Chapter 40. Father. Yes Son. You Want to What?

Chapter 40

Father.

Yes Son.

You want to what?

The following weekend was not worth remembering and I don’t recall much of it. These meditations about my father had thrown my mood into a deep funk that only added to my frustrations with lack of a job market and the continuing bad news about the economy.   And did I mention the economy?  The economy was looking very perilous in early 2009, every day the stock market continued to sink to new lows. The newscasters announced each new fall dutifully and morbidly. Just like looking at a fatal car wreck, we the American public, couldn’t turn away.  We could not stop watching this dark dance of numbers as our collective mood passed from anxiety into fear and the pace of American economic decline increased with frightening speed.

It seemed like recovery and spring would never come.  What better time to work on personal issues and really crawl down into a hole, see how it feels to muck about in your own deep emotional recesses?  Hell, I was there already, might as well push it.

Good times indeed.

Determined to make “the best” out of this unexpected situation (read this as middle-aged, a temporal shock in and of itself, unemployed, spending  endless days at home and watching the savings you had invested for times like these disappear), I resolved to finish the dad meditations once and for all.  At least I would feel better about having completed a task and better yet, maybe I would learn something.

What I eventually came to understand about my relationship with my father took several days to work through.  These meditations were not fun.  They were hard and long.

I revisited some really difficult moments of fear that I had not thought about in years.  I went back to my room as a child, I heard the sound of his snoring, an indescribably loud arcing guttural noise that would wake me at 2 and keep me awake for hours.  Worse than that, I felt the physical smallness of our home, the lack of places to hide or escape.

The next day my thoughts returned to the palpable sense of fear that my father would fly across the narrow hallway and burst through the door at any moment and hit me.  Or those wonderful moments when he would embarrass me in front of friends by insulting and deriding me as he often did, laughing with them all the way while I sat and took it all.

With these fears there was sadness. Sadness over how he took pleasure in hurting us, how he laughed loudest when we felt the most pain.  The manner in which he struck me, my mom, or my grandma. The shocking vision of his coiled arm and upraised fist, his screeching voice, the wild eyes and the unkempt hair. And then silence in the house when he left afterwards.  It was as if a bomb had gone off, the air was sucked out of the room, the atmosphere bristling with emotional electricity.

This psychological goulash was topped off with a big helping of shame.  Shame about how I laughed along with him when he went on attack seeking to humiliate my mom.  Shame about how I did not stand up to him.  Shame about how embarrassed I was to be around him.

Eventually after I took these thoughts as far as I could, I began to gain some perspective, but not until the end of a week of intense concentration.  I made sure that I didn’t drink anything during those evenings and kept she that wasn’t really all that curious about these meditations for reasons I wasn’t sure of appraised of what I was working on at least in a very summary sense.  I walked big foot Kelly a lot in the cold and thought and thought plenty about dad just what he had done to us and to me.

As one’s understanding of a person who has fucked with their life grows, pain eventually ebbs and fades and mine did.  And as my newly rediscovered sense of shock faded into the background I realized that I would never understand my father.  Why he carried the bitterness of his youth to his grave.  His resentment of the success of others and his anger at life.  His constant abuse of his family, those who should have been the closest to him.  While he could not forgive those that had hurt him, I had to find a way to forgive him for how he had hurt us.

The first step to forgiving him was to understand his pain.  Only then could there be a sense of movement.  As I thought about his past it was easy to do.  With the time he spent in a true hell from Siberia to post war Eastern Europe, that part was simple.

The next step was acceptance.  What he did is long past.  That sounded nice but I was not able let go quite so easy.  I brought this up with she who has been meditating a long time more than I have that evening at dinner.  Over bites of thinly pounded chicken breasts with a lemon/butter/caper sauce she gave me some advice.  “In our meditation group,” she explained, “when we have negative thoughts from the past we focus on them and then put them in a rose.  Then we fill the rose with light and positive energy and cast the rose away watching the petals fly.”

I had to work hard not to laugh at this thought and finally couldn’t hold it back anymore and I did.  Not good. That put me on the defensive at the dinner table.  Laughing at your wife’s suggestions is always a risky move as she rarely will appreciate your reasoning.  But the very idea of putting my father’s ‘negative energy’ in a luminous pink flower and turning him into a bright light was way beyond ludicrous.  Maybe we could tuck his spirit into a rib-eye steak or an onion, grill them well done and then douse them in gasoline, burning it all to charred embers.  Now that was a visualization exercise that I could understand and the next morning I did just that.  While I can’t say I understood why, watching those imaginary ashes float away in my vision gave me a weird sense of closure.

