Fathers and flowers and fear

It is Father’s Day, and I no longer have a father. Except that I do still have a father. He runs in my veins. Occasionally, his temper flares up in me. Often times, I see the same notes of beauty that he saw in nature and in art and in food. Always, I carry the great sensitivity that he hid inside himself, though I do not hide my sensitivity. I suffer from it, and I am grateful for it.

He was tough to live with, my dad. He did not show affection. He did not say I love you. If I brought home a report card that had mostly As and a B, he would say, why’d you get the B? He yelled a lot and he hit me and my brother and my sister, and I remember the last time he ever hit me was when I was 17 and on that occasion, he slapped my face. I did not cry that time. I stood up straight and looked him in the eye and said nothing, and he never hit me again.

He was a complicated man, raised by a cold housekeeper after his mother died when he was three years old. His father was a taciturn immigrant who only ever said one thing to me, his grandchild, that being, What grade are you in now? I didn’t see that grandfather very often. We were an army family, and we moved all the time. But I saw him when we went to our home state of Minnesota every summer (at least when we were living in the states), and I saw him when he stayed with us for some length of time when we were living in Texas. I remember that his table manners were abominable, and my mother stared down into her plate rather than look at the way my grandfather ate, and to not reveal how horrified she was at the noisy and open-mouthed way that he chewed.

Those were his influences, my father‘s, that cold, nearly cruel housekeeper, and that withdrawn father. When my dad met my mother, he finally found a place to put all his love. And he found a place to show his love. I am glad for him that he at least had that one person for giving and receiving that most important of emotions.

I feared my dad most all of my life. But once when I was in my 30s, with children of my own, there came a day when I confronted him with how terrified I had been of him all my life. Those were my words: “I have been terrified of you my whole life.” And isn’t this something, my dad was genuinely surprised. He did not know that I did not know that he loved me or was proud of me. He said it on that day: he said, “You have no idea how proud I am of you.” And I said, “How would I know it? You never told me.” But after that day, something that needed to be broken down between us was broken down. I was able, after that talk, to rib him a little, to be, if not disrespectful, then playful. Rather than dad, I began calling him by his initials, AP, for Arthur Peter. And I saw that there was validity to the way that I used to think of him when I was a little girl. When I was about eight or nine, I would take walks with an apple in one pocket and Kraft caramels in the other, thereby creating my own caramel apple. I would take walks and I would sing songs from Rogers and Hammerstein‘s musicals that I thought spoke to what my dad really was. I liked the song “Something Wonderful” from the King and I: “He will not always say/what you would have him say.” Or: “He has a thousand dreams that won’t come true.” OI thought those words described my father. I thought that in his heart of hearts was the most tender place, the sorest place. But here’s what I also saw about my dad.

One night he invited people over to look at slides of paintings from a museum he had visited in Europe. It may have been Amsterdam, and the painting may have been a Rembrandt, I don’t remember. But my father was showing the assembled guests the way the light came through the dirty fingers of a boy holding a candle, the way that you could actually see the blood in his fingers. My dad’s appreciation of that art was so deep. He was a true art lover, if not a sophisticated one. He was a good cook willing to try things that his wife would not. He could make strudel with the dough rolled out on the kitchen table so thin you could read newsprint through it. When once I sliced open my finger on a Vienna sausage can and it required stitches, he was the one who calmly ministered to me.

We became pals, my dad and I. When my book was chosen for Oprah’s book club and I knew I would make a fair amount of money, I bought my dad a Cadillac. (Not without him protesting, but I insisted.) Buying that car is the best thing I ever did with money and the day I bought it is the most grateful I have ever been for my career.

I was never quite sure what gift to give my dad for Father’s Day, and in his later years, my gift became much easier because I just bought him rounds of golf at his favorite course. I think that was his favorite gift from me, excluding one time at Christmas when I got him a used coat at Goodwill that was quite beautiful, a camel hair coat with a bullet hole in it.

Anyway, my dad does run in my veins and when I took a walk yesterday, I saw how that was still so true. Here’s what happened.