Last night I finished reading Pravda, a novel by David Docx. It's a novel about a multi-generation British-Russian family and is set in Manhattan, London and St. Petersburg in the post-Soviet era. In this book, St. Petersburg is not the sparkling city of ``white nights,'' the State Hermitage Museum or the glories of the Kirov Ballet at the Mariinsky Theater.
Everything has gone off, is old, decaying, cynical, callous and, ultimately, despairing. No family relationship is as it seems and long-held family secrets eat corrosively at possibilities of connection and affection. Still, all said, it was an extraordinary book, one of the best novels I've read in quite some time. I think I'll be on the lookout for The Calligrapher, which is the other novel Docx has written.
One of the characters is an editor at a London publishing house that specializes in trade publications and self-help magazines. Surely none of us -- even in the most decadent days at the late and lamented West Bank Guide in Gretna, Louisiana -- ever worked at a publication this disfunctional. I was reading it on the Alameda ferry and laughed and laughed so much when I got to that section that I am sure the other passengers were convinced I was demented.
But then I got to a section that left me absolutely speechless. The book describes the response of one of the characters to the recent death of a parent. It so closely paralleled what I have experienced that it was downright eerie.
The author wrote of his character Isabel ``she recognized her error, that the precise opposite of that which she had imagined was in fact true: when a parent passes away, the family demons do not retreat but rise from their sarcophagi and move out across the borders of the mind, swearing in their puppet regimes as they pass. And from here on in, it would be frontline, hand-to-hand: her against them. You think that your journey from birth to death is a journey away from the clutches of your parents but in fact it's the reverse.''
All I can say is that's exactly how the past two weeks since Dad's death have felt. Instead of feeling free of his heavy hand, I now am bumping up against all the old antagonisms and resentments he harbored and encouraged. And finding that someone else has identified this situation and written about it, albeit in a work of fiction, was a staggering experience.
I 've been thinking of my memories of my father. They are so overlaid with a mythology he created and that my mom supported that it's hard to peel back the layers to find the reality and the person who lived within. Out of the corners of my memory, I can see him in his red felt hunting hat and plaid mackinaw, building our first house with his own hands, never stopping, never knowing the meaning of recreation or relaxation.
He had strange rigidities that came, I think, from a perpetual sense of outsiderness that probably was the result of being a motherless immigrant. His mom died of the same von Willebrand's Disease that contributed so much to Dad's health problems, and left him the youngest of six children on a wheat farm in Washington State's Whitman County Palouse country. His name -- Bjarne Slind -- was difficult for non-Norwegians to pronounce, and Dad was easily embarrassed when he had to explain himself to others in any way. He was acutely aware of what he thought others were thinking of him, and often we, his children, caused him much pain because of the supposed damage we did to people's opinion of him.
Dad was always a very driven man. Whatever he did, it occupied 200 percent of his energy. When we were kids, the Boeing Company took all his attention, focus, and energy. We never took a family vacation, he never took a day off--that we knew about--and always we were told to be proud of our dad because he worked so much harder than anyone else.
He was generally gone by the time we got up in the morning for school, and most nights he didn't come home for dinner. He brought home metal models of the planes and other projects on which he worked, generally attached with a swooping curve of metal to metal ashtrays. I remember the B-47 and the B-52 bombers, then the Minuteman missile, the Lunar Orbiter, and, his final project, the AWCS airborne warning and control system you may have seen in the form of a huge mushroom-shaped radar dome that rises up out of the back of a large military jet.
He was always on the go. He had the kind of soft-sided suitcase called a ``B-4 bag'' and it seemed as if every week my mom was pressing his pants and packing his B-4 bag for another trip. At first he often went to Dayton, Ohio -- presumably to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base --and to Boeing's plant in Wichita, Kansas. ( I remember mistakenly writing Dayton down as a state in a grade-school test. Dad went there so often, I was sure it was a state. And I was always scared as a little kid when he went to Wichita because I just knew that was where all the witches lived. Now that I hang out with the witches, I think that's pretty funny).
Later on he got to more exotic destination, like Paris for the annual air show; and to Madrid, Spain and Woomera, Australia, to the deep-space tracking stations set up there. He went to Calcutta and hated it, and visited Germany many times, which he loved, because ``it is so clean there.''
He moved the whole family to Florida when he was working on the Minuteman missile. All of us had immense cultural shock from which, I think in some ways, our family never quite recovered. I went from a very genteel all-girls private school I had attended from first grade onward to spend my senior year in a huge coeducational public high school that was racially segregated, and had mandatory classroom prayers and Bible reading.
The town of Cocoa Beach where we lived had been retooled for the interests of the various male military, scientists and engineers who most often came to the Cape on short-term stays without their families. So the town was comprised of little but motels and bars, most of which had a space theme. And many of the men who worked at the Cape stopped off at the bars before they went home at night. Alcohol consumption was an accepted part of late 1950s--early 1960s military-industrial complex male-bonding culture. I suppose the strip along Highway A1A was a bit like early versions of the Vegas strip in the ``rat pack'' days, minus the gambling, but with all the other distractions. Here's just a little bit of what the dads passed by every night on the
strip between the Cape and freshly build tract homes on newly dredged
land where everyone lived.
