More Memories
The thoughts for this post came, and then went, a few times. Let me try to do the process by which I derived them, again.
These memories are hard to generate, which is why I do not feel bad “using up” a blogpost to take the time to write them down.
The second time I am writing about my father, perhaps in my life. The first time was yesterday.
There is a thing about a right of passage, writing the eulogy for your father. The sons would take over the family. Being the strongest man at your father’s funeral, that everybody else can lean on. Jordan Peterson talks about this, certainly, but he would not be the first or the only one who speaks of a right of passage such as this.
I would not know what to say about my father. In part because I do not speak the language he speaks, in part because his fluent language is not his mother tongue - not his birth language, and that language is not the language of his people, either. We talk in our own broken blend of English and his fluent tongue, but it is completely custom. Nobody else speaks like this.
What would I say? There are parts of him that are like parts of me, that I like a lot. And so there are parts of him that I like a lot.
He can be protective of people’s hopes. He would be very brusque, but then if a person had a hope, no matter how small, he would be unusually protective of it both compared to other people in the population, and what one may expect of him given the brusqueness.
There was a time when somebody he didn’t particularly like too much was wya into power washing simulator the video game, and I wanted him to try out a real power washer. My dad had not one, but three, and none of them were really working or had all the parts in one place, but he took an hour to get one running so that this person could try the power washer in real life. He cared about the dream coming true.
I have a memory of him on a road trip across the country, becoming very into Buffalo Bill, and all of the Buffalo Bill museums that we were passing, and needing us to stop at every one.
Often he would not understand me. Sometimes he would. We were in a museum in Greece one time, and I had started posing with the statues. He asked me what I was doing, if I was making fun of the statues. I said no. I said I was trying to feel their essence. If I looked at them, and stood how they stood, maybe I would feel something. Maybe I would feel some potency. This felt very Aristotelian. He understood what I was saying, and explained to my mom, “She is feeling their essence.” Then he started taking pictures of me, with the essence.
We had books in the house, some classics, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Heidi, Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Sherlock Holmes. Paperback collections with small print. He would tell me these were very important works, and that I must read them to be a good American. I had a disposition for being inspired by this challenge. I wanted to be a good American. A decade later I would realize that he has never read these books, himself.
My father is somebody who was very interested in swimming as a very healthy and life-giving activity, especially outdoor swimming in beautiful bodies of water. He would often encourage me to swim, poke me hard to swim faster. What is funny about this is he himself did not know how to swim.