Father's Day has arrived close upon the heels of my husband's death, and I am thinking about what a loving father he was to his three sons. And although I am no longer married to my daughters' father, I am also thinking about what a loving father he was and is. My thoughts about my own father are more complicated. I know that he loved me, but love wasn't a word spoken in our house, and he was mostly ill-equipped to demonstrate his love. What follows is something I wrote about him a couple of years ago. (I wrote it in winter; thus, the reference to snow.)
About a month ago we had some snow and I decided to put on a new pair of hiking boots that I had not yet broken in. I sat grumbling on the stairs as I struggled to work my feet past their unyielding backs.
Then I remembered my father’s shoehorn, which sits on a shelf in my office. Within moments of retrieving this tool, I was easily and fully shod.
And then I started to think about my father.
My father, who died almost 30 years ago, remains an enigma to me. His shoehorn is the only memento of his life in my possession. When he was alive, it sat on a tray that also had a place for a wallet and keys—one of those caddies that men use when they empty their pockets. He wouldn’t have carried the shoehorn in his pocket, but he must have wanted it near-to-hand when he got dressed in the morning. I don’t know. I never saw him get dressed. I never saw him less than fully clothed, except at the beach. Although born after the Victorian Age, my folks were Victorian in many ways. (No swearing and they certainly never told me anything about you-know-what.)
But, I digress. The shoehorn is made of real horn. I can’t recommend killing an animal for its horns, but I believe some animals shed their horns and this is a lovely relic of a pre-plastic age.
It pleases me to think he might have brought this shoehorn with him from Scotland. I like to believe it was made from the fallen antlers of a highland deer. (I suppose it is just as likely that he bought it somewhere after he settled our family in New Jersey. But I like my story and I’m sticking with it.)
My father had to shoehorn himself into the life he was given as do we all, although some do it with more grace than others. Born in Glasgow before the First World War, he grew up with two sisters and his parents in modest circumstances. From what I learned from one of his sisters, he loved motorcycles and climbed mountains (or what passed for mountains in Scotland). He was, according to this sister, a wonderful big brother.
I don't know what became of the adventure-loving young man. I only know that by the time I came along, the mountain climbing and motorcycles were in the distant past, and the wonderful big brother had morphed into an inflexible and angry father, mostly interested in work and tinkering with cars.
There were occasional flashes of tenderness--I remember that it was he who would get up in the night when I was sick. And once in a great while, he would become silly and dance around a room. But, for the most part, I lived in dread of his anger.
It wasn't until I had my first child at age 35 that I felt had done something he truly approved of. He loved his grandchildren and seemed able to display a kindness and patience with them that he had been unable to muster with my brothers and me. So that was progress.
Here is something I wrote after looking into his home office soon after he died:
The first thing I notice is what isn't there. No well-thumbed books with the best passages underlined. No personal letters. No scraps of paper with notes scribbled on them. No favorite photograph on a desk or wall. No indications of any pleasure traced through decades of a life.
I take that back. There are signs of his love of all things mechanical. There are books about the Queen Mary and other Clydeside ships for which he helped design the machinery, books about cars--three about Jaguars, and the real thing sitting in the garage, sleek and self-satisfied, like a profligate child, heedless of its own money-sucking ways.
Then there is the computer that he set up in his 80th year, when he was already losing strength. The computer with every bell and whistle. I watched him just weeks ago lower his fragile self into a chair and, trembling with a love and attention never shown to any human, take this late-century miracle through its paces.
And the fax machine. What did an old, cancer-ridden man need with a fax machine? Did he use it to message God and tell him he damned well wasn't coming? Is that where he was going on the day 48 hours before his death when he wouldn't stay in bed, though he fell repeatedly and shook his fist at anyone who tried to help him up? Was he making one last attempt at connection of the only kind he could conceive?
Did my father know how lonely he was? Has he been released from a lifetime of anger? Or is he up in heaven barking at the angels, demanding a cell phone and a cup of tea?
Twenty nine years later, I still wonder -- Is there a shoehorn that could have allowed him to fit into the world with more grace and less anger. What would it have taken for him to enjoy his family? As a child, I blamed myself. I eventually came to understand, of course, that I was the victim, not the author, of his rage.
What would my childhood have been like if he had used his prodigious intelligence to teach rather than to browbeat? I will never know.
Lately, I have taken to holding the shoehorn in my hands while I contemplate what my father might have been like in his youth, try to imagine what thwarted dreams and disappointments led to his anger. And I also ponder the fact that he inadvertently gave me backbone. It took courage to stand up to him. Who would I be now if I had had an easier father? I will never know that either.
For many years, I felt resentment toward my father. Now, I feel only compassion for his unhappiness and sorrow for what might have been. And I hope that -- if there is peace to be found after this life -- he has found it.
Whatever else he was or wasn't, he was my father. I did love him. And, one way or another, he helped make me who I am.
