This essay will appear
one day after my father’s
birthday. I do not have
much that is concrete to hang
on to since he died when I
was two and a half, sixty-three
years ago.
Add three years and that
will be my age early next
month. But I do have stories,
told to me by my mother and
several relatives. One of the
things that I have learned over
the years is that memories,
replete with their images, are
often more powerful than the
realities that they represent.
I felt that way quite starkly
when I finally got around to
visiting Thoreau’s Walden
Pond. I had a great day walking
the pond’s perimeter,
standing in the middle of the
small plot of ground that was
his cabin, and sitting on the
bank he sat on
musing on the
pond’s innate
wisdoms and
nature’s infinite
capacity to
teach us all we
will ever need
to know about
ourselves and
our preciously
short existence.
Today’s Walden
Pond has a
public beach,
its perimeter
path is littered
here and there
with trash, and
the silence that
so buoyed Thoreau’s
spirit has dissipated,
replaced by the sounds and
vestiges of modern life. There
is something to be said for
staying away
from mythical
places.
One of
my mother’s
favorite
stories about
my father is
about how he
would come
home from
his office, often
late, and
pick me up
and carry me
around the
Oriental rug
in his office.
At the height
of his career
he was the
country’s leading theater architect.
As a result, he worked
long hours and was away
from home often. I did not
have to be crying or cranky;
he just wanted to spend some
time holding me.
I can not claim to have any
immediate memory of those
moments.
But now, when I hold my
grandson Grant in my arms
and walk around the rug in
his living room humming the
tunes to him that I hummed
to his dad, it is as if time has
backtracked on itself and I am
my father and Grant is me.
The void deepened within me
over the years by his palpable
absence closes, if just for a
few moments, and I feel my
father presence in so tangible
a way that it is impossible
to describe. These are rare
moments of pure joy to hold
on to.
In ``The Brother’s Karamazov,’’
Dostoyevsky writes, "
that there is nothing higher
and stronger and more wholesome
and good for life than
some good memory, especially
a memory of childhood.’’
Mine is not an actual memory.
But it is a memory nonetheless,
a quite powerful one that
has always had the effect on
me of what Wordsworth calls
``a renovating virtue.’’
Pictures also have a way of
either conjuring up the past or
creating a memory that is as
meaningful, and useful, as any
rooted in real experience. Earlier
this year my cousin Fred
sent me several photographs
of my paternal grandparents,
neither of whom I ever knew.
One picture of them, standing
arm in arm, and seeming
to be looking right at me, sits
atop my desk.
My mother and father are
to their right, and my son Tim,
their grandson, sits to their
left. It is as close as we have
ever come to being together.
If I include myself, it is the
closest we have ever come to
a family gathering.
And the wonderful part
of it is that every day when I
turn on my desk lamp before
first light and see my family it
is as if time and death never
happened.
The pictures animate both
past experience and imagined
experience. Both are equally
powerful.
I would like to think that
each of us carries such lovely
baggage and that as we travel
through life and time from
year to year these moments
in our lives serve to wash
away the despair so easily felt
in light of humankind's increasingly
adept capacity for
self-destruction. Perhaps, to
