The summer we escaped from Dad and stayed at Aunt Alice
and Uncle George’s summer home, I would hear Mom crying in her room at
night. At the time I thought it was all
about the breakup of her marriage and the end of a love relationship – and I
couldn’t understand why she would be so sad about that, under the
circumstances. Years later, as a parent
myself, I understood that she was grieving more for Donald and me than anything
else. At the time, I thought it affected
Donald more than me, since I was 16 and “understood these things,” while he was
only 13. When I was ready to hear it,
Mom pointed out that in the year leading up to our desperate run to freedom, I
had run away from home for a few days (until they found me hanging out at the
A&W); I had quit the football team (which I loved), failed the 11th
grade, started smoking and drinking (she knew about the drinking?)…In fact it
probably has affected me in one way or another to this day. Not being a psychiatrist and not ever having
been to one, I am not going to speculate further at this point.
As a parent now of grown children who have their own
families, I can see where I could have done a better job. It started with noticing and commenting on
the fact that my son and both sons-in-law were much better fathers than I
was. They were more mature and ready to
be fathers. Of course that’s literally
true, as they were all much older than I was when they married and became
fathers. But also, they just seem to be
better at it. In turn, I considered that
I did the best I knew how, based on my upbringing and who I was. Then it dawned on me that my father had
probably done the best that he knew how, based on his upbringing, and who he
was. And then, who raised him? Based on what? I choose to believe that I did the best I
knew how, and Dad and Popu in their turns did the best they knew how. Same goes for Mom. She did the best she knew how. Finding fault or placing blame is misguided
and pointless, is it not? The poet and
author, Maya Angelou, summed it up succinctly in quoting her own mother: “I did
what I knew; and when I knew better, I did better.”
Actually, I have some good traits, and I must have picked
them up somewhere – as in the way I was raised by my parents. As mentioned elsewhere, both Donald and I
left New York for California, took advantage of the great education system
here, and not only graduated from college, but earned advanced degrees, as
well. Considering the environments we
were raised in, the likelihood of that happening in both cases – two for two –
seems very small. We must have picked up
some values and some abilities from our parents that are not easy to pin point
or describe. But we must give credit
where credit is due.
I don’t recall seeing Dad read books, although he often
referred to some characters and stories that came from books he had read. He often talked about Plato and Socrates;
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, among others. He also liked John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and
Men, and Travels with Charlie in Search of America. I have since read most of Steinbeck’s novels,
some of Plato and Socrates; and Thoreau’s Walden. I don’t recall getting into Emerson. I think I started Walden twice and dropped it
both times because Thoreau is so negative.
He finds fault with everything. I
don’t mind an author or a philosopher who points out the folly or
inconsistencies of our humanity, or who makes us think by challenging the
dominant paradigms, but Thoreau seems to say, “You are all a bunch of idiots
for going along with this travesty, you poor pathetic dummies.”
Dad could find fault with anything, and he usually
did. As an example, Dad one time railed
against the evolution of men’s shaving:
At one time men mixed their shaving cream in a bowl and applied it with
a stubby little brush. Maybe you have
seen that in a scene from an old movie.
Anyway, now we squirt the shaving cream into our hand and apply it with
our fingers. He lamented modern society’s definition of progress. That is the kind of nit-picking fault-finding
that I found with Thoreau.
I have a hunch I picked up my love of reading, and
perhaps my intellectual bent, from Dad. Unlike me, however, Dad had definite
opinions on everything, and would announce them as if they were
incontrovertible and final. I’m almost
the opposite. If I have opinions, they
are not strongly held, and may be changed by anyone who speaks with
conviction. I like to think it is
because I can see both sides and/or I understand that I may not have all the
facts, or the facts may have been distorted by the media. I mentioned that if I had to choose one word
to describe life, the word would be “funny.”
Well, if I had to choose one word to describe my attitude towards life, the word would be “whatever.” To the extent I state opinions or points of
view throughout this document; it is for the purpose of giving insight or
examples as to how my mind works (or doesn’t work). It is for the purpose of leaving a trail as
to what I was like, not to persuade others that I was right about anything.
