Father’s Day, like a number of other holidays or special occasions, owes its existence to clever marketing campaigns designed to extract as much profit as possible from an often overly sentimental and gullible public by appealing to emotions, when in the proper context, are not only genuine but ennobling. While free enterprise is well able to defend itself from its detractors, it is easy prey to its own success. However one wishes to frame one’s objection to the effects of rampant commercialism, one cannot deny that the success of such ventures lies in the skillful manipulation of what remains at bottom as something which contains at least a kernel of truth.
Taken together, fathers and sons have always been subject to a palpable dynamic of love and hate, or at least similar emotional states which describe the creative tension that accompanies the collision of the past and future–standing side by side, father and son embody what has been actualized and what may yet become. The father may represent both failure and success; he may be an agent of change through attraction or repulsion; or, what is probably a more accurate view, a father, a various times throughout his and his son’s life, are all of these.
My experiences with my father are etched into my memory and attached to events that often lie forgotten until some shade of light, a spoken phrase, or even the feel one might have when entering a room, triggers their recollection. Time graciously provides us with the marvel of reflection; it offers us the opportunity to resolve our conflicts if we are wise enough to probe the obvious or to recognize it when it is so.
My dad and I were so often thunder and lightning that our explosions and flashes blinded and deafened us to each other, especially after I reached puberty and throughout the years I sprinted toward manhood. For all of the fireworks, there were episodes that defied rational explanation, that didn’t fit into the either or transit of our daily lives. While I confess to several fond memories involving my father and me, one is vivid and strong as much for its unusual character as for its tenderness. I was very sick, which was a more frequent condition for me when I was a child than has ever been the case since I became an adult. Whatever my illness at the time, I must also have been feverish as I recall waking and seeing my father kneeling quietly beside my bed. He spoke but I cannot remember a single word he said to me; he stroked my face and head. And strangest of all he brought me a gift, a porcelain Boston Bull terrier. While the smooth surface of the tiny statue was cool and calming to touch, it bore no significance to either of us in our daily lives; it wasn’t a dog that I had always dreamed of, or the kind of thing I played with, nor did it relate to anything I can ever recall my father speaking about. As the character of elemental events go, this was as much a non sequitur as I have ever encountered. Perhaps, for both of us, love, in the way it had to be for us could only find truce in an object which was not overpowered by our own personalities, to love each other fully we needed neutral ground. Although I was so very young, it may be providential that my father somehow presaged our fate, or at least a fundamental part of it which lay between he and I, and brought the only offering of love that would not wound either of us but allow us to become unconventionally whole, something that both of us would need throughout the remainder of our lives.
Our memories probably differ, my dad may see me as I see my own son–I hope his life has been as full as mine has been, and that my children will have as beautiful a memory of me as I have of him.
Tags: dogs, fathers, porcelin, sons
Although drought continues here in Piedmont North Carolina we had fresh corn on the cob last night–the first of the season for us. In addition to the corn we also managed to find a few ripe grape tomatoes, green bell peppers, and jalapeno peppers. The three different varieties of summer squash that we planted are producing more than we can eat and/or give away despite the lack of rain. While we have already picked and prepared green beans several times this year, the dry conditions threaten how plentiful any remaining harvest will be; however, the winter squash we planted (butternut) seems indomitable in our increasingly arid climate. Our blueberries and blackberries have held up surprisingly well; but, they, too, are bracing for the unrelenting onslaught of Japanese beetles, which have now begun to lace the leaves of the blackberry bushes, glut themselves on ripe fruit, and breed on every leaf they have not already consumed.
