father's day

I was riding the D-train home yesterday with a friend of a friend after a lovely picnic in Sunset Park (banh mi and fresh strawberries and blueberry buckle and Vietnamese iced coffee), and this friend of a friend will be moving to Berlin in another few weeks. We were talking about living in Europe, and our experiences of Germany in particular, and it got me to remembering something I wrote ten years ago. Ten years later things feel less raw, less exposed somehow, and I'm glad to be where I am now, here on the verge of another collision of my birthday and Father's Day.

Spring 1999
My father was the kind of person with whom other people felt an immediate and lasting connection. He was the kind of person that people remembered later as being brilliant and funny and quirky and so human. He was quick to anger but, as so many people have told me over the years, his anger and sometimes overly-harsh criticisms were rooted in a deep passion and caring for others, for life.

My father liked to travel, he liked history, but that wasn't enough. He wanted to live in the places he read about in books, he wanted to live what others lived. He was a professor of history but I think for him academia wasn't enough: it fell flat, rang hollow. He was no historian living in that intellectual ivory tower; he was hungry -- insatiably hungry -- for experience. When he was writing his dissertation on the economic history of the Weimar Republic back in 1978 he dragged us off to Germany for a year, first to a farm in Ippendorf and then to the urban metropolis that was Bonn. Eleven years later, when he was just beginning the research for a book on the origins of the Great War, that ironically-named 'war to end all wars,' he dragged us off to Paris for a year. And everywhere that he went he left new friends behind who inevitably found their way to our door in California, or to the lake cabin in Idaho, or to our apartment in Paris or our home in Mohegan Lake. Everywhere we lived we seemed to have a steady stream of visitors, and he loved them all, and so we loved them all too, and though he's gone now we still get cards from some of them at Christmas time.

My father was an associate professor of European history at Barnard College, the women's college affiliated with Columbia University in New York City. He liked studying history but he preferred to live it. I think the most amazing time in his life, as a specifically German historian, was the winter we were living in Paris, and that Christmas we spent in Berlin, that winter of 1989/90, the winter that Wall came a-tumblin' down. It was the beginning of the end of the Cold War -- the opening of the Brandenburg Gate, the revolution in Romania, the thousands and thousands waiting to cross through Checkpoint Charlie and the newly-opened border, the chipping away of the Wall, of history itself. And he watched it all, drinking it in, grinning wildly, perhaps satiated.

My father, I know, has taken on near mythic proportions in my head. Larger than life, beautified (yes, almost beatified) sometimes beyond any recognition -- he was an amazing man and I am an idolizing daughter. I forget the times we fought, the times I screamed at him that I wished he wasn't my father, that I wasn't his daughter, that I hated him. It's easier, sometimes, to forget, to think that I was always good to him, but I am lying to myself. I know that. My father was a smart man, though, and I know that despite our fights he surely knew that I always loved him, surely understood that I wouldn't have bothered yelling at him, otherwise.

This is supposed to be about him, though, not me. In non-mythical measurements he was about 6 feet tall (maybe a little less), weighed about 180 pounds (maybe a little bit more). He had blondish hair that tended towards shagginess, frothing around his head in wild wisps and curls. When I was little he had a reddish orangeish mustache and beard. Years later he started to let them grow again but grew discouraged when he discovered they were coming in more gray than red and orange. He wore a suit to work most days but always looked a little uncomfortable, preferring instead his soft faded jeans and worn flannel shirts. He liked to brag that some of his advisees had blue hair and that he was friends with the mohawked security guard. He never smoked but he would hang out with the "smokers' brigade" in front of the Barnard library. He liked to tell us funny stories about his college kids at the dinner table sometimes. He had one advisee, a Columbia boy, who had earned his college money by riding new roller coasters all over the country, breaking time records. Once, when he took me to work with him one day, this particular student came into his office hours. After the student left I asked if he was the roller coaster boy. Dad, surprised, said, "Yes, how'd you know?" to which I allegedly replied, "He looked a little scrambled." I must have been eight or nine at the time. Dad took to bragging about this story for awhile.

My father died on April 18th, 1993, a week and a half before his 47th birthday, a beautiful Sunday afternoon a week after Easter. I was two months short of 17, a typical pseudo-angst-ridden suburban teenager, and suddenly I was handed on a silver platter a justification, a reason and an explanation, for my moodiness and dark clothes. Sometimes I feel like I'm stuck, like I'm still that pseudo-angst-ridden suburban teenager, even nearly six years later, even after four years in the middle of Manhattan. Sometimes, at 4 a.m., I am still that 16-year-old daughter watching from the sidelines as the mythical father's eyes roll back into his head.

I'm trying, these days, to take my father down from that pedestal, to de-mythologize him. If I can do that, if I can make him a normal person again, maybe I can be a normal person too. But this was supposed to be about him, about the mythical father, not me.



"papa went to other lands
and he found someone who understands
the ticking, and the western man's need to cry
he came back the other day, yeah, you know
some things in life may change
and some things
they stay the same

like time, there's always time
on my mind
so pass me by, i'll be fine
just give me time..."
(Damien Rice, Older Chests)