Elegy for Dad, & Other Stuff

Some months ago in a creative writing course, my classmates and I were instructed to do an exercise wherein we took the traits of a parent and matched them up metaphorically with an object of some kind. We were to then briefly explain the connection.

Dads were old golf clubs, while moms were garden equipment or the musical instruments they barely played anymore. There were tools and car parts, even a steering wheel in one case. All were true representations in their own right, in fact it’s impossible to be wrong in this sense, but I felt that nothing about the things my classmates equated to their parents truly personified them. Each one, the golf club, the baseball, the wrench—they were things that stood objectively outside them, representations of hobbies and trades.

“My father is a golf club. Because…he likes to…play golf?”

“My mother is fond of gardening, and can become quite dirty out there, so this HOE…”

…

I suppose I could have associated my own father with a paint brush, that being the chief tool of his trade. Maybe a roller or paint stained steel ladder, or a speckled, used tarp. Or maybe a pair of bleached overalls and a beat up flat brimmed ball cap. They would all have made sense. I could write of the little empty lemon and lime juice bottles that he mixed all of his specialty colors in. He had an eye for color, my old man did. He could breathe new life into the drabbest room of the mustiest, most dated Victorian you can imagine.

With both Father's day and his birthday looming at the time, any of those would have worked as the perfect homage.

However, the truth is if I mentioned all of those things first it would have been a blatant lie. Nothing quite captures the essence of my father as accurately as a bottle of Jack Daniel's old Tennessee sour mash whiskey.

Something about the shape of that bottle, and that black label. Something about the way it stands out among the fancier liquors, the way it belongs up there among them and yet doesn't, like some little rugged, rough hewn gentleman. It's amazing, the contradictions this simple drink embodies; it can be a gentleman's specialty one day and a tramp's vice the next. A headliner at cocktail parties showing up in classy snifters or drams, while the night before it graced a dirty, wet bar top in a foggy mason jar. It's known as American Bourbon by a "worldly" few. To those well acquainted, it's just Jack. It's been there to toast successes, and drown failures. It stares down the pipes of screaming thralls, while other times it sits on a small kitchen table next to a lonely shot glass with despondence staring back at it. It is at once social and solitary.

Personally, I abhor this awful drink; just the smell of it buckles my knees. But the old man loved it. Some go toe to toe with it. Most fail, miserably. It’s by nature a hard thing to take. And so was he.

My father was a man of towering contradictions. On one hand he had a tremendous talent for what he did. He stood out in his family with a sizable capacity for abstract thought. He held firm beliefs, was a spiritual man, and for much of his life a devout Catholic. He had certain creative gifts, some athletic potential, and a high IQ.

He had potential.

…Then there’s that other hand.

He alienated his family and retreated to the bottle. A manic depressive, his proclivities soon led to destructive and volatile behavior, growing paranoia, and to the development of a massive superiority complex. He burned bridges to friends and most anyone who loved him. In his arrogance, he blamed everyone but himself.

My father died a few years back, succumbing to what a sheet of paper listed as congestive heart failure, hastened no doubt by nearly a lifetime of alcohol abuse. He died in a modest tenement, after sundown the report says, in the middle of a dusty old reclining chair alone.

They say in order to understand something fully one must go back to the beginning.

Here goes…

I believe that from an early age, my old man fell victim to what Steven King coined in his novel IT, as The Derry Disease.

For all those horror fans like me out there this reference should be self explanatory. For the rest of the world, The Derry Disease is a term the main characters of King’s novel use to personify the undercurrent of complacency, melancholia, apathy and tunnel vision that grip the citizens of their town. People cling to their faults and fears, hold on to their old prejudices, and continue to feed their vices until their goals become ever more shortsighted, their lives more trite and meaningless. They resign themselves to life in the town; the life of their parents, and their grandparents.

