Sneaking Into New York City

Sneaking Into New York City

Today is Father’s Day according to convention in the United States that begun, more or less, in 1910. A Day for honoring fathers has been a part of Western culture since the Middle Ages. Mothers have been honored formally in the U.S. since about the same time as fathers in the Unites States, but more broadly, mothers have been held on a pedestal for at least one day of the year for millennia. The Ancient Greeks had an occasion for mothers that they didn’t have for fathers. The maternal process, from carrying a child to birthing a child to suckling a child is clearly considered more worthy of Paribas and respect than whatever suffering has to be borne by fathers. I would never suggest that fathers are worthy of equal honorifics to mothers and do agree that the burdens of motherhood far exceed those of fatherhood. One might argue that in the same way alpha male tendencies drive fathers to do things like provide well for their children, it can certainly be said that imbedded maternal instincts give mothers the drive to procreate and nurture as they do. This anthropomorphic way of thinking is neither new nor particularly revealing, but does set a baseline for the process of honoring fathers on this day in June.

My father was not much of father. That is said with no malice or denigration of his other qualities as a man (I did not know him well enough to judge those), but is an observation made somewhat objectively as the oldest of his sons (as far as I know), and the person most responsible for carrying the added burden of explaining his ways to some degree, to a total of three half-sisters and two half-brothers. Two of those siblings were only first met in the last year and so these children had sixty years or so to wonder what their father was like or should mean to them. The one observation worth making is that the primordial need to better understand one’s heritage in regard to the man who sired them is strong and may recede for long periods, but probably bubbles up sooner or later. The modern reality of genetic testing and its ubiquitous presence in our online lives has given some wing to this otherwise dormant drive. In my case, my overall commentary about my father has been that he was who he was and that no child of his should take it too personally if he did not do for them the things that most fathers do and most children expect from their fathers. C’est la vie.

Nevertheless, I tip my hat to that man who gave birth to me. His ashes sit in a brass box and ziplock bag (that’s an entire story unto itself) in a properly marked garden wall at the Mission San Luis Rey de Francia in Oceanside, California. That is only seventeen miles from my hilltop in San Diego, and I go there with some regularity for one reason or another that I am not entirely prepared to dissect except to say that it is a nice place to ride my motorcycle. His grave marker is interesting to me because he has depicted on it a large spreading tree that resembles a painting of a tree in Patagonia that hangs on my living room wall. That tree does more to symbolize fatherhood to me than anything, and it is strangely coincidental that it appears on his grave. The tree stands alone and yet is the center of an entire ecosystem that thrives because of it. I would argue that the reason for the tree is that very ecosystem that it supports. The lone tree and the river are my best analogies for true fatherhood because they both symbolize that which brings prosperity and life to its people. My friend Frank always says in a very African way (he worked in West Africa in his youth), “You are a river to your people”. I first heard that phrase in Lawrence of Arabia, when Auda ibu Tayi (played by Anthony Quinn) says that to Lawrence about the Turkish gold he thinks is housed in Aqaba. My father apparently liked trees and, I imagine, probably rivers as well, but I tend to feel he liked them for what they could do for him rather than what he could do for others in their guise.

So, as I share out at my two favorite weeping willows in my back yard in Ithaca, I contemplate my drive down to Brooklyn this morning to see by children on Father’s Day. Even though I lived and worked in New York CIty for forty five years and have the city tax bills to prove it, I have little or no need to revisit the City for old times sake. I do not long for the City even though I went over that lifetime from tolerating it to liking it. Most of my old friends and colleagues that I knew from the City are either ensconced in their country homes for remote working purposes or retired to some more distant home in Florida or Arizona or some such place. I am going to the City only for two and a half reasons. First and foremost is to see my children (or at least two of the three) and my two granddaughters. I haven’t physically seen them in fifteen months and am long overdue for a hug. The second reason is because Kim does have some connectivity still in the City. Her friends have not yet moved on from their lives there and she is still connected to them directly by virtue of two boards she sits upon. She also seems to need a hairdo from some long-time salon that she has yet to improve on in San Diego. The half reason that remains is my consciousness is that after forty-five years in New York, it deserves a modicum of respect from me and I am looking forward to having a post-pandemic look around to see for myself what has changed and stayed the same.

Since I have no place of business to visit (Bankers Trust, Bear Stearns, Ironwood and New York Wheel no longer exist, Deutsche Bank, AFI and LERC are unaware or uninterested in my existence) and few friends in residence. Some of that I can wave off as the normal passage of time, but some of that makes me wonder why, as Chinua Achebe of Nigeria so eloquently put it in his acclaimed novel, Things Fall Apart. It is not something I choose to ponder much because there is not much I can do to impact it at this stage. I am happy and proud of my career and accomplishments, but this reminds me of the time I got a bundle of documents from the airplane that crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland many years ago. We had lost a colleague on that flight as well as the bank document pouch. The loss of the colleague lingered as a tragedy, but the return of the documents showed us that the work was trivial and unimportant. Such is life. Nothing means anything in the long run except the humanity one encounters. And no humanity is more dear than our families.

So, today I am sneaking into New York City. I am ducking to avoid being seen by or seeing anything related to my long-past work and I am standing proud to meet and greet my long-since-seen family. I think I may have finally found the proper balance in this regard of life.