"Oh, Clara, interrupt me"

Clara nodded. “It seems incredible. A man of such talent. How could anyone so well-endowed be so self-destructive? It’s hard to believe.”

 

“Nonsense. You know better.” Arthur’s eyes were dry now, and his voice had regained its crisp, thrusting tone. “It’s the rule, not the exception. Thoreau was right – all men’s lives are failures. Oh, not yours. Maybe not mine. You do honest work. You serve life. But look at all the brilliant talents who’ve drunk themselves to death, or thrown away the work they were best at doing, or thrown away their energy on false crusades and called their means of self-destruction a sign of superiority. Larry did, almost to the end. Or how many take the opposite way out, like your parents, shut down and closed up, cringing to death? Why? Are they too afraid to live? Or too proud? Who knows? But it’s the rule, not the exception. Larry’s suicide was only more dramatic than most. Of all the seed, of all the fetuses, of all the infants, all the children, all the men and women … how few survive each stage and grow to the next, and how few of that few survive. Only a few, a tiny few beneficiaries of the right combination of genes and circumstances and decisions survive to become human beings. And of those few – oh, Clara, interrupt me, don’t let me go on ranting.”

 

Clara took his hand. “You need to grieve.”

 

“Not now. Enough for now. Don’t let me keep up this self-pitying, maundering – talk about something else. How’s your love life? Are you going to marry that nice boy, what’s his name? And is he old enough to vote yet?”

 

-– from Dorothy Bryant, A Day in San Francisco, pp. 70-71.

__________

 

Leo Strauss always used to insist that we mustn’t confuse the opinions of a character for the opinions of the author. So maybe Dorothy Bryant herself doesn’t believe this. More importantly, maybe it’s not true. Maybe.

 

 

Character-driven plot

It came to me this afternoon why my blog posts have been so boring for the past couple years. There’s been no compelling storyline.

 

Good writers can make a compelling story out of anything. James Thurber created the immortal Walter Mitty out of a middle-aged shlump daydreaming while standing in line. But I’m clearly not James Thurber. (It’s not always obvious whether I rise even to the level of Walter Mitty, but be that as it may.) Whatever virtue my posts used to have – and people used to have nice things to say about them – came not from my skill as a storyteller but from the material itself. It came because I had dramatic scenes to describe, with characters who forced the scenes to come alive.

 

Or at least I had one such character. I mean Wife.

 

It’s not that I miss living with her, God knows. Don’t misunderstand me. But she – her complex and maddeningly contradictory character – may have been the most dynamic thing in my early posts. Maybe also the anger that she inspired in me at every turn, the anger that I had to write down in letters of fire to keep my head from exploding. To keep from doing real damage to myself or her.

 

But I don’t feel that kind of anger any more. Wife is a shell of her former self, and I live an hour’s drive away. She still sets my teeth on edge when I have to say more than Hello or Goodbye to her, but that’s all pretty rare these days. And I’m not romantically entangled with anybody these days, least of all a tormented narcissist. Even if I were on the lookout for a girlfriend, my experiences with Wife and with D – and with my Father, come to that – have pretty much innoculated me against wanting to be tied to another tormented narcissist. On the other hand, they do make life exciting, and they are fun to write about. They make even the most pedestrian prose sparkle in the same way that they make the real world sparkle … because there can be something entrancing about them even as they make themselves and everyone else miserable.

 

She cuts you once.

She cuts you twice.

And still you believe.

The wound is so fresh

you can taste the blood,

but you don’t have strength to leave.

You’ve been slashed

In the face

You’ve been locked outside the door.

You stand there pleading

with your insides bleeding

but you deep down want some more ….

 

But in that case, it seems like I have a choice: learn to write, or stop writing, or accept being dull. Damn but I wish there were an easy choice that also gratified my ego! How galling that the only choice which really puffs up my ego is the one that requires hard work …!

