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Father's Day
by Marc Moran
June 12, 2002
I spent the evening with my father recently. We ate and talked, drank wine
and talked some more. After dinner we took a leisurely stroll through the
town of Princeton, crossing streets and wandering through the empty campus,
exchanging thoughts and laughter. We stopped to look at the bricks that
commemorated my grandparents' and my father's business and to look at the
names of the other people and businesses that have long since vanished from
existence in every way save for our memory of them and the fired clay blocks
that lined the path.
I enjoy the company of my father in a way that does not translate to other
relationships that I have, because, well, because this man is my father. This
is the man who once stood up for me on the day I married, who read to me
every night before bed as a child and who taught me skills like fire-building and archery. He played chess with me, listened to my problems,
hiked the five tallest mountains in New York State one summer because I
wanted to. I remember him running to the top of Haystack mountain in the
middle of a fierce thunderstorm while I crouched behind rocks hundreds of
feet beneath the summit, frightened and trembling at the thought of him
being struck by lightning, while he fearlessly raised his arms in triumph,
his poncho whipping wildly in the driving rain.
Once, while canoeing the rapids at Foul Rift on the Delaware River, we were
swamped by standing waves and my father, losing a grip on his paddle,
reached out for it and fell from the canoe, slipping beneath the surface and
disappeared from sight.
I was left to ground the canoe on a rocky outcropping, empty its contents
and dump the water, before repacking it and continuing on down the river
alone and shivering, without him. Half a mile down the river I found my
father waiting for me in a speed boat where he had managed to be picked up
by a couple of fishermen along with a couple of jugs of drinking water we
had lost as well. He was smiling when he saw me and I will never forget the
feeling of relief I felt, knowing that he was still alive, still my father
and that I was still his son.
Not long after my wife and I found out that we were expecting our first
child, my father came over for dinner to our new apartment. It was one half
of an old farmhouse on the only working farm left in Hopewell. He came into
the kitchen and looked out the windows at the view of the fields and the
woods that lined their edge, and when my wife had left the room he said to
me, "I've been here before."
There was a feeling of history in the air.
"When was that?" I asked.
"Your mother and I came here to a party once, before you were born. I
remember drinking wine from Dixie cups and dancing with your mother right
here in the kitchen."
I was silent, the image of the two of them, young and still in love, dancing
slowly in each other's arms, filling my thoughts.
He stared out of the windows, I imagine with the same image in his mind as
well when he said, "She was pregnant with you at the time."
"So I guess I've been here before, too?"
"I guess you were." He said, somewhat sadly.
I guess that's how things are when you stay close to your roots. Things
change, but not that much. People and time intermingle, like in a ghost
story. Places mean one thing at one time and another at another time, but
nothing really changes all that much. Not really.
Fathers love their sons and sons, in return, love their fathers. Both spring
forth, not only from their connection to one another, but from the very
ground they live upon.
The ghosts of my family fill this valley and I can never really escape them,
even if I wanted to.
One of the names inscribed in the bricks we read that night was F. Scott
Fitzgerald. Earlier, before we had eaten dinner that evening, my father had
dashed off to his library to retrieve a copy of a book I had lent him, one
that he had originally lent to me.
"This was great." He said. "I almost never read fiction anymore, but I am
glad I took the time to read this one again."
He handed me a tattered copy of The Great Gatsby, one of the greatest
novels ever written. I opened it and began to read the closing passage out loud while the rice simmered on the stove...
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any
lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And
as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until
gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for the
Dutch sailors' eyes- a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished
trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in
whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory
enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this
continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood
nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something
commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of
Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of
Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must
have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know
that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond
the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year
recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter- tomorrow we'll
run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-----
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the
past.
Our ancestors were Dutchmen who arrived in the early years of the
seventeenth century when the view they saw was no different from the one
Fitzgerald described. I try to imagine sometimes what it was that inspired
them to do something so adventurous, so unexpected and daring and what they
must have felt when they saw this land from the deck of their wooden ship. I
often wonder why it was that when they put down their roots, they chose this
spot and why it is that I cannot seem to let it go, even as I see it
receding before my eyes, changing into another land that will undoubtedly be
inhabited by another people in the not too distant future. Already there is
the sound of different languages; the sight of different people than my own
and they look like they plan on staying, regardless of the impact on those
who went before. Perhaps this is the way of all people, like the Lenape who
camped where my garden now flourishes, like the Dutchmen in their creaking
boats who now are little more than a memory.
Before I left for the evening we sat in the dark of my father's library
listening to 'Rienzi' performed by the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra and my
father quoted Oswald Spengler, from a source I had never heard before.
"When the last sheet of music is burned to ash, then we will be gone."
In a couple of days I will be joining my wife and son on vacation and we
will celebrate Father's Day over six thousand miles from our home, with her
family. And I will tuck my son into bed and I will read a story to him, as I
always do, and as my father did for me, but my thoughts will be back home
with my father and with his father and with every one of those who went
before us, those brave and honorable men worthy of that title, who carved a
home on this continent for their sons and their sons' sons, so long ago.
And when we return home I will dance slowly with my wife in our own kitchen,
in the same house where my father was raised and where his own parents
surely must have danced, once, long before we both were born.
Happy Father's Day to you as well...
MARC MORAN
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