He could get mad but mostly that something occurred that could get him mad, in the sense that his day had been dis-ordered.  

So here I am pondering why it is that in this last quarter of my life, I keep saying to myself: “I am my father’s daughter.”  If so, I’m not very good at it, but then neither was he.  He didn’t have some master plan that worked like clockwork, but rather carved out for himself a version of the good life in America, and I believe that after thirty years of responsible parent mode, that’s why I’m turning to him.  I know he had a difficult time retiring; it wasn’t simple to live a daily life with my mother, a restless person in her own right.  He got depressed the same as a lot of men do when their day job is no longer.  Always a man who enjoyed cocktails, a bottle of wine open at meal times, I know in his later years his afternoon Scotch was required to punctuate the day; in this observation I recognize my own restlessness at wondering how to define myself at yet again another stage in life.  In her retirement years, my mother did good works in the community through her church; my dad drove the three plus hours to take cello lessons.  The actions my mother took to make others feel better, made her feel better; the actions my father took were to enrich his life for himself.  I think that’s a critical point.  He was a collector in a manner of speaking, a collector of enjoyable experiences.  I admire that, it is what leads me to enjoy my little camera and the photos that I take of the Catskill Mountains day in, day out throughout the seasons.  I collect pictures of my yard with the goat and the horse, in the spring and in the snow.  I chronicle my walks with my dogs in the woods, and the chickens that peck away in the yard.  That is my delight.  I still cook with care, even though I am aware that many wives after forty-seven years say ‘enough’.  But somewhere in there, while cooking for seven, I realized there was an art to the well-prepared meal, and it is this art that I aim for.  My dad loved the ‘mot juste’ finding the perfect one word summation and had a uniquely British way of obliquely making reference to one thing while in fact humorously commenting on another.  When our house burnt down in the 1980’s, he made sure to send the a book of the complete works of Beatrix Potter, aware we lost the small editions  he had sent us.  In a way, he loved to share his English-ness with us.  I’m probably the only sibling who made steak and kidney pie for my husband when I was young married.  It seems strange to write this, but my mother didn’t have many traditions to give us, while my father thought it was perfectly ordinary to invite you for a walk after a big holiday meal.  He had a walking stick, naturally.

My point.  Just recently I read Roger Kimball’s great book, “The Relevance of Permanence in an age of Amnesia,” and I am surprised to connect its relevance to my feelings these days.  I am looking to my cultural inheritance for clues as to how to transition stages of life and, I recognize how challenging it is in this age of iPods, for want of a better description.  Because somewhere in here, or there, I recognize the experiences of our elders informs us for better or worse.  It would appear I am mining his experience of custom and culture for time proved relevance about what it simply means to get through life in a mannerly way. 

I had the unusual experience of living in France for four years when I was eight years old, while for my father, it was a return to Europe.  For him, it was not the transition it was for my mother.  Déjà vu you could say.  He was comfortable and that was very reassuring to me as a young girl.  He expressed little anxiety.  If it was old fashioned, it was recognizable.  Our kitchen stove was a coal stove.  A simple two-burner gas plate was for summer use.  Potatoes were store by the ton in the back room, and there wasn’t a window screen in site.  A huge gate blocked our house with a bell that clanged when it was opened, and at night it was closed, effectively sealing our home behind walls.  A smaller door was cut into one of the side gates for daily access.  I chipped my tooth slipping against the brass handle that opened it.  Still chipped.  

Yet, I have to wonder that my children don’t see me as reluctant perhaps?  Mom doesn’t like change.  She’s set in her ways.  Is she happy?  They who live with their big screen TVs with access to a myriad of stations are perplexed that I have little interest in mastering a cell phone and enjoy not being in constant touch with ‘the world’.  The chickens will at times meander into the house, she takes the phone off the hook when she needs space.  It’s almost as if she is resentful of the changes that they see as ordinary.  I wouldn’t say that; I’m just not interested.  Face it, I pay my bills on line, I’m not off the grid, and I am grateful for Netflix, and Facebook keeps me in the loop.  But I haven’t had a TV for thirty-seven years.  That’s probably one of the points that puzzles me today, this sort of belief that life, a life shouldn’t be idiosyncratic.  My father’s generation still took that seriously.  It was yours to give meaning to, whether through family or opportunity or simply custom and culture.  There was still plenty of room within society’s constraints for individualism.

I guess in some ways I miss my dad because he’s not there to back me up.  If he were still around, or if my children had known him better, they would not see me so much as 'unusual' but as familiar, recognizable, an extension of my dad, who was a man who didn’t worry about what you might think of how he lived his life.  He appeared to simply assume it was his choice and his alone.  As long as he was a good father, husband and citizen, what possible reason could anyone have to question how he determined what suited him.  That is an incredibly liberating concept.  I believe that only now do I recognize how deeply this concept reverberated in me, for I ended up living a most ‘unusual’ life and, validating this premise is how despite all the many unusual choices I made, and I made quite a few, it never appeared to occur to him that it had anything to do with my love for him or his for me.