 

 

 

Talking about Father, 3

When I e-mailed Aunt J asking her what happened with Father that brought about his refusing to speak to them for a couple years, she wrote me as follows:

 

The incident in question probably occurred between 2000 and 2004. As I remember it was around Christmas and Aunt C was staying with our family. (Probably her, Cousin 1 and Cousin 2). We all drove over to your parents’ house for some event around the holidays, and I thought everything was normal (whatever) until we got back and Cousin 2 was very quiet.  Finally she burst into tears and reported that your father had "felt her up."  We had a long conversation and Uncle was nominated to talk to him.  I don't know if it was in person, by phone or by email but the result was anger and a period of a couple years of not having any contact. Things got patched up and went along in a manner of co-existence for a while until the Thanksgiving after which Aunt C, your mom and I made a short " girl" trip. That ended rather badly when we met the men at the music center and then had dinner nearby. I remember your father as being particularly offensive and I let him know, I think via email.  He answered that I was too sensitive and should grow up. I answered that I was not going to argue about the past.  The only thing I asked was that in the future, if I asked him to stop a line of conversation or behavior, that he would. That apparently was the wrong thing to have asked because that produced a very long period of non communication.

 

On another note, what did Brother say about his health, other than that it is not good. I am feeling a little bit guilty because I still harbor resentment and anger, but I want to be supportive in a difficult time.

 

I replied as follows:

 

OK, so the reality was somewhere in between his version and what I imagined: not so organized or structured an event as I imagined, but clearly referencing concrete behavior rather than the evanescent nothings that show up in his version. Thank you.

 

Under the circumstances, I think anger and resentment are completely natural. Of course it’s good if you can avoid getting stuck in them forever, but the real reason it’s good is that anger and resentment are icky and unpleasant things to feel. Finding a way to extricate yourself from them isn’t so much an obligation, the way I see it, as it is just a happier way to live. What has helped me is that I finally came to understand that he really, truly, deeply, profoundly cannot see the other person’s point of view. At all. For a lot of years this frustrated me very much, because I really felt strongly that he OUGHT to be able to see the other person’s point of view. That’s a fundamental part of what it is to be an adult human being. Of course it is. But finally I came around to the point of view that asks, “All this frustration you’ve been feeling all these years, … what good is it doing you? All this moral indignation you’ve been feeling that your father refuses to grow up … is it making him grow up? Do you see any changes?” Putting the question that way, I realized that no, in all that time I had seen no changes. So was it doing me any good to expect it of him? Well if he hasn’t learned to grow up in the last four-to-five decades that I’ve known him, and if he hadn’t done it in the two-and-a-half decades before I was even born, then the odds are heavily against his finally seeing the light in the last couple of years before he dies. So I’ve decided to reclassify his behavior as a handicap. Some people have physical handicaps, because their eyes or legs don’t work right. Well, my dad has a moral handicap because his empathy gland doesn’t work right. That doesn’t mean I have to put myself in his path and allow myself to become a victim – quite the reverse! Just as – when you see a man walking down the street sweeping the ground in front of him with a white cane, you don’t stand squarely in front of him and expect him to go around you – so likewise with my father no reasonable person should put him- or herself into a position where you have to rely on his having empathy for you or your situation. On the other hand I’ve tried to give up feeling angry. For some reason (and I have theories – but no more than that – what that reason might be) he just CANNOT see the other person’s point of view or feel himself inside the other person’s skin. He OUGHT to, yes, but it ain’t gonna happen. So I don’t expect it any more. I’m sadder but less angry, and I think it’s an improvement.

 

All Brother told me about his physical situation is what I saw myself at Christmas only maybe more so. For years and years as he aged, he looked basically unchanged; but now it’s as if all the years have caught up with him at once. He looks like a very old man. He’s weak. He has no energy. He’s got a ton of medicines to take at different times throughout the day; and while Jim says he is NOT experiencing dementia or confusion, it’s hard for him to care enough about keeping them all straight. He’s very tired all the time and just doesn’t feel like doing anything. That’s what he was like at Christmas, and Brother tells me it’s much the same now only more so. It’s the kind of physical appearance that makes people start asking themselves how much time he has left, and saying things like, “Well I’m not saying he’ll go any time soon; he might have years left. I just don’t know.” It’s true, of course – nobody knows. But with some people it never even occurs to you to ask the question even when they are in their nineties. Looking at my dad these days, it occurs to you to ask the question.

 

 

 

 

Talking about Father, 2

Responding to my mail, Brother said:

 

To clarify, the confusion thing is not really like Alzheimer's-type confusion per se, just that there are some conflicting things and it seems hard for him to find the balance. It's not like he doesn't remember what pills he's already taken or what his name is.

