Ten Random Things about my Dad

I meant to write this yesterday, but I figure that only one day after Father's Day (which we didn't really celebrate in my family when I was a child, maybe because it hadn't yet gained official status) is good enough. I don't really know what my "ten random things" will be; this is a blogging adventure in which I trust I will find out.

1. My dad's birth and death were near each other, both geographically and on the calendar. He was born in a house barely half a mile from the house in which he died, the house in which I spent my whole childhood, where my parents and siblings had lived for several years before I was born. His birthday (and my parents' wedding anniversary) was June 1, his death day June 10.

2. My father whistled and hummed. A lot. His whistling was pleasant to listen to. His humming, which sometimes involved chewing his tongue if we was working hard on something, was charming to me, though not everyone heard it that way. He was kind of known in our small dead-end street neighborhood for his unique hum. I suppose it had a sort of droning quality--a little bagpipe-ish?

3.  Dad loved to sail. We lived near the ocean, and he tolerated a long commute to work and back for the sake of living near the water and being able to sail easily in summer. This was his time of year, I suppose--when long days allowed for a sail even after a day's work and the homeward commute. An evening sail sometimes became a moonlit sail, or even a moonlit drift, since the wind often dies in the evenings.

Photos of my dad as a very young boy often feature sail boats. In one he holds a model sailboat in his hands (he also is wearing a sailor suit, as is his older sister--clearly a fashionable item around 1920); in another he crouches by the edge of a pond, his father bends over behind him, as they launch a small boat (the same one?) into the pond.

4. Like me, he was the youngest child in his family. I don't know what that means exactly, but I sometimes think of us as having that kinship of being "youngests." I also share his blue eye color, along with my brother David, though Dad's and David's eyes may be more sky blue than mine.

5. My father had a temper, though I rarely remember it being directed at a person (others in my family may remember differently). Mostly at objects that weren't cooperating with his designs--such as when he attempted some sort of repair job. And at paying the bills. My dad did not like paying the bills, which in those days included courtesy accounts at the local grocery store, liquor store, drug store, etc. I imagine some of my own very mixed-bag of feelings about money might have something to do with that.

6. Speaking of my dad and money, one of my earliest memories of money has to do with a rudimentary magic trick my dad would play on us and for us--in which he would make a nickel disappear and reappear, from his sleeve or something. He would show me his empty hand, then "find" the coin behind my ear and produce it for proof. I like that memory of money magic better than the memory of his unhappiness when paying bills.

7. Dad was very bright, witty, and curious about the world, and was an avid reader of Scientific American, National Geographic, and Smithsonian magazines. He did the math puzzles in Scientific American. He was an electrical engineer and used math all the time, I suppose! If I asked him for help with math homework, he would usually end up reading the text book. He certainly did not simply give me the answers.

He played games with us when we were small children--"Trot Trot to Boston" and "This is the way the lady rides" on his knees. He said bedtime prayers with us and sang "Day is Done." Every night, I think, for quite a few years.

8. My father was a pretty complex person (aren't we all?). He could be charming and a great story teller, but I think he was not necessarily a happy man. Some of that no doubt stems from his own childhood and upbringing and family tree; some relates to the death of my oldest brother when he was not yet eight years old.

I know that many marriages suffer and even fall apart following the death of a child. My parents stayed married, but I have a feeling that my brother's death and my parents' grief, unaided by "modern" psychotherapy or understandings of the grieving process, sent tremors and fault lines through their marriage and our family. More than I yet fully understand, I think ours was a grieving family, or a family in which grief had gotten buried rather than being grieved in a healthy way.

In the shifting planes and plates of my childhood and my parents' marriage, I think my dad and I came to share another, harder to articulate, reality--to some degree we were both on the outside of my mother's inner circle of intimacy which became more exclusively centered on my sister.