I just came across another way to explain myself. In her first book in a series about her
family, author Lisa See has one of her characters, a Chinese-American born and
raised in the Los Angeles area, describing her return from a visit to China. She says, “When I returned from China, I
found here a restless seeking for something that couldn’t be found. The Chinese found it many years ago – a sort
of serenity, an inner calm that comes from the understanding of life.” She had previously discussed how Chinese
culture and history is so much older than Western civilization and,
accordingly, results in very different kinds of people. I am not saying that I have any Chinese
heritage or suggesting that I have “the understanding of life,” but I do seem
to have an “old soul,” and that may be one of the sources of my “whatever”
attitude.
Aunt Dot recalls how Dad (her younger brother) would
complain to their parents about the way she would sit in a chair doing
homework, for example, in what he considered an unladylike position; or that
she was wearing too much lipstick, or something. This reminds me that Greece is not so far
removed from the Middle East, and he seems to have been reflective of the
religious, legalistic mind set of the men towards women that prevails there
even more so today. He was also against
make up, dancing, rock ‘n roll, side burns…you name it. Sadly, he also explained to me on more than
one occasion after the separation that he didn’t hate Mom; he hated what she
represented (whatever that means). It
reminds me of the way Muslims, even Muslims in America, call the rest of us
“infidels” and “unbelievers.” No attempt
to give the benefit of the doubt; no attempt to understand; no tendency to love
and appreciate other human beings unless they think as we do.
If anyone challenged Dad on any of his pet beliefs he
would announce that he had read the bible straight through from start to finish
– Genesis to Revelations – and ask whether his challenger could say the same
thing. If not (and very few people can
say they have), then there was no basis for arguing…he was right. It is like the saying, “I would have a battle
of wits with you, but you are unarmed.”
Many years later, during what I will call my “born again” phase
addressed elsewhere, I learned that the bible is something that needs to be
studied and discussed in great depth and width, under the tutelage of more
learned people, over a long period of time, in order to be understood in all
it’s important areas. Reading it from
cover to cover on one’s own is so futile it is laughable. But I didn’t know that then, and neither did
he, so I was appropriately intimidated, and he was correspondingly
self-righteous and arrogant about it.
In much the same way, Donald, Mom and I thought that Dad
was very intelligent because he talked about issues and concepts that we never
thought of. Years later (again) I
realized that he was getting his talking points from the editorials and “op-ed”
articles in the daily newspaper. Since
none of the rest of us was reading the newspaper, we had no idea that he was
basically just repeating what he was reading.
We thought he was so smart! It is
an example of the saying, “In the land of the blind, the man with one eye is
king.” By the way, nearly every
household subscribed to the daily newspaper in those days. I think that television was not considered to
be a good source of relevant and complete news, especially not local news back
then. Now of course we have huge blocks
of TV time and beautiful men and women devoted to bringing us the latest, along
with visuals, as fast as they can get it – half baked or not. With CNN we even have a station bringing us
“news” 24-hours per day, 7 days per week.
It is very repetitious overkill, plus “filler news” that only a small
percentage of viewers would care about at all.
A little off the subject, but Dad liked to inform us that
he voted for the man, not the party, but that the Democrats were “for the
little guy,” so his favorite man was usually a Democrat. I think even then it occurred to me that,
given our system of “one man – one vote,” the man and the party that was for
“the little guy” would always get elected, since there were a lot more “little
guys” than wealthy big shots. If it is
not working out that way, then either a lot of “little guys” didn’t agree with
Dad, or the big shots were pulling a fast one on us, somehow. In those days, the little guys were the
“working class,” who actually worked, paid taxes and voted.
Growing up on Long Island there were more than a handful
of occasions when we would be enjoying a treat, or sitting on the beach, or
sitting in someone’s shady backyard on a hot day, and someone would say, “I
wonder what the poor people are doing now!”
The so-called joke was that it was as if the speaker didn’t know that we
were the poor people. We were
blue-collar working class, but it seems like we didn’t hear of any significant
group of people that weren’t working at all – and would therefore be the real
“poor.” I’m sure there were some, but
loosely speaking the folks on the bottom of the socio-economic scale were
thought of and referred to as “the working class.” Now we have “the working poor,” the people
working for minimum wage, who are worse off than what we thought of as the
bottom of the scale back in our day.
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