Disappointing My Father, or, No, I'm Not Going to Smoke Weed on My Spirit Quest in the Desert (Day 23)

My earliest memory of my father starts with the smell of water. River water, specifically--the slow-moving blue water of the Yuba river. The smell of sun-warmed rocks and green leaves. A frog-catching smell, a summer smell.

I am three or four years old, and we are at the river. I am staying in the shallow end, splashing, and screaming when water touches above my knee. I prefer to play in the sand, really, and only go in the water to rinse off. The river scares me.

"It's time you learned how to swim," my dad says. 

And then he picks me up and carries me to the deep part of the water, and lets go.

"Swim," he says. "Or sink."

Heart thundering, gasping for air, I thrash around in the water, trying desperately to keep my head above the surface. I find the right combination of movements to keep myself afloat, and I drift slowly down river, arms and legs pumping furiously.

"See?" Dad says, and grins. "You can swim. Nothing to be afraid of."

He tells it differently, of course.

When I was growing up, my dad never treated me like a princess. That was a role I was only allowed to play with my grandfather, Poppa, who let me to rule over him with my imperious little voice and plastic crown. My dad didn't put up with any of that. He was a busy man--not always physically busy, but constantly intellectually engrossed, his brilliant mind endlessly working at some philosophical puzzle. I think I was six when I figured out that the best way to have a conversation with my dad was to use all the biggest words I could, and try to challenge him on some point. I had to be better than a princess. I had to be intellectual. I had to be quiet, and listen to him debate the Metaphysics of Quality with his friend Steve. I had to try to wrap my mind around concepts like Thermodynamics--most significantly the third law, about entropy. I had to be able to keep up with conversations about objective reality, and whether or not there was a god.

Most of the time, I contented myself with lesser subjects. My favorite thing to do, as a kid, was to create and act out stories, usually featuring Barbies or Polly Pockets or figures made from modeling clay as my characters. I especially enjoyed setting up a Barbie community, establishing relationships, and then making a major natural disaster hit--floods were good, and tornados. Earthquakes were easy to simulate, although they scared me. I always used these disasters as a way for Barbie to find out who her true friends were, to risk her life saving her younger siblings, and, of course, to be rescued herself by Ken, in all his dashing, plastic glory.

But all the while that I was playing, or listening to audiobooks, or squabbling with my sisters, I knew that this was all lesser. It was beneath my father's notice, not worth any real time or attention. If I wanted his attention, I would have to talk about Robert Pirsig. I would have to try to come up with something really worthwhile to say, and figure out a really unique way to say it. Most of the time, whatever I came up with didn't seem important enough or smart enough to say, so I didn't say anything at all. My dad, for his part, didn't say anything to me, either. Our relationship became one dominated by silence--him, too absorbed in his own deep and important thoughts to talk to me, and me, too intimidated and ashamed to talk to him.

One of our Christmas traditions, when I was a kid, was to do a family read-through of this really depressing Christmas play about how good we Westerners have it. There was one particularly horrifying song, a little girl crying on the outskirts of her town which has just been bombed, blinding her and killing her entire family. I don't remember anything else about the play, or why Dad loved it so much, but it made me cry and gave me nightmares every year.

My father is a child of the Beat generation, a Kerouac enthusiast, a lover of Ken Kesey and Neil Cassady and Robert Pirsig and "Dark Side of the Moon." He is a man coming from a world of rigid boundaries and clear expectations, daring to defy it all. Almost a national merit scholar, he was a brilliant student who could have done anything with his life, anything, and he chose to leave the world behind and live in his 60s-era VW van for a year, like a less-tragic version of Into the Wild. He was determined to throw off the shackles and illusions of society and live on his own terms, in the way God and Philosophy led him.

He's a man of contradictions: a staunch believer in community who was never willing to give up any part of himself to actually belong to a community; a trumpeter of the importance of family, who never sat at the table for dinner, but instead made his own dinner and ate it alone, in the living room, with a book full of things smarter than any of us had to say; a preacher of the perils of Babylon and the doomed state of our world who believed that church was too worldly to attend, but was stoned for most of my childhood. A peaceful man who punched holes in our walls, a patient man with an explosive temper, a man who believed so strongly in communication, yet sometimes couldn't figure out how to say "I love you," or "You're interesting," or "You're beautiful."