 

As I understand it, the In-Law thing was quite specific. They arrived one day for some family event, and Dad hugged Cousin 2 in the wrong way (he's always especially liked her), and she felt uncomfortable about it and told her parents. When they talked to him, he resented their suggestions. "We can be very understanding, you know...", when he didn't think there was anything wrong in the first place, felt very patronizing to him. So he realized he'd had enough of them, having rarely gotten along with them for the previous 40 years anyway. Funny that they said they didn't know what it was about.

 

I think I have heard of them meeting up a few times in recent years, when they were passing through town, so maybe it's changed and no longer the full freeze-out.

 

Ultimately, I agree we have to be responsible for our own outlooks in life, but one's family is a special case. I don't think Dad looks back fondly on a life well-lived, because, well, he has so many regrets. It's just how he is, and I know he replays conversations in his mind. The big ones are probably career-based: He should have been a better businessman. He should have followed the acting thing and not have tried playing businessman at all. He should have been able to make a million doing home loans in his later years, because we all know how easy it is ... if you'll just follow these 10 easy steps. (I really hate what the get-rich-quick brigade has done to him, to say nothing of Fox News.) He didn't really need to work after selling the business, but to some extent he was just coasting on the business his parents built, so it may not feel like he made a killing in the [family] business. And he wasn't able to make anything happen after that because he was always looking for an easy way.

 

I think his family—us and your kids—are the one thing he can really feel proud of and good about. So, even though I don't have a lot to say to him sometimes, I try to hang in and listen to his stories, and something will come up. Even if you don't have anything to say to the old man, avoiding him in the hallway will have the effect of him thinking he's losing his son now, which has got to be one of the worst feelings, I imagine.

 

Yes, he's needy and insecure sometimes. Some of my growing up has certainly involved learning to be a parent to him. But he has been through a lot in life, as I suppose anyone that age has, and I wonder what he has to teach me still. For you, "making peace" might mean giving him a break and listening to his stories a few more times, making his life as nice as it can be, and trying to understand whatever you can of him—at the very least, not let him die wondering if is elder son hates him. I mean, nobody really has a lot to say to their dad, but you end up talking to him anyway. I think a good political argument would brighten his spirits. And he certainly has some notions that deserve a good take-down!

 

And my next installment ran:

 

I had to smile when you closed by saying Father has some notions that deserve a good take-down, but that particular job is one I no longer feel up for because he doesn’t listen. He’s appreciative of a part well-played, but sometimes it feels to me as if it would be all the same whether I engage him in an earnest political wrangle or recite the soliloquy from “Hamlet”. Either way it’s performance art, but he’s not going to reflect on what he’s heard. Or maybe he does for you – I can only speak from my own experience. But that experience is that he usually thinks I have said something different from what I really did say, and the next time we meet he has forgotten all about it. Not very rewarding on my side.

 

By comparison, it’s really easy to listen to his stories. If he would spend more time performing his own stories and less time asking me to be on stage presenting something of my own, it would be a lot easier for me.

 

Of course you are right that he doesn’t look back with contentment on a life well-lived, but I think he wouldn’t have anyway regardless what he had achieved in life. He is always second-guessing his past actions and berating himself over them. And I have to wonder, … how is it possible that he never, in all those years, realized the futility and pointlessness of brooding over the past? Worse – given that he’s never realized that – how much can any of us really do for him? Show up and listen to a story? That’s a quick fix, sure, but so is whiskey. So is television. What’s more, the whiskey and the television don’t have to go home at night because they don’t have to go to work in the morning, so as quick fixes go they are more reliable than we are. But I despair of being able to do more for him than that. He’s got to do it for himself, or it just won’t get done. And if the best I can offer him is the same quick fix he can get from whiskey and television, … well, it’s hard to feel excited about that.

 

In many ways the situation he’s in is a very sad one. I believe he has spent his whole life being afraid of other people and therefore holding them at arm’s length by trying to entertain them non-stop: because as long as the bullies are laughing, they aren’t beating you up. But he never lets up, and he’s never slowed down enough to reflect on what he’s doing or to understand it consciously. He doesn’t listen to the silence any better than he listens to other people. And so he has been running away his whole life.

