Solitary sentinel

NYC, Theater District, June 20, 2012

Love's Austere and Lonely Offices (Father's Day)

Here's what I know about fathers: I have an extremely good one.

I have always aware of this, but have become more so over the years as I've met person after person who did not. Abusive dads. Absent dads. Dads who never hugged their kids, ever, or expressed any pride in them. Dads who likely learned their fathering techniques from their own dads, who likewise had no idea what to do. It's a Russian doll of bad dads, where every time you open one angry and frustrated man, there's another angry man who helped shape him. Interrupting that lineage, once it's gotten started, can take years -- generations, even -- of work.

Our father could not have been more different. Over the years, he has been the very image of not only a good dad, but a splendid human being. He worked hard and he worked long hours, but I never remember feeling him as remotely absent: when he came home for the evening, he was home, and present. I remember him teaching me words and getting me to memorize poems when I was a kid, exercises that played a huge and early part in shaping my love for reading. He has been protective but never overprotective. He's ready to offer advice but never one to force it upon us. He was always slow to anger -- very lucky for me, as during adolescence I was often very quick to inspire it.

I remember when I first got interested in writing, it seemed to me that most of the greats were spurred to their craft, at least in part, by terrible parenting. On that front, I felt, I was handicapped from the start.

And over the years I've come to think it's likely an illusion anyway. Every writer who's found fodder in their family dysfunction likely first had to surmount it, and I suspect many people who could have been writers may not have been able to. I know people, in fact, who have a great deal of raw writing talent and yet for years have had to invest the lion's share of their psychic energy in just surviving the toxic legacy of their parents. And the armies of writers out there with proud and supportive parents probably outnumber the ones with Joan Crawfords.

(Somewhat tangentially, I think with amused embarassment about the time that my mom ended up on a plane next to another woman, and through chit-chat they discovered their daughters were both writers. After going on proudly for some time about my writing -- the contests I won as a teenager, my few publications, my day job -- and likely overblowing them terribly, my mother asked about her fellow passenger's progeny. It turned out her daughter had written, among other things, a little book called A Thousand Acres. Yes, it was Jane Smiley's mom. This is one reason that bragging -- even about other people's accomplishments -- always strikes me as a truly silly thing to do.)

Robert Hayden's great fatherhood poem always makes me think of my dad, and feel grateful that I never had to fear "the chronic angers of that house" and that my father practiced "love's austere and lonely offices" so well.

Here's a poem for my dad, about the way he used to give us "airplane rides" on the beach at Gulf Shores, Alabama.

***

Early Flight


Our father, swimmer and fish-warrior:
hallowed be his hands, the ones that gripped

our wrists and ankles for the lift. Are you ready?
he would grin, and we claimed to be,

feeling the stretch of our muscles as he began
to turn like a discus hurler, feeling

the ground drop away, one eager daughter
after the other, dogfighters in looping rotation,

our eyes peeling the surface of the sand,
the far dunes and the beach-shacks spinning,

the vast green waters a blur: that world
we thought we were ready for. And though

he was no god, how he flew us then—
his dizzy gulls, his kites—allowing

in speed and his steady grip just enough fear
that we rose and fell laughing and shrieking

over the curve of the sand,
our limbs the only tether between us.

Ooh Las Vegas

Much as I love the Junkies (and Gram Parsons), my version of this song would likely be called "Ew. Las Vegas."

I've written about this before. Much as I like to imagine that our spare time at our conference will be spent having Rat Pack like good times, it's just not my kind of town. Part of it is that I don't have the money to make it my kind of town. Nicolas Pileggi, who wrote Casino, wrote Las Vegas is a city of kickbacks. A desert city of greased palms. A place where a $20 bill can buy approval, a $100 bill adulation and $1,000 canonization. He left out the tip for nonprofit drones visiting for a convention, that $5 will buy you a cup of coffee and some cards advertising hookers.
Also, I have a hard time turning off the part of my brain that worries, and Vegas -- rather than releasing me from it, as it's supposed to do -- makes it worse. I worry about the prostitutes. I worry about the people slumped over the slot machines, their eyes flickering back the numbers. I worry about humanity as a whole, and American humanity in particular, and then I worry about myself for not being able to relax and enjoy the whole thing.

The best I can really do there is try to leave my body and consider it all from a cultural anthropology point of view. For a writer, Vegas is great material. What doesn't kill you is fodder.

Still, all things considered, Vegas mostly makes me want to get out of town and see the desolate, haunted country all around it. High desert ranges, sagebrush, tiny towns that seem like no one could live there. Towns like Hernandez, New Mexico, which Ansel Adams photographed in this haunting 1941 shot. I haven't been to Hernandez, but there are desert towns all over the West that still look essentially like this.

Moonrise, Hernandez

          after Ansel Adams

What is there, beneath this stone-hewn sky,
          but to cluster and keep low?

Strings of whitewashed crosses
                      maintain ramshackle piety,
a stay against the leathered palm of sagebrush,
the whims of mountains, clouds
    solid as snowbanks,
                     their pewtered canopy
over huddled shacks
stitched by need
              into a town.

The moon drags her train over soil
pocked with clapboard and sheet metal,
               a past-prime bride abandoned
at the altar. Her light
catches on sharp edges, stray nails;
                pale threads tear loose,
become thin sheets and shirts
                clinging to the lines,
flapping like wingshot birds.

                If you come upon it, turn away.
Whoever comes here must claim these things,
              must wear this shirt, its wind-licked lapels
              stitched with aces.
You must wrap herself in these sheets;
                     hold your loneliness close.
You must scuttle among crosses where the dead
                     crouch quiet in the bracken,
                            listening to the wind forget their names.