So absorbed in their own mediocrity and depression, they turn a blind eye to one another. One scene in the book, as told through a flashback by a female character, details her physical and sexual assault by a group of punky young men. Terrified, and with tears streaming down her cheek, she looks around for somebody, anybody, who can help her. Her silent, frightened gaze settles on a grown man in the doorway of his home. He peers out, a dumbfounded mixture of fear and shame on his face, and then slowly shuts the door, leaving the girl to the mercy of the gang.

In King’s novel, this backwards undertow of negativism and destructiveness provides the life force for an ancient, demonic being that had insidiously plagued the town of Derry for generations. On the surface it terrorized as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. In its true form, a sinister, spider-like entity, it literally and figuratively had its limbs stretched out through every artery of the town. It fed on its negative energy and bad karma, and in growing larger and larger it thereby perpetuated it year after year, draining the vitality of Derry's citizens.

Of course there is no murdering clown traipsing around Hamden or its nearby towns, let alone a grotesque, monstrous spider living underneath its streets.

That I know of…

*Sigh* Only in Maine...

King’s narrative was at least in part to me, a metaphor for what an inescapable deathtrap for personal growth and fulfillment a small town mentality can be.

People are born there. They dream. They live out their lives. They defer their dreams. And they die there.

It’s true, there is not, and never has been a life-sucking arachnid existing in the bowels of my town that influences its citizens to stray from the righteous path, but there is this inherited, renewed ethos that places great emphasis on bogus ideals of practicality and success, measured among other things by forty grand to start, a cell phone and maybe a company car. It is a choral mantra sung that endorses materialism, greed, and artifice, while condemning uniqueness and originality.

It starts with an empty home life and diminished expectations. It's followed by a desire for escape with no clear destination. Eventually there is the fear of failure:

“You can’t shoot for that, what if you miss?”

Complacency soon takes over. What began as a reason people couldn’t start something becomes an excuse why they won’t. Tomorrow becomes next week, and then next month until they drown themselves in eventually, and one of these days. At the first sign of a big paycheck they get caught up in an unfulfilling job. Then settle into a mundane, two-dimensional lifestyle. Suddenly, the idea of leaving seems impossible, just a foolish, fading memory. These people let others slap an expiration date on what they can achieve, and a time frame for things like marriage, and children.

The divorce rate in this country isn’t decreasing any in recent times…

The reins of their life no longer in their hands, they may regret year after year how all they wanted to do was leave this town and travel, be a painter, or go back to school. They lie to their wives, and husbands. Neglect their children. Forget their parents, and throw friends under the bus. Slaves to commodity, even education was never more than a business proposition to them. Some become self aware, donning the role of that guy on every bar stool in America who laments his position in life, perpetually unaware that tomorrow, in a few hours or even in the next ten minutes they could turn things around completely. Many remain ignorant to any of this, and sit happily in that bar(s) each weekend drinking with the same people at twenty-seven they sneaked in there with at eighteen.

A person like my father would have fallen just outside of this demographic. This would have been the yard stick presented to aspire himself to, and hopelessly at that, due to his family’s social and economical status. Not only was he told what he “should” achieve, he was reminded of what he never could.

As a lower middle-class, Italian Catholic, college was not a novelty he could afford, much less would it have been pushed in a household like his. From both ends of the perspective my father would have heard, “You’ll never be able to do that.”

He seemed frustrated all the time, angry at everything, and nothing in particular. He too never realized he could change any time he wanted to. As his son, I believe he could have. I believe that he was made for greater things, but was derailed early.

This post isn’t an attempt to exonerate the things my father had done; rather I am just putting into perspective a problem that threatens a lot of young, talented people.

For those of us who nurture dreams atypical of our locale and that require growth and life experience its stifling limits could never provide, this prepackaged lifestyle becomes a kind of sickness that pervades the psyche. We become subject to conditioning that dulls colors, nullifies emotions and expression. It stifles rhythm and quiets music. It kills the soul. If left in it too long, it assimilates us, holds us prisoner. We need to do all we can to liberate ourselves from being the latest batch of casualties to this monster, sacrificing our futures to feed it, keeping it alive to infect future generations.