 

To mix metaphors, he has painted himself into a corner. It’s really sad that he’s stuck in the corner, truly it is. But what are we to do when he has been the one clinging to the paintbrush for dear life all these years?

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

 

The In-Law thing is a special topic, so let me address it separately.

 

The version of the In-Law story that you told is the same one I’ve heard from him, but I suspect he misunderstood what happened. I wasn’t there, so everything I say is reconstruction. But he did make sideways remarks to the effect that Aunt C was there too – so that it included at any rate all the In-Law women (except possibly Cousin 1 who might have been out of the country) – and that everybody chimed in. Wait – they were all there? But they live in different places. That must have required some planning and organization. And I know that they have talked for years about wanting to do something, because they have all felt consistently uncomfortable around him … dating back to when he first married Mother and Aunt C was still a teenager and he would make remarks about her – in her hearing -- even then. My calling it an “intervention” (in the sense used here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intervention_(counseling)) is admittedly an interpolation on my part. But when Father first told me the story, the very first thought that sprang to mind was, “Gosh, so they finally did it.”

 

Anyway, I assume that no reasonable person could have made as big a deal as he describes out of as innocent a hug as he describes; and in my experience the In-Laws are reasonable people. For them to have gone on at such length, they have to have been talking about more than one hug – probably about the last fifty years, or some appreciable fraction of them. And I think Father just never understood that part because – as noted – he doesn’t listen. He reacts emotionally to a felt sense about whether the person talking to him is For Him or Agin’ Him, and he tunes out all the subtle details. But the subtle details matter: they make all the difference between “I hate you because I am a malicious asshole and your enemy” and “I love you but hate what you just did so please don’t do that thing again.” As near as I can tell, anybody who tells Father the latter runs a strong risk of being misunderstood as having said the former, even though the two sentiments are worlds apart.

 

Also, … did you hear the story from Christmas 1995 about Father groping one of Cousin 2’s breasts when he was drunk and he thought nobody else was watching? I heard it from Wife when we drove home from that very party – i.e., back in 1995. Admittedly some of Wife’s stories are pure fabrication. But she would have had nothing to gain by making this one up, and I saw with my own eyes that Father was more or less consistently drunk all his waking hours during at least the three days we were there. Aunt J says he kept it up after we left. Booze makes people bolder anyway, so I’ve always assumed that the story is likely true. And it would be far more believable to me that Cousin 2 could have brought that up as one in a series of examples designed to show a pattern, than that she would object to being hugged Hello. Again, when Father first told me the story about this bad meeting with the In-Laws, I assumed immediately that that must have been what they were talking about, but that he didn’t hear all the critical details like the words “back in 1995”.

 

I wasn’t there so I can only guess. But it’s a hypothesis that accounts for the data, and it pains me to say that it does not strain my credulity.

 

Time to get to work. Ciao ….

 

After that I decided to e-mail Aunt J, just to check whether my hypothetical reconstruction was correct. It wasn’t, and so a couple days later I sent Brother a correction:

 

Turns out I was wrong in my hypothesis about what happened with the In-Laws. I e-mailed Aunt J to check, and there was never any single big “intervention” … just an ongoing series of incidents followed by people talking to Father asking him not to do X or Y in the future, followed by him getting offended at being asked. She identified at least a couple of different times that the communication dropped off for more than a year over such events. The “don’t know” remark came from Uncle when I asked him last year, “What is all this about?” He shook his head and smiled sheepishly and said something like “Sheesh, I don’t really know myself.” (That’s not a direct quote.) Aunt J wasn’t there at that particular moment.

 

Sorry for assuming something more dramatic than really happened. I should have checked before: there is no substitute for getting your facts straight.

 

 

 

Talking about Father, 1

A few days ago, my aunt (call her Aunt J) e-mailed me to ask after Father’s health. Father hasn’t been well for some time, and just in the last couple of years he seems to have aged by a decade. On the other hand, I haven’t seen him since Christmas. (More or less on purpose, although it’s also true he lives three hours away from here.) So I e-mailed my brother to ask him how Father is doing, and he replied as follows:

 

Yeah, I was going to write you actually. He's been pretty weak for a while now. You saw the beginnings of it last time you were out there, I'm sure. He's just not his old hearty self. He's had the enlarged heart and various issues for a while now, but of late, he seems to have kind of given up. [My girlfriend] went out there a few days in a row to try to get him moving, do some stretching and move his legs. He just won't do anything! Which is fine if you're 16 and sitting on the couch, but he is wasting away. And he has myriad drugs and pieces of advice he's trying to follow, and he can't eat like used to, so I think it's all too confusing for him.

