I am grateful for the opportunity to stand
before you all today and say a few words about my father. I think that as with
any relationship between two people, my perspective on him is my own and no one
else's - although there may be common threads and ideas and perceptions shared
among many of us today, each of us has a unique view of the kind of person he
was. However, I do sincerely hope that some of what I say here
resonates with you, for that would validate my own feelings and thoughts - and
ultimately, this is what binds us together into one human family - the fact
that we all recognize one another's joy and suffering, that we can share our
discoveries and our failures, feel elation and sorrow in consolation with one
other.
I am sure that you all know a number of things
about my dad's life - that he was a WWII veteran, that he was a very brilliant
electronics engineer who worked on the communication systems for NATO during
the inception, escalation, and through the very height of the Cold War. He invented
and exploited a technique for spies to communicate stealthily over long
distances - this involved detecting one of the short-lived ion-trails created
by a meteor entering the Earth's atmosphere, and bouncing a signal off of
it from a previously-cued encoded magnetic tape played back at high-speed.
He was granted a patent as well for a ubiquitous device that we take for
granted nowadays which keeps electrical impedance constant as delay is varied
or induced in a signal. You may also know that, after he retired, he was
a volunteer for Hospice - a wonderful organization that made it possible for my
mother to stay at her home, surrounded by family, in her last days here with
us. You also probably know that he was a musician who played clarinet, piano,
and organ. Or that in his spare time he repaired radios and televisions, and
occasionally made some very odd devices - I think the "timing light"
deserves special mention here.
He was a member of the "Greatest
Generation," those folks who grew up during the depression, fought in
WWII, then came home and helped build this country into the powerhouse that it
is today.
Some of my earliest memories are of spending
time with him in the front yard in the evenings after he came home from work.
We would sit in lawn chairs, and he would show me the constellations and
talk about the stars and the universe. Every so often, he would catch a
blood-engorged mosquito or a fly or a grasshopper, and we would feed the
spiders. I used to find it odd, but less so now that I have considered it
further, that I ended up working in a field very similar to his, although I had
no plans to pursue such a career. I credit him with sparking and nurturing the
part of my mind that is fascinated with science, and I am so very grateful for
him having passed that on to me.
Something that seems be fading rapidly is the ability of
folks to use their own hands. All of us I'm sure remember that go-kart we
had growing up. We used to race around our semicircular driveway and up and
down our little one-way street at ridiculous speeds, often skidding into the
foliage near the garage. My dad maintained and repaired that go-kart
himself, and he also did much of the work on our cars. In addition to
learning how to hold the "trouble-light" so it didn't blind or burn
him ("Get the god-damn light out of my eyes!"), this gave me a
genuine appreciation for working with my hands, learning how to fix things
myself, and certainly added to my sense of thriftiness. I also learned a
few handy swear words which I use frequently to this day.
As with any of us, he was shaped by the
environment in which he found himself. For my part, I am strictly a
person of science and have no belief in the numinous or the supernatural, but
this doesn't mean I am immune or blind to the full range of human emotion and
experience. The way I see the world affords me a perspective that enables me to
more easily appreciate triumphs as involving not just human perseverance and
creativity but also circumstance, or what we might call blind luck; it also
allows me to readily understand and forgive faults because I can see how much
of what we do is simply beyond our personal control. And so it is of
course this way with my dad. Although a
memorial service is typically not the setting to even mention a person's
faults, I think that we do a great disservice to him, and to ourselves, if we
fail to seek closure in all matters that may have been left open. We
would be lying if we were to claim that any of us has had a single relationship
that didn't involve difficulty, misunderstanding, and even heartache.
My dad had his faults - but I see those faults
as a part of the entirety of what made him the unique person he was. I
know that he often had a difficult time expressing feelings towards those with
whom he shared close relationships - he often could seem uncaring. What
comes to mind when I think of that aspect of his personality is what he must
have lived through during his, and indeed some of this country's, darkest and
most anxious times; I wonder what must have preoccupied his mind during those
episodes, and also what he was really feeling inside. What makes me wonder this
are other things I saw him do - his volunteer work at Hospice, for example, but
also one much more specific occasion that I'll mention. When we lived in
Montgomery County, some very dear friends of ours lost a son in a tragic car
accident. I remember when the news arrived, my mom was completely
devastated - she had been close friends with the mother of this boy since
before I was born, and they had raised their children together. I
remember my dad hugging my mom so very tenderly in that time. I also
remember him sitting by himself out in the yard, writing a very touching poem
in memory of that young man. Surely a person who could sometimes seem callous
yet who could also feel so very profoundly in consolation, and express that
feeling, had a tremendous depth of emotion and connection.
He was reared during a time when gender-roles
were rigidly and simply demarcated - "women were women, and men were
men." When I think of the novel "To Kill A Mockingbird," I
am reminded of that era - Atticus Finch was portrayed as a stoic yet showed a
depth of character that surprises and delights me every time I read that story.
I imagine my dad was like that also - an exterior belying,
and often impeding the disclosure of, the richness that
was underneath.
I am sure most of you know, and as those of you
are Catholic will find neither shocking nor inappropriate, my dad was fond of Martini's.
And Manhattan's. And Ballantyne Ale (yech!). He always drank out of those
spherical glasses with a very small flat-spot on the bottom, and had a
particular genius for setting his glass full of booze in the most precarious,
unstable locations imaginable - the apex of a round car fender-well, a
half-buried rock, an exhaust manifold, the top of a tire on the vehicle he was
repairing... He drank more than he should have, and you may not know that
we did an AA-style intervention with him - this was after my mom died and he
had escalated his drinking to a level that was destructive. I remember
vividly participating in that intervention, and also in the follow-up sessions
at the treatment center. I think it's fair to say that we all opened up
emotionally to each other as a family, and this included my dad. He wept
freely and openly, and it was plain to me how deeply he felt the pain of having
hurt each of us. He clearly felt tremendous shame and regret, and I am
not afraid to admit I was very touched by that. I am sure we all were, and that
is a good thing indeed.
What I see in my mind when I think of him, is a
person of great intellect, but I also see someone with an under-appreciated
depth of character and feeling, marked by the times of his upbringing with the
stamp of stoicism and stark, repressive expectations on male behavior which
impelled him to squelch outward displays of emotional vulnerability. He must
have seen some truly great and terrible things firsthand in his lifetime,
things which cannot possibly leave one unaffected - abject poverty
during the Great Depression; the horrors of a war that killed over 55 million
human beings; the rise of the Soviet Empire; the tension from constant threat
of Nuclear Annihilation for most of his adult life; changes in social norms and
behaviors at a staggering pace. He also had fears for his children's lives that
I have thankfully not experienced - the Vietnam War, conflict in Peru and
Nicaragua, the Gulf War. But he also lived during an exciting time - he saw the
women's liberation movement, the civil rights revolution, the collapse of the
Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he was very much an integral
part of another revolution that continues to touch us all - the transition from
vacuum-tube electronics to solid-state devices that has fueled the technology
and miniaturization revolutions.
I choose to remember him as a complicated man,
a deep thinker, who I have no doubt felt intense joy, pain, sorrow,
and happiness. In other words, as a complete person, someone with
shining, admirable qualities, and also someone with faults shared by all of us.
For my part, I have tried to learn from his better qualities, yet also from
what I have perceived as his deficits - I credit him in no small part
with the clarity to see these things. I am going to miss him, but I will
continue to treasure all of the memories I carry and the lessons he helped me
learn.
Thank you!
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