Typing into the night

My dad used to apologize to us kids that he wasn't the best father around. As a child, I mostly ignored his comments but would wonder what a 'best' father was like. Did he give his only daughter a tiara for her 5th birthday? Did he let her have as many puppies as she wanted? Did he make a rule that said she didn't HAVE to clean her room every week? Did he buy her a horse she could ride every day? Did he offer to pay her education through Yale or Harvard or Stanford?

When I reached adulthood, my dad would continue to repeat his mantra. "I am not the best Dad around." Suddenly I reached the age where I knew he didn't have to be the best dad around - he just had to be my dad. I knew Dad tried hard at everything he did. He was competitive that way. He was driven - not just in his work, but in his golf game, in his evening of game of basketball HORSE down in the driveway, in his way he cared for his family.

And then when Dad retired, he decided he needed to write. By then, he and my mom had moved to a summer home in the mountains. A couple weekends a month, I would drive up to their retreat and deliver their mail, the latest local news, and endless reams of typing paper for Dad's project. Every six weeks I included a new typewriter ribbon and more "White-out" for his mistakes.

And every day, Dad would type. He'd put his typewriter on the breakfast bar; he'd sit at the barstool for hours, pecking away at the keyboard. He'd chew his pipe. He'd drink endless mugs of coffee. He wouldn't talk - he'd type.

Mom and I used to wonder to each other "What can he be writing?". When we'd ask him, he wouldn't answer. He'd frown over his glasses, he'd clamp harder down on his pipe stem. And he type with a newer fury.

So Mom and I decided he was writing his memoirs. Pages and pages of his history. Each finished page was removed from the typewriter and put in a manila folder. Page after page filled the folder. Pages of words, of whiteout stripes, of coffee stains.  Pages we never had a chance to read.

Today, I think of Dad as I read Billy Collins' poem Royal Aristocrat

My old typewriter used to make so much noise
I had to put a cushion of newspaper
beneath it late at night
so as not to wake the whole house.
 
...one burst after another
as my wife turned in her sleep.
I was a single monkey
trying to type the opening lines of my Hamlet,
often doing nothing more
than ironing pieces of paper in the platen
then wrinkling them into balls
to flick into the wicker basket....

... Such deep silence on those nights —
just the sound of my typing
and a few stars singing a song their mother
sang when they were mere babies in the sky.

We never found Dad's memorior. I have no idea where he put it, if he finished it, what it said.
But he was still the best Dad in the world.

The informal education

When I was 5 years old, my parents announced we were all moving overseas. Probably Bolivia, or Brazil. Or was it to be Chile? Hmmm, the corporate office was still spinning the little spinner on the map. 

My father, Hoop, did promise us we'd benefit from the education of a lifetime. Brother Iilya and I thought 'he means were going to school down there, too. No breaks for us.'

But what Hoop really meant was that our education wouldn't just be formal, school taught. It would be a collection of all we saw, all we heard, all we lived.  Hoop wasn't referring to any country's school system or any boarding school we might be sent off to; he meant our life was now our textbook. And we better study it well.

Religious education is one class that certainly did not have walls for us. Hoop was raised in a household where Sunday was 'hangover hell.' As a child, he'd leave home early on Sunday and wait until dark to return, letting his parents sleep off their Saturday night drinks. If by chance Hoop went to church, it would have been a sympathetic aunt or neighbor who would drag him there. Mom, on the other hand, grew up in a very strict German Lutheran family. Everything about her childhood was overshadowed by strict rules, fears, and routines. 

My religious education became a bit of every country we lived in, every hymn or prayer we shared with strangers. When my best friend, Mary, took her first communion as a Catholic, I was not allowed to attend. Instead, I waited at her house for the 'tea and crumpets' party that followed. We believed our little sips of tea in our teacups were the blood of Christ, and we song pretty songs from a catholic songbook her parents had. The afternoon was pure and white and fragile.

The only real 'church' songs I knew were ones I learned from records we had. Mom had a collection Newport Jazz Festival albums, and a gospel song or two usually showed up there. She also had a nice selection of Mahalia Jackson albums, and I learned "His Eye is on the Sparrow".  From Hoop's scratchy copy of a Statler Brother's album, I learned "The Twelve Apostle Braves" 

"Simon Peter, Andrew, James, Phillip, Thomas, Matthew
Bartholomew, Simon, Judas, Judas, James, John.

...And Thomas he'll go with you don't you doubt it for a minute..."

When we settled in India, my mom reached deep for her faith. She taught us the non-book side of religion, the kind that cannot be recited from memory. The kind that doesn't live in cathedrals or in gold crosses; the kind that tithing cannot buy.

Hoop called it her 'fisherman faith'. He told me he got that from a parable. I think he got it from "living" the world and finding that having faith, like fishing, is yours once you are shown how.