The original version of this column originally appeared on Father's Day of 1999.
Things I try to remember elude me. Facts wiggle through my mind like drops of mercury, haunting my peripheral inner vision, nagging yet reticent. I remember old houses, sharp smells of wet dog and wool, the crunch of snow underfoot and the tender nap of flannel, floating faces but no names.
Yet I persist. I close my eyes and try not to grab hold of the first easy, saving word. I try to dissolve the code, to reach back to the faint colors stirred up from my muddy-bottomed brain. It's all in there, the scientists say, everything we've seen and felt, every sound, everything noticed and unnoticed. Each of us is a museum.
They say we might retrieve all experience, talk ourselves clear of the tangling rubble of the past and be free. It is good to do this, they say, to escape the sucking gravity of the past, to establish ourselves as beings independent of the hurt and damage inflicted upon us. Remember Philip Larkin's lines? They f*** you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do/They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you.
I would not know of Larkin had it not been for my father, who read him, and in whose books I first found those lines. In retrospect it seems strange that my father should have such a book--the only poet I can remember him ever mentioning was Kipling, the only lines I ever heard him quote were from Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade."
I close my eyes and I can hear him softly reciting, "Half a league, half a league, half a league onward ..."
He learned the poem at Belmont Abbey, a prep school in North Carolina he attended as a day student on scholarship. He was a poor boy, more accurately a poor relation, but he could run and throw. He never knew his father, or his brother's father. He played on the same American Legion baseball team as Jimmy Hall, who set a rookie record for home runs when he came up with the Minnesota Twins in 1963. He was a shortstop most of his life--also a boxer, an intelligence officer, an altar boy. A father.
I remember his rough hands and the way the stubble on his chin scratched me when he hugged me. I remember the way he could snap a baseball through bright air, how he could make the ball seem a humming, vibrating, living thing.
I remember the blue haze of his Pall Mall smoke. I remember wartime absences and the gray and yellow-striped queerness of early morning tarmacs, earth-rattling B-52s roaring and the emptied belly of a cargo plane. I remember the old Thunderbird he had for a while, and the blue suit I borrowed from him while I was in high school. Details swarm together and for an instant form a picture; just as quickly they float away like ashes.
There are tangibles. I have his baseball glove. In my mother's house there is a drawer full of military ribbons, old watches, Zippo lighters, all the paraphernalia of a certain kind of mid-century American masculine existence. I can recall specific moments, days. There are few photographs. But there is evidence--no one goes through the world without leaving a mark.
I am, for better or worse, my father's mark.
I am more of the part of him that read Larkin than gripped wrenches and baseballs, though I have gripped wrenches and baseballs and have at times thought them more my metier. The older I grow, the more I remind myself of him. I am 13 years older now than he was when he died; I have lived more than half my life without him. I look like his photos, I imagine that I feel some of the same things that he must have felt.
It is difficult to know how much we attribute to our fathers, how much to our mothers, how much to the crowd we happened to have fallen in with, how much to the blood and how much to the wild secret voices within. We are tricky and complex and not easily reducible to component parts.
Even now I dream of my father and wake in quiet sorrow that he is not here. Sometimes I think I should not be surprised to pick up the phone and hear his voice. Sometimes I think I expect him to call.
A "past" is a personal myth, a narrative we create to give our unruly lives a sense of order and purpose. Our stories are the way we justify ourselves to the world and to ourselves.
When I remember my father, I wonder if I am not ascribing to him qualities he would not claim. Would he think of himself as kind, quiet, strong? I am not sure--my father was not one to talk much about himself, much less about how he viewed himself. If he constructed a private biography, he kept it private.
I do not remember my father talking much, though I hear his voice--his inflections, his hesitancy, a little vocal catch that signals his groping for the right word--in my own. I have made his mispronunciations my own, I have assimilated his gestures and, they tell me, his smile.
Near the end, my father told some stories--about growing up in Asheville, about his single professional boxing match, about a cobra and a Jeep in the jungles of Thailand. These stories were offered more as anecdotes than as answers, as scraps of information from which we might patch together a kind of comfort, a quilt to wrap us in. They weren't meant to explain; at the time there seemed nothing to explain other than the large mystery of why people are born to die and why dying sometimes had to hurt so much.
In a way I was glad for him when he finally gave out, when the suffering was over. But maybe it wasn't like that, maybe I was more selfish than that, maybe I was tired of the hospital smells and the waiting. Maybe I was not as good a son as I could have been.
This is hard to think about, that I might have wished him dead for selfish reasons. I know that I could not help it, that awful thoughts breeze through the minds of saints. Still, I wonder if I let him down.
It would not have been the first time, though we never had the break that some sons and fathers have. I loved him and he loved me and things were never so difficult that we couldn't talk.
I think we could be friends today, that he would like me and the life I've made. I think he would be OK with how things turned out. I miss him, but I'm not sad when I remember him, and in the end I suppose that is all that we can hope.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 06/16/2019