Forefathers
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See the tall man in the back looking bemusedly upon his brood? That’s my paternal Grandfather, Fathered Eleven, standing in front of a stack of hay that he probably planted and harvested himself. (Click on the image to see a larger version.) I have very little memory of him as he died when I was 12, so I’ve been trying to reconstruct him and other fathers from my past out of the gossamer threads of old photos. There’s no thinner stuff, believe you me.
I remember only that he was quite jovial whenever I saw him and that he was mostly deaf, so I couldn’t understand a word he said. And I was too young to know that I should try harder to listen. That’s him in 1934—at the height of the Great Depression. This is the only picture I’ve ever seen of him, his wife, and most of his children together. I don’t know why some are missing from this picture.
He was a farmer and was given to visions, as are some of his descendants. And he wasn’t choosy about the otherworldly visitors he saw. He told of seeing Jesus in vision and of meeting Satan face to face. He covered the complete spectrum.
My Dad inherited a bit of spiritual romanticism from him, which led to a view of himself and how his life would be that never quite materialized. That’s my Dad with the orange aura. No, that’s not real aura. It’s a Photoshop effect. (Is it obvious that my Photoshop skills are pathetic?) He wanted to grow up to be just like his dad: a farmer surrounded by children who would one day work the same land and in turn pass it on to their sons. He would be the patriarch of a large clan—the Abraham of a greener Ur. He was born a half century too late, though, for such idyllic dreams. He got caught up in the whirlwind of modernity that swept him away from his home and into a life that, I think, he eventually grew to hate.
But this post is about his father, not my dad. He bears a familiar look on his face; if you watch, you’ll see it creep across fathers’ features from time to time. It’s a mixture of amusement, perplexity, and love so strong it consumes the self, and it’s the natural state of conscientious fathers. Slobs who spread their seed around but never engage do not have this look. They’re not around enough to know what they don’t know. The irony and the injustice is that those who try to be good fathers soon come to suspect what they don’t know, which is anything, it would seem.
Who is this man in the photo, aged 35, who is younger than I am now? He dug a basement under the foundation of his house after it was already built to make room for the 11. He would know nothing about his wife’s menstruation for another 20 years! And would only learn then because he was a custodian in a high school and had to clean the Girls’ restroom.
I today know more about the facts of his life than the man in the photo, who knows nothing of the life bearing down upon him. And yet, though I know more about the events of his life than he does, I am no closer to knowing who he was than I would be if I knew nothing at all of what he did or what was done to him. I don’t know what he thought about being a father of 11. I don’t know what consumed his thoughts when he came in from a hard day in the fields, or if he had any thoughts at all. What would that man in the picture say if I told him that his sweet little girl on the front row would grow up and marry an abusive man and would outlive one of her own sons? What would he tell the boy with the orange aura if I told him that on that boy’s deathbed some sixty years in the future, he would say that the days he spent milking cows were the happiest of his life? That many years in the future, that boy would tell of being made to sleep in the chicken coop and would weep at the telling? If I told him his wife is even now growing resentful and angry and lonely?
Look as closely as I might, such answers are always and permanently out of reach. Zoom in on the picture. Isolate his face, lighten the shadows. Zoom again. Just when I think that one more step will render his image clear, it becomes distorted and the image is no longer a man looking (perhaps) back at me, but a mere collection of pixels in blockish black and white. Man reduced to geometry. In the end, I can only fill in the gaps with my own inferences, which are of course more about me than about him. The only way to make sense of the picture is to zoom out again. Distance brings perspective, which brings understanding. If that’s a truism applicable to all aspects of our universe, it means that by the time I understand parenting it will be far too late to do anything about it.