Friday’s meditations took an unexpected turn when I opened up to the behaviors of my father that I could see inside of myself.  This wasn’t a planned moment, but my mind went right there like a hound that had spotted vermin.

At first it wasn’t pleasant. I let the old man’s ghost walk the room for a few minutes and saw how it familiar it looked my personal mirror.  I didn’t kid myself, there were plenty of his behaviors are there inside of me.  This is not surprising, all men carry their fathers in them, good bad or otherwise.

It was easy to spot the really bad stuff.   A powerful temper that took years of discipline to wear down (and patience from she who would not tolerate it).  The sense that world was imbued in darkness and people were basically out to screw you, to be constantly on your guard because everyone was tying to take advantage of some angle and get your better.

What was really surprising was how quickly I moved through those negative thoughts and realized how many positive things that he had given to me, character traits that were dear parts of my happiness and my success.

He taught me how to be funny. The flip side of darkness is the humor it brings.  Dad gave me a 5 star dark sense of humor that has never failed to shed light on sometimes horrible situations and bring joy to normal ones.

He showed me what a work ethic is.  He lived his life working hard and made me believe there is no other way to do it.  There isn’t.

He taught me not to take shit from anyone, another double-edged sword that wins a lot of battles and puts you into ones that are completely unavoidable.

All of his brought a smile to my face.  I began to close the meditation with a sequence of thoughts about those boys who grew up with no dad at all.  I wondered whether this was better or worse.  I came to no conclusions.  Then I began to think about the men who filled in for the failing fathers out there.  In the world this could be a teacher or grandparent. In my case there was an uncle who often took up the slack for the dad who wasn’t there.    But I wasn’t ready to delve into his yin and yang yet.  It was time to pull out.

As the meditation ended I had another unexpected food vision, something so out-of-place that I never really understood why it showed up that early winter afternoon. It was a peach.  Not just any peach, it was the first peach of summer.

There was no whipped cream or chocolate syrup in this vision, instead I looked out at a perfect piece of fruit of my choice.  Where does the fruit of dreams lie?  It is something simple like a crisp apple or maybe a slice of cantaloupe, right out of the fridge, cold and crisp never mushy and perfectly sweet.  For me it was a peach. And it hovered there slowly spinning like a top.

A short parable about summer fruit.  I live in a region known for fog and cold summers not for stone fruit and certainly not the sort of fruit that is found at the road-side stands that populate side roads throughout our country.  Yet doggedly and as my philosopher gardener points out, stupidly, I planted several fruit trees anyway.  A pink lady apple, straight from an upscale well reviewed and precious farm in Philo to the north, a peach and a nectarine, the latter two from a hardware store.  No pedigree on them.

Five years later this apple tree has never produced more than 4 or 5 apples, The peach which did OK last year didn’t produce a thing, got hit with a blight that turned its leaves to crinkled black whispers.

The nectarine is now producing, this damaged plant that suffered through a few brutal transplants is suddenly happy.  We think so often of the peach, but there is the nectarine in the background, never mushy and never with that horrible skin/flesh contrast.  It is steady eddy underdog fruit that doesn’t get the love it deserves.

Cooking stayed very simple that week.  Dinners were not memorable or inspired.  I was withdrawn and not talking much during meals.  This was a week of mourning for a life that never was, a father I never understood and the damage that he caused.   These were winter days of a personal mental Shiva (the traditional Jewish period of mourning) where I buried my dark feelings about him forever.  At least I hoped so.

Sweet and Sour Cabbage for pops.

One cabbage

One onion

Oil.

Garlic.

Sugar (pinch)

Salt (pinch)

Vinegar

Take onion, slice thin.  Heat pan add oil.  Slice onions and garlic, sauté to transparency.  Meanwhile slice cabbage discarding core.  Add to pan.  Sauté on  medium heat until soft adding vinegar, salt and sugar to taste.

Very good with sausages, preferably grilled and a peasant red.

Music for thought.

John Coltrane.  India.

Moon River, Bill Frissel with Dave Holland and Elvin Jones.

Chick Corea, Sometime Ago/La Fiesta

Radhe Krishna, DJ Cheb I Sabah

Dr. John.  Dr John plays Mac Rabennack.  The legendary sessions.  All of it.