The father
Matthew Raymond July 1998 Having a father is like having a mythical creature: you grow up not understanding him—his habits, his reactions, his odd expressions, his strange epileptic fits, his extraordinary generative power—fully aware that he was made in some other time, when the world was different, the landscape, the people, the great cities rising up in his memory, stories in some vast connected body of experience to which you seem barely related, all the conflicts back then—among brothers, against parents, even between nations— laid out with great clarity and purpose. You marvel at his huge hard hands—such skin would never be yours—and those thin gray locks like archaic feathers, and his morning ablutions, his ritual of brushing and shaving and dressing, the sharp deliberate movements of his arms as he ties his tie, as he shoehorns his hard dry heels into his stiff black shoes, the same every morning. The way he chews his food at the table. The way he folds the newspaper. So original is his power that there is no father you could ever imagine him having, nor youth nor childhood nor infancy, as if he’d sprung fully formed from his own omnipotence. And so, like some tragic hero, inept and insane, you struggle against the imperfect bonds of his obtuse love, against his worried hope and repressed ambition. You seek to define yourself, to test your mettle in the slow fires of his deep obscure will, his unyielding strength, which as you grow you come to see not as strength but as weakness, as frailty, as humanity.