I can remember being proud whenever a Minuteman missile was successfully tested, and loved the glamor that the first Mercury 7 astronauts brought to the community. But all in all, it was a hard time for the family. Social scientists later wrote about the families who lived there at that time. They called what we experienced the ``Brevard County Syndrome,'' and they didn't see it as a good thing. So many of us had come to Central Florida's Brevard County from somewhere else and we kids--and many of the wives--didn't want to be there. Everything felt alien to us, including the sleepy segregated public schools that suddenly had an exploding enrollment of very bright kids whose dads were the scientists, engineers, and military officers that pushed America's space program forward.
The social scientists said that the dads -- who lived in the high-pressure zero-defects-tolerated atmosphere of Cape Canaveral -- simply could not tolerate the normal comings and goings of their children. When they came home from work, their families seemed unbelievably sloppy and undisciplined. So the fathers seldom came home when the kids were up, or they had to stop and anesthetize themselves at those space-themed bars first, or simply became unbearable martinets when they did encounter their children. I don't even need to go into specifics but I can say that our family was just like the others in the county with a space-program connection, except that our father had the added burden of his sense of outsiderness that dominated everything else. Those were certainly the most difficult years our family has ever experienced.
From those days my memories of my father are of a man with a flat-top haircut going off to work every day wearing the same starched short-sleeved white shirt that all the other engineers wore. (When I saw ``The Right Stuff,'' I laughed out loud at the Mission Control scenes because everyboy was wearing the same geeky white shirts Dad wore in that era). We learned a new vocabulary: ``AOK,'' and ``work the problem'' from him.
In later years my memories are of his perpetually working to maintain an already flawlessly maintained house on Mercer Island, in Washington State. I think it was painted every year, and the roof was replaced every two or three years. His garage workroom looked more like an operating suite, with the walls painted white, and every tool in its appointed place. C clamps and screwdrivers and hammers were all hung in size-gradated order. Nothing was out of place. And inside the house, nothing ever was on any counter top.
When my kids were little, I'd bring them over to see him, but he couldn't tolerate much contact and quickly retreated to his garage. That was more or less a pattern he repeated with almost everyone for the rest of his life. And in the last decade of his life, I can't think of one single family event--weddings, funerals, graduations, birthdays or other celebrations--he attended.
His last couple of years were marked by a serious physical decline, particularly after his second wife died. I don't think I'll ever know to what extent it was osteoporosis and to what extent it was to damage from tossing 80-lb wheat sacks into rail cars, but Dad shrank and shrank physically. I've been 6 feet tall since I was 13, and at first Dad was my same height. The last few times I saw him, he was so small, and so bent over that I bet he wasn't even 5 feet tall. My brother Eric was perpetually having to buy Dad smaller and smaller-sized clothing, as Dad lost his appetite and barely ate.
The last two times I saw him, he was very gray everywhere and slouched down in the corner of his wheelchair. He still had what was left of a flat-top haircut that gave him a little wisp of hair in the front. He could not hear very well, and sometimes was not well-oriented in time or space. He spread the newspaper out on his bed in the nursing home and sat curled over in his wheelchair, reading it carefully from cover to cover every day. He was terribly lonely, even though he probably received more visitors than all the other residents put together.
I felt so sad to see him that way. Yet I knew there was nothing I could say or do that would change his physical decline or alter his feelings of loneliness. He was forever convinced his physical problems were only temporary and perpetually badgered my brother to get him back his possessions and his car so he could resume his normal life.
I did what I could for him from California's Bay Area where I now live. I wrote him long letters and illustrated them with photos in efforts to remind him there was a world -- and a family -- outside the nursing home. The last time I visited him, I stopped at Boehm's in Issaquah and bought him some chocolate for his lifelong sweet tooth that I unfortunately inherited. He always had princess-delicate skin, so I had some special mild soap sent him that was made by the Cistercian nuns in the newly revived Tautra Mariakloster in Trondheimfjord, not that far from where he was born.
And now he's gone. I remember someone saying that every time an elder in the family dies, it's as if someone has burned another volume in the library of world history. There's still so much I'll never know about Dad, his sense of the world, and the history of his family that came to America in 1922.
This photo below was taken in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in late 1944 or early 1945. I'm the year-old toddler, and Dad is in his dress blues. He was in the U.S. Navy and stationed at Treasure Island, which is why I'm a native San Franciscan. I wish all the days we spent together were as happy as this day.
We still have no memorial planned. The planning has become a bit of a testy process. But, one would hope, things will simmer down and we will be able to gather together and remember this complicated man in the best way we can.
family parents fathers children immigrant immigration Florida military space+program Cocoa+Beach engineer Boeing Seattle elderly age ageing death dying funeral memorial
California Washington Mercer+Island Golden+Gate+Park Norway Norwegian Palouse wheat+farming