 

I have no idea where he's at with Uncle and Aunt J, and whether he wants you to share his health woes with them. Are they not still estranged? Is this too personal? Or do such things matter, if you love him and want him to be happy and better?

 

The last couple times we were there, he mentioned that you seem to have shut him out, that you can't seem to stand being in the same room with him. Not sure what you can do with that information, as I know it's a bit heavy. Maybe he was just prying into your private life and you didn't like that, or maybe there's something else. I do think you should consider making some sort of peace with it and with him, though. He could still hang on for a long time—I'm not predicting anything—but you never know.

 

We're going out there on Saturday for Mother's Day, and because they have some tickets to the symphony on Sunday that they can't use ... because Dad's not feeling up to it.

 

I answered back:

 

Thanks for the update.

 

Yes, the last time I saw him was Christmas, and he was weak then. In general he’s been getting older and weaker the last few years (as opposed to years or even decades before that when he seemed to be holding onto a plateau), but this was really accelerated. And it sounds like things are just continuing to accelerate.

 

Confusion, for example, sounds like a bad sign. For years it might have been iffy whether he was willing to comply with a doctor’s orders, but he generally knew what it was that he was refusing to do. If he is now losing track even of that, … well, it’s like the physical weakness but in some ways even more worrying.

 

As for Uncle and Aunt J, … when I asked them about this “estrangement” they said they didn’t understand it. Father just stopped returning calls and they got a call from Mother saying that she had to side with Father … but so far as I can tell they never really knew what it was about. And they have all talked together since then, perfectly amiably – or at least that’s what I hear. So maybe it is a thing of the past.

 

My HYPOTHESIS (I emphasize that word a few more times for good measure) is that it stemmed from a visit several years ago when the In-Laws collectively seemed to stage what AA calls an “intervention” related to Father’s frequent sexual innuendo around women. I’ve heard the story only from him, but apparently they tried to sit him down and explain the kinds of behaviors (both words and deeds) which have made people (especially women) uncomfortable around him for 50 years. Well, I don’t think he understood the point; in his telling of the story he felt that they were picking on him for no good reason, simply out of malice. I deduce that he must have felt acutely embarrassed. So I HYPOTHESIZE that this is what prompted him to stop speaking to them. As noted, I think it has worn off over the ensuing years because I have heard of them all meeting pleasantly in coffee shops since that time. And in fact my hypothesis might even have the time sequence wrong, so don’t take it too seriously.

 

As for myself, I think he may be overstating things somewhat. Somewhere along the line I realized that I don’t really have a lot to talk about with him, and I got tired of having to make up things to say just to be sprightly and entertaining. So I stopped. At one point he e-mailed me to ask why, and I explained that I just didn’t have a lot to say. He tried to talk me out of this (“You do too have a lot to say!”), but not very successfully. The business about visiting … hell, I don’t know. For years it has felt like he’s hunting me whenever I’m there, so he can lure me privately into a back room and … what? Talk … entertain … be sprightly … something like that. (It always feels a lot more predatory than that, but really there’s nothing else it could be.) And again, I just got tired of it. So I started declining invitations to hustle off into private rooms, and I spent more time hanging out with everybody else at the party. It’s not quite the same thing as being unable to tolerate being in the same room with him, but it probably looks like it from his perspective.

 

I understand that he might die soon … certainly the rapid decline doesn’t look good. I’m not sure what “making peace” would look like, since I don’t really believe he will spend eternity hovering over his gravesite bitter that things didn’t turn out better. I wish him no ill. Truly. But what I wish for him most of all is that he be able to look back on his years with contentment, and forward into the unknown with interest or curiosity; and I have no idea how to give that to him. Or to anybody, really … I think you have to give it to yourself. Am I wrong? Maybe so … tell me what you think.

 

I have to run, because Son 1’s plane lands in a few minutes. But I should be able to pick up the discussion tomorrow.