9. I won't claim some pinnacle of "ideal dad" perfection for my father, though I think he was more present than many of the dads of his generation. For all his complexities, I do believe he loved me (and my mother and siblings) as best he could. I know that he cared about what I was up to, what I was thinking, what I hoped to do with my life.

Sometimes we talked ideas, like theology, but given that my thinking was not yet very nuanced or sophisticated, I can't say it was an full or even exchange. I have often wished my father were still alive to discuss things and enjoy discoveries with me--not to mention to meet David, Bekah and Anna; to see that I ended up ordained and then got "un-ordained," to see my paintings.

10. My father died thirty-two years ago when I was only twenty-five, meaning, I've now lived several more years without him physically present and alive than I lived with him. Given that I was twenty-five and headed to seminary and not all that good at acknowledging, let alone processing, "negative" emotions, perhaps I never really grieved my father's death. (Maybe I followed the family pattern and buried my grief rather than allowing it to be experienced, expressed, and to move through me!)

I realize some days that I feel hungry for traces of my father. I don't know how else to describe it. When I was helping to pack up my mother's condo to move her to assisted living, I felt as if I were on an archeological dig looking for artifacts of my dad--old photos, his handwriting on an envelope, a letter or postcard. It's not as if I set out to do that. It's more that I experienced that searching energy rising up in me unexpectedly, unbidden. Hoping for a tether. A tangible connection.

Maybe I am looking in the wrong kinds of places for the wrong kinds of "traces" of my dad. Maybe he's more present to me than I think, more a part of me than I know. I saw a recent photo of myself and was astonished to see my father's face in mine---all the more so because I've always thought I looked much more like my mother! Which doesn't mean I don't or shouldn't miss him still.

I do miss him still. Especially on a clear, sparkling day in June with a nice breeze perfect for sailing. Such was the weather on the day my dad died. I remember feeling an intense disjuncture between the horrendous hollow of grief I was feeling and the breath-taking beauty of the day. Thankfully it had also been that same kind of weather the day before dad died, and he had spent the afternoon sailing his boat.

PS. I am wishing I had a photo or two of my dad to add to this blog. Since he died long before the days of digital photography, I don't happen to have one in my iPhoto collection. Some day when I get one scanned, I will add it in.

Renouncing my Ordination Vows: One Year Out

To continue the story from my latest post, "Looking back, looking forward," I consider my renunciation of the ordained ministry to be a break for freedom, a coming out party, and the laying down of a very heavy burden. Yet however light-hearted that may sound, it was anything but easy. There was death, there was grief, there was fear. There were no guarantees. 

Was I making a mistake? Would I some day come to regret taking this essentially irreversible step? Maybe. Maybe not. 

On Sunday, March 31 I awoke feeling heavy, raw, and vulnerable. The enormity of what I was doing had really taken hold of me the day before when I'd received in the mail copies of the documents that I and the bishop and witnesses would sign on April 3, Thursday, just a few days away.I had read and discussed the contents with the bishop, but this was the first time I actually held copies in my hands. 

Grief for what I was leaving behind and fear, especially fear, obscured the clarity I had known for most of the past several weeks. Tears were just below the surface. I told myself to tread softly, to be gentle with myself, and maybe I could avoid a major meltdown. 

"It's not that I'm changing my mind," I told David on Saturday after the mail had come. "It's just hard. Really really hard."

On Sunday, per my usual morning habit, I sipped my mug of tea and wrote  a little in my journal, though that didn't seem to help any. I found myself remembering something a friend had told me several weeks before, that when she is struggling to get clear about something, she finds it helpful to clean out clutter. Meaning: physically sort and clear out material stuff from some part of your home. I had already found this helpful, though never in a clear, linear, cause-effect kind of way. It was just that things I'd been mulling over would somehow resolve and get clearer after I did some sorting and tossing.

"OK," I said to myself as I left my small upstairs study and headed downstairs, still wearing my morning outfit of nightgown, hooded fleece, and sweatpants. "Just pick one small task, one shelf of books. That's all you have to do. Just do that." 

