Father's Day

Nothing like some kind of officially ordained theme day to provide a deadline for a post I had been considering for a couple of weeks.

Hmm, thinking about my last post, on Courtly Love. The Church alternately condemned and tried to commandeer the Courtly Love philosophy - it's idolatrous, of course, even leaving aside the inevitable painfully lame evocations of Greek/Roman love deities, the adored and all-commanding love object makes a fleshy sort of idol. So the clergy could either try to hit with a rolled up newspaper its best (meaning: richest and most likely to execute inconvenient priestlings) clients, or try to convince them that they really meant the Blessed Virgin Mary all along. So much easier to rhyme than Hortensia anyway.

So the Sacred and the Profane - all these hungers for More or Other or Metasomething of Transomething else seem related, and as the hunger sharpens, the differences seem even smaller - like one would eat any edible. So this is why my father believed in all the modern versions: ESP, the Loch Ness monster, flying saucers, Bigfoot. All of them. The world HAD to be wonderful; we had to be something other than alone together. And when he went to some seance when I was 17 he asked where I would go to college.

I guess it's a hunger I share, but with my more corrosively cynical and analytic, more conventionally educated mind. There's that other kind of mysticism, that looks at, oh, I don't know, a flower or a cow - or a child - and wonders at the wonder of it all. I don't have that. Joy, yes, great joy - but if the child isn't a changeling (and consider the flipside of wonder, the terror of THAT possibility), well, wonder's not in it. But maybe that these things aren't real is the only reason there's wonder. After the initial freebase moment of the First Contact - maybe sharing a smelly office restroom with Mr. Spock would take all the Otherness out of it.

And there's something about what my father didn't want - the reason why he supported George Wallace and other rightwingers, before disappearing for a while into an invisible libertarianism. There was a great "no" there to things as they were to go along with the "yes" to things that weren't. And the sense of loss, or betrayal, of things being less than they should have been, of being lied to.

So after talking about retirement for years, of fishing and traveling. Why did he give all his fishing equipment away the day he and and Mom moved to sad Mohave Valley, at the border of Arizona and Nevada and on the Colorado River. After being for so long the only one of us who was genuinely warm and loved people, why did he constantly turn down social (and fishing!) invitations? The three hours daily of listening to bitter, hypocritical dishonesty from Rush Limbaugh, well - that I knew. The $10,000 on a scheme I could tell was fraudulent from the first paragraph of the come-on letter? Yes, familiar too - we'd had a number of those missteps throughout all our years as a family - and superficial; it wasn't going to make a difference. And - heartbreakingly - the electronic emissions machine to cure cancer he got from somewhere so he could set up a clinic with his neighbor - that he ended up using on himself - and all of us helped him use - as he was dying from it. He knew what I thought about it and all the rest, as part of our core family morality - the morality that meant it took me a decade and hundreds of games before I finally beat him. He never let me. We don't. Because it wouldn't be real.

But I remember something else about imagination and my father. In the evenings when my sisters and I were very young, in the evenings we used to visit with Snakey - Dad's four fingers and thumb talking at us in the persona of a clever snake who lived in the heating vents of our Southern California tract home, who knew many things. So, did we believe it? I mean, that thing was pretty clearly a hand there and my father's attempt to keep his lips from moving was for the sake of honor - not effectiveness. But it didn't have that airy feeling of our own various make-believes. It was solid and a benevolent snake cruised the heating ducts of that house - I still can't picture one of the grills without picturing a pair of bright eyes peeking out.

Wonder if that's how my daughters felt that way about Spidey, the spider I made with my hand when they were young?