For years, the gap between us was wide. I tried to bridge it by reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but I couldn't finish it. I found the book confusing, frustrating, and deeply sad in a way I could never fully articulate. It's a tragic story. It's the story of a man on the downward slope of life, a man with regrets. I was a fifteen-year-old girl searching desperately for some reason to be an optimist. The more I tried to understand my dad's philosophies and tastes, the more I kept butting up against one painful, inescapable truth:

I just wasn't deep.

I didn't like spending all my time thinking about the futility of existence, or the inevitability of selfishness. I kept finding myself getting frustrated and thinking, briskly, Ok, but what should I DO about it? The only point of philosophy, I felt, was to instruct us how to live better lives. At a certain point, we needed to stop dwelling entirely in the theoretical, and start living. Functional was the keyword, to my mind. Yes, molecules may be made up of swirling bits of nothing, but this chair functions as a solid, and that's really all that concerns me. I like to think of it as my mother's practical, British, stiff-upper-lip genes coming into play.

But I wanted so badly to be deep, to be smart in the way my father was smart. I wanted to see him nod his approval at me. I wanted to get him, and I wanted him to get me. But he was, and to some extent still is, a staunchly independent man. He didn't want to be "gotten." He wants, I think, to remain an enigma, unable to be bound by the pathetic chains of my frail understanding.

I remember when my dad told me to read Demon Box by Ken Kesey. 

He said it was one of the best books he'd ever read, and that if I wanted to be a writer, I needed to read it.

I did not find it to be one of the best books I'd ever read, but some time after I chucked the copy across the room in frustration at my total inability to connect with a single thing Kesey wrote, I did manage to have an epiphany.

My dad came from order and rules, and he was seeking independence and freedom. He would always be seeking freedom, fighting for the right to do things his own way. That was why "Dark Side of the Moon" was liberating to him: because the music broke all the rules of music, it excited him, it pushed the boundaries of what music was.

I did not come from order. I came from chaos. I was raised in a loving, supportive, God-fearing hurricane of intensity and unpredictable emotions. Nothing was certain. Nothing was set in stone. The world, to me, has always been a terrifying network of possible decisions. That was why "Dark Side of the Moon" sounded like an upsetting cacophony of noises to me: it reinforced my fear that nothing is predictable, nothing is safe. While my dad was searching for freedom and truth, I was constantly trying to get home. I was Dorothy, and my dad was the tornado.

In that moment, I had to let go of the fear that I was stupid, or not deep, or naive, or incapable of "getting" the most important spiritual and philosophical concepts. I had to forgive myself, for being so different from my father. And I had to forgive my father, for being so different from me.

I may never be a great thinker. People will not look back in 50 years and marvel at my groundbreaking philosophies. But truth be told, the only reason I would even want that, is to make my dad happy. For my own happiness, I am perfectly thrilled to be known as a mediocre mind telling enjoyable stories about disasters, and their effects on Barbie's love life. I like to think I'm a little more than that, but if not, I'd still rather be happy as myself, than drive myself nuts trying to be someone smarter, better, deeper, more Beat. 

My dad could have died last summer. He was knocked off a ladder by the tree branch he was cutting down. When I ran around the side of our house and saw Dad on the ground, not moving, a tree on top of him, I can tell you that it didn't matter that we have different life philosophies, or different tastes in music, or different ideas of what makes an appropriate bedtime story. It didn't matter that he made me sing a depressing Christmas song. It didn't matter that I didn't like the way he taught me to swim. All that mattered was that he was my dad, the man who read me bedtime stories and sang Christmas songs with me, accompanying on his old guitar, and taught me to swim. I'm not sure how much more existential you can get, really, or how much more functional. Ornery, aging, opinionated, stubborn, with a broken neck and two broken arms and a brain tumor, or crippled for life, or going blind, I just want my dad. I love him. 

And it's a good thing I do, because neither of my sisters is particularly interested in being a caretaker to the elderly, so in twenty more years, I'm your best bet, Pops.

Things have been better between my dad and I recently. I don't know if it's because he's mellowing with age, or I'm mellowing with age, or we've both become aware of his mortality, but I don't feel that gap between us any more. He still thinks I can't cut it as a writer, and I still hate the music he picks, but we remember how to say "I love you" now, and that matters more. He'll probably always be swirling around, looking for houses to drop on the witches of lazy thinking, and I'll probably always be clicking my heels trying to find a home that feels like home, but we're part of the same story.

Of course, he tells it differently.