His Most Important Job? Dad
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One of my earliest memories is of looking up at my father, pinned against the sky, and thinking that the sky must be coming right though his eyes—they were the same shade of blue. His hand was large and folded around mine as we walked up a hill to fly kites. His hands would also hold me in the water as he taught me to swim, first in the pool and later in the ocean. He was a swimmer, a former lifeguard, and water was his element. I would swim through huge waves to follow him and listen to his instructions on how to ride a wave in to shore. I anchored my world around him—the sound of his voice, the expression in his eyes, the lessons he imparted about tides and currents and the pull of the moon. He would lift me onto the back of a horse and smile as he watched me fall in love with riding.
All these memories flooded back as I wrote my new book, Dear Mom and Dad, A Letter About Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew. I returned to the child looking up at the father she adored, but I also had to travel forward through time, to the teenager who resented America for claiming so much of him, and to the young adult who protested stridently when he was president—in part because she was following her beliefs, but also because it turned his attention toward her. For daughters, our fathers fill up a huge swath of the sky, even if we never knew them. Barbra Streisand dedicated her new book to her mother and “the father I never knew,” who died when she was 15 months old. She has no memories of him, yet he has hovered over her life. Lisa Marie Presley was nine when Elvis died, her time as his daughter cut tragically short. Yet before she died, she reportedly railed against a recent film about her parents, claiming that Elvis was portrayed unfairly, even though some of the film is outside the scope of her memory. Part of us will always be the little girl who looked up at our fathers, certain they had silver dust on their hands from hanging the moon.
Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter About Family, Memory, and the America We Once Knew
amazon.com
For those of us who have watched our fathers age, and often become ill, we stand beside the children we once were. We balance our memories against the sorrowful lessons of age and infirmity, and if we’re lucky we realize there are more lessons to be learned in that final stage of life. As Alzheimer’s lopped off present day realities and sent my father reeling back to his distant past, I saw the young nearsighted boy who was determined to make his mark in the world. I saw the gentle side of his nature, which dementia couldn’t steal. And I watched his eyes lose their blue and become grayish as he moved further and further out of reach—until just before he died, when he opened his eyes and they were blue again. In his final moments he taught me about miracles and mysteries, and even though he couldn’t physically reach out, I felt his hand around mine.
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