My father was an excellent speller. After he retired, he and my mother did the New York Times crossword every day at lunch. My mother is very good at crosswords but has a tendancy to swap vowels and create other unusual spellings. My father relished knowing the correct order of letters.
He shared with my mother a devotion to proper grammar. Shortly after my father died, my mother, an English teacher from an era when sentences were regularly diagrammed, told me, "I think I fell in love with your father because of his complex sentences." After a pause, she added, "And maybe he fell in love with me because I could tell him why they were beautiful."
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Monday, December 27, 2010
In memoriam
My father died at 4 am on Monday, December 6, 2010. His last few months were a struggle, for him, for my mother, for me, for their close friends. The images of him bedridden are powerful and hard to overcome. I am trying to remember earlier times. I will record here pieces of those memories.
Before standing for any length of time became difficult, my father loved to cook. He cooked turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Occasionally he digressed with a goose or a duck, but he always came back to turkeys. He cooked oysters, grilled or steamed open, and oyster stew was the traditional New Year's Eve meal in our house.
When I was a kid, he often baked brownies on Saturdays. He liked them with nuts, but he would grudgingly substitute raisins for me. This was but one of many ways I complicated his gourmet plans. The most notable and long-standing obstruction I created was becoming a vegetarian at 13.
My father cooked and ate as relaxation and distraction, from work before retirement and from his own ailments later on in life. He did not relish the challenges posed by other people's needs and demands. He wanted an enthusiastic and largely undemanding audience for his meals. I fought with him over food--my father and I both subscribed to some version of "you are what you eat," so what to place on the table was an existential question.
I preached the evils of his nightly bowl, or bowls, of ice cream, which became more and more of an obsession for him. When he was starting to have mobility problems the summer before he died, I refused to get him his second serving of ice cream, and defiantly he went to get it himself. He fell in front of the refrigerator, the first of a couple of falls. Of course, I felt guilty--am I then the self-righteous daughter who denies her ailing father his small pleasures, causing him injury? He was not above creating this narrative himself, but he would not have planned an actual fall. This fall and the subsequent one caused no broken bones, but some bad bruises and an increasing family feeling of helplessness.
And so the memories of earlier times keep coming back to more recent times. The culmination of everything, it seems. How do you come to a place where the end is not the culmination but merely a phase, a "transition" time?
Before standing for any length of time became difficult, my father loved to cook. He cooked turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Occasionally he digressed with a goose or a duck, but he always came back to turkeys. He cooked oysters, grilled or steamed open, and oyster stew was the traditional New Year's Eve meal in our house.
When I was a kid, he often baked brownies on Saturdays. He liked them with nuts, but he would grudgingly substitute raisins for me. This was but one of many ways I complicated his gourmet plans. The most notable and long-standing obstruction I created was becoming a vegetarian at 13.
My father cooked and ate as relaxation and distraction, from work before retirement and from his own ailments later on in life. He did not relish the challenges posed by other people's needs and demands. He wanted an enthusiastic and largely undemanding audience for his meals. I fought with him over food--my father and I both subscribed to some version of "you are what you eat," so what to place on the table was an existential question.
I preached the evils of his nightly bowl, or bowls, of ice cream, which became more and more of an obsession for him. When he was starting to have mobility problems the summer before he died, I refused to get him his second serving of ice cream, and defiantly he went to get it himself. He fell in front of the refrigerator, the first of a couple of falls. Of course, I felt guilty--am I then the self-righteous daughter who denies her ailing father his small pleasures, causing him injury? He was not above creating this narrative himself, but he would not have planned an actual fall. This fall and the subsequent one caused no broken bones, but some bad bruises and an increasing family feeling of helplessness.
And so the memories of earlier times keep coming back to more recent times. The culmination of everything, it seems. How do you come to a place where the end is not the culmination but merely a phase, a "transition" time?
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