This jibes SO well with what Bill's mother is doing, as the stories all take place when the important people in her life (her husband, close friends and family of origin) were alive.
It would have to be that way, wouldn't it?
I wonder if everyone does it to some degree, reliving in one's mind certain reassuring events that made one feel one's best, fleetingly and not aloud, but still reliving it. I suppose everybody does and it's just called daydreaming or remembering-what-happened, until one's reality fades and shrinks to the degree that those daydreams seem more real than Monday.
And (she says in her best Viennese accent), you're so lucky to have had a father worthy of adoration. I envy you so.
But how about the curse of having to live with the knowledge that he could have saved the world, if people had just realized, how about THAT, huh?
He really was a wonderful man. And father. Here's a story, speaking of reliving the past. I was maybe eight, I'd guess.
Daddy was given an expensive pen as a gift by some of the people who worked under him (there were "over 1000" of them, so mighty was My Dad) and he liked it very much, especially the inscription. I loved it too, and was very proud of him, and of the pen, and of the inscription. So I asked if I could take it to school and show everyone. (Probably for Show 'n Tell.) And he thought about it, and then said Yes, I could, but I should be very, very careful of it, because it was precious to him. Be very careful, he said, not to lose it.
I lost it.
I don't remember the circumstances, all I remember is sitting on the staircase outside our apartment crying for a long, long time, waiting for Daddy to get home from work. It was a horrible thing, I was wretched, in despair, very frightened at the gravity of what I had done.
Finally, Daddy came home, and I called him and said I had to tell him something, and told him everything that had happened, including how I had been careless, and that the pen was gone, and there was no place else to look.
And he put his arms around me and said that there was one thing that was very, very much more important than a pen, and that was to have a daughter who was so brave and honest that she would tell the truth about what had happened and face up to it right away, and some other things that made me feel better immediately. And he never reproached me.
Oh, I have one more story about Daddy:
When I was a child, I was very curious about and interested in sex. More than average, I think. Now I wonder if it was because my upbringing was so sexually repressive. Very prudish, VERY, my parents. They didn't even undress in front of each other. Big apologies for walking in on each other during a clothing change, that sort of oddity. No references to sex in my family. But for whatever reason, I got into "playing doctor" sorts of trouble repeatedly, as a young child. It was not a happy thing, I suffered terrible humiliation as a consequence, but seemed unable to stop it. I was really interested in the little boys' penises.
This is what stopped it:
Daddy took me aside and explained this to me:
He explained that sex was something everyone on earth was interested in, too, not just me. That I was interested in it because I was a human being, not because I was a bad girl. He said some more things, about why I had to stop these activities, in which I always seem to get caught (like, one kid and I took turns showing each other our should-have-been-privates in the yard in back of the apartments in full view of the kitchen windows of dozens of apartments! We were not only nasty children, we were idiots!)
I forget the detail about why I had to stop, in his explanation, but I remember clearly the message that i was no different from anyone else, and asking "What about George Washington?"
Yes, Daddy assured me, even George Washington, even Abraham Lincoln, had the same feelings I had about sex. (I don't know if he used the word 'sex.' I just remember the astonishing news.) We ran through a few more founding fathers, and I was cured.
For a decade or so, at least!
Yes, I was lucky.
{Of course there was my mother...
Who was Grandma's daughter....) |
