Father Knows Best

Father Knows Best

In 1975 my best friend Paul convinced me to apply to business school at Cornell and to join him on his quest for strategic greatness in the business world. In those days I spent all my time with Paul and his young, sweet wife Ann and we often joked about his favorite childhood TV show, Father Knows Best, starring Robert Young and Jane Wyatt as the iconoclastic parents that represented the best of post-war American life. Our joke was to call it FNB. The show first aired in 1954, the year I was born. It represented the idyllic life we never had and the father that never failed us and never left us. We were both in search of that perfect scene of familial bliss. Strangely enough, the show itself had its ups and downs with two cancellations and two changes of network sponsorship, but we were oblivious to that reality of life. So, I took the ride with Paul down that businessman’s path, launching my adult life trying to become the father that knows best.

Today I read a story in the New Yorker by a man (John Edgar Wideman) who felt that he had failed as a father. He wrote a haunting essay on the subject and started it with this introduction:

One day neither in the past nor in the future, and not at this moment, either, all the people gathered on a high ridge that overlooked the rolling plain of earth, its forests, deserts, rivers unscrolling below them like a painting on parchment. Then the people began speaking, one by one, telling the story of a life—everything seen, heard, and felt by each soul. As the voices dreamed, a vast, bluish mist enveloped the land and the seas below. Nothing was visible. It was as if the solid earth had evaporated. Now there was nothing but the voices and the stories and the mist; and the people were afraid to stop the storytelling and afraid not to stop, because no one knew where the earth had gone.

Finally, when only a few storytellers remained to take a turn, someone shouted: Stop! Enough, enough of this talk! Enough of us have spoken! We must find the earth again!

Suddenly, the mist cleared. Below the people, the earth had changed. It had grown into the shape of the stories they’d told—a shape as wondrous and new and real as the words they’d spoken. But it was also a world unfinished, because not all the stories had been told.

Some say that death and evil entered the world because some of the people had no chance to speak. Some say that the world would be worse than it is if all the stories had been told. Some say that there are no more stories to tell. Some believe that untold stories are the only ones of value and we are lost when they are lost. Some are certain that the storytelling never stops; and this is one more story, and the earth always lies under its blanket of mist being born.

I graduated from college in 1975, graduated from business school in 1976, started my New York City banking career in 1976, married my first wife in 1976, bought my first home in 1977, made my first overseas business trip in 1979, bought my second house in 1980 and had my first child in 1982. Paul’s path was not dissimilar though the details and dates varied. He went his way and at his speed and I went my way at my speed. I was a man in a hurry, going where I did not really know, but I knew I needed to get there fast so I rushed forward headlong into life wanting nothing more than to be the father that knows best.

Those years were not the best years of my life but they were the formative years of my adult life. Paul and I were close and spoke often as we compared notes on our respective paths. They were the years when I learned to be a man that could support himself and others. They were the years when I discovered how to stop being the son without a father and become a father to a son. I was a father who knew nothing but wanted to be the best…the best everything. Little did I know that we none are best at anything and that there is no such thing as best. I watched Paul suffer mightily under the yoke of responsibility. He was a racehorse and I adapted better to the plow. Best is a fiction and a dangerous one at best. What we should have done was try to be good, or at best better. Yes, being better is best. What we needed was a show called Father Knows Nothing.

But wait, responsibility is not nothing and those years between school and fatherhood were the crucible of duty. Duty has many facets. Neither Paul nor I ever served in the military, despite his father having been a West Point graduate. My father had supposedly been conscripted into the Italian army during the war (proof of anything with my father is hard to come by). Mandatory induction in the United States had ended in 1973 and until one was 26 years old (that would be 1980 for me), one was liable to potential induction and forced duty. But the duties of adulthood, while not as crisp and clear as boot camp, are still very real. And here’s the thing, unlike military duty, service to adulthood and fatherhood know no statute of limitations. In fact, once an adult, always an adult and once a father, always a father. They say that we are as happy as our unhappiest child. That is true duty and the responsibility for that must be case-hardened if it is to prevail. I may not know much, but that much I do know. Some metal hardens under fire and some metal cracks and disintegrates. I hardened. Paul cracked. Metallurgy does not always explain itself.

The rest of the story is a somber and soulful one. Failings of the fathers are often visited upon the sons in many ways just as beaten children often beat their children, if not with the rod, perhaps with the glance or the word. Some stories do not need to be told to be understood. We are all failed fathers regardless of our metallurgical status, none of us is the best we can be except for during that moment when we realize that we must be better.

Paul died last year and left a promising life largely unfulfilled. He died at his best because he had no more to offer. Dying broke is a popular and au courant concept, but it is the reality we must all face. We have no choice but to leave everything on the table. But those of us who live on have the ongoing obligation to seek optimization. There is a concept in calculus where limits are asymptotically approached but never actually achieved. It is a base concept of infinity. As we all reach for the infinite, we all fall short, but not necessarily for lack of trying.

Kim has asked that we think about ourselves in the distant past. I cannot think of those years between 1975 and 1983 without thinking about my friend Paul. Our friends remain our friends no matter the passing of years or the change in circumstance. I am certain Paul’s children know that he tried to be the best he could. Yesterday all three of my children reminded me, intentionally or not, for one reason or another, that I was falling short of being the best. One wanted more than I could give. One wanted something that was not mine to give. And one just wanted me to give more. My only response is the same response that my dearly departed friend Paul could only give to his children, that the only thing that father knows best is that father can never be the best, but while he is on this side of the infinite, he can be better. The shroud of mist lifts and the earth is once again reborn this Christmas morn.