I chose one short section of bookcase in our dining room where the extra books were tucked sideways over the upright ones. A box for collecting give-aways was already there from the last time I'd worked on these shelves. 

I worked along quickly and easily without stopping to browse or to give much thought to each book. I seemed uncharacteristically decisive: some I left on the shelf; some went in the box. No looking back!

I worked from right to left until only two books remained. I saw their titles and stared. 

Death in Holy Orders, by P. D. James.

And  Living Free, by Joy Adamson.

"OK," I said. "I get it." I started to laugh, and probably cry, too.  "I get it. I remember why I'm doing this."

Somehow I knew I would be OK. Not that everything would be rosy and simple, but that I would survive. I could renounce my ordination vows, and I would be fine, maybe even more than fine.

"Thank you. Thank you. Thank you."

When Thursday morning rolled around, I knew I would tell this story at my "renunciation ceremony" in Emmanuel Chapel at the Cathedral. I had asked the bishop for a chance to say something, although at the time I hadn't known what I would say. I brought the two books with me as visual aids and to add a little drama and humor to the day.

I also gave out cards of a drawing of yellow tulips I had done for David's good friend Nat on his birthday. I've been wondering just how to mark this day today. Maybe a bunch of yellow tulips would be just the thing.

Looking back, looking forward

Moments ago as I sat at my computer trying to decide whether I wanted to post this image or not, the sun broke through the morning clouds and illuminated the trees out the window (some of the same trees as in the painting). They were  brilliantly yet fleetingly ablaze with what I call "Irish light"--the particular quality and intensity of sunlight born of overshadowing clouds' breaking up, and clear air, often after a rainstorm has washed things clean and left surfaces ready to glisten. 

(A digression: Maine light and Irish light have a lot in common. But Ireland gets lots more rainbows, probably because the rainstorms are more frequent, and more often mingled with sunshine, and (if you're lucky) they are more fleeting.)

The trees this morning were briefly illuminated as in the painting, but of course from the right rather than from the left, that would be from the east rather than from the west. It was enough to prod me to include the painting in this post.

My hesitation? I think there's a little touch of sadness for me in this painting, although I don't believe I was feeling sad when I painted it. I think it's something about that dark, somewhat brooding background, and also the knowledge that it was painted in September (its title is "Afternoon light, September"). There's always something poignant about the beauty of autumn, at least for me, due to our knowing that the earth is entering its dying season, and that winter's hunkering down is not far off. (And here we are, back in real time, and it's the last day of March, and the snow piles still linger, though they are dwindling daily!) And the beauty of afternoon shares that same rhythm on a smaller scale; we know it is the prelude to the dying of the day (which of course allows for the very different, mysterious beauties of the night).

Somehow this painting, with that hint of sadness (do others see and feel it? or is it just me?), feels appropriate to the present moment for me. Last year at this time, I was just days away from formally renouncing my ordination vows, and the enormity of that step, however much I felt it to be right and good, was very much with me. Those last few days were kind of an autumn/winter time of allowing myself to let go of something that had been part of me for almost half my life (twenty-six of fifty-four years, if you count the years I spent in seminary). I felt very vulnerable and quite sad through those days, and I tried to give myself room to grieve in anticipation of the big day. I sense that I'm revisiting those days right now as I approach the first anniversary of my renunciation on April 3. 

"Renunciation of the Ordained Ministry" is, by the way, the official, canonical name in the Episcopal Church for what I chose to do. It's a somber, serious name for a somber, serious step, one not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, if I may borrow some language from another, more familiar, liturgy. I consider my renunciation to have been more truly a break for freedom, a coming out party, the laying down of a very heavy burden--you get the idea. 

But however lighthearted that sounds, don't be fooled. There was death, there was grief, there was fear. There were no guarantees. There were also some surprising gifts in those days (and not exactly the kinds of gifts one normally associates with dying and grief). Which is to say: more stories are on the way.