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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780889775923 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Regina Press |
| Publication date: | 05/11/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 313 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
THE FATHER CHARACTER
by Carrie Snyder
There is a particular photo that I'm thinking of now. We are new to each other, my dad and I; we have known each other no more than a few months. My dad proudly holds me aloft: an infant standing in the palm of his hand, my legs freakishly strong, my spine erect. I perform like a miniature circus act as he extends his arm to show off our trick to the camera. We both glow with delight, my face scrawny and rashy and his gap-toothed and bearded.
I have the flaming red hair that came from his grandmother.
These early hours and days and months are known to me through photographs, their colours garish with the hues and textures of the 1970s: baby Carrie florid in a scratchy orange-checked dress against a backdrop of paisley and corduroy. Note: redheads are not flattered by orange-checked dresses.
My dad's nickname for me, as a small child, was "Grunion." I looked it up in the dictionary once. It is a kind of fish. But he didn't choose the word forthe meaning; it was the sound that summed me up, somehow, just like my brother Christian was "Grumbuff" (he really was).
I am writing the literary equivalent of a scrapbook. This will never do.
Memories flood in, good memories, but as I write them down, I alter them and their power diminishes, pinned to the page like a collection of dead butterflies; that is what I fear, although I am a writer, although writing things down is precisely what I've trained for and practised for all of my life, a claim that is scarcely hyperbole. At seven years old, I read in the Guinness Book of World Records that the youngest published author was a poet, a prodigiously talented four-year-old, news that came as a terrible shock — already past my prime! — and my dad humoured my sincere dismay, perhaps even encouraged it. It marked me as precocious, after all. Lost world records notwithstanding, he encouraged me — both of my parents encouraged me — to believe that I had the talent, the imagination, the intelligence to track down any goal, no matter how far-fetched. My mother believed (and still does) that her children are so fantastically gifted that her belief itself is fantastical, while my father balanced this out by believing that we could have done better. At seventeen, I showed him a term paper written for a third-year-level university history course, for which I'd received an A+; my dad read my paper and said he wouldn't have given it that mark, as it wasn't deserved. I was stung and furious. I also thought he was probably right.
Memories flood in, good ones, and yet I am writing about this grudge kept and nurtured for more than half my life. Good grief.
Perhaps it is the subject itself — my dad — that is tapping into insecurities like rotten roots, anxiety about my talents and the (diminishing?) powers of my brain, and, just as snarled, my doubts about this profession and its audacity to claim authority.
I want this essay to please my dad, as in, to meet his standards — yes, that is a piece of it — but also to please by giving him pleasure, to surprise and delight him.
* * *
We are in the car.
Dad driving, both of us talking, holding cups of coffee — actual coffee cups, no lids. The drive to the private Mennonite high school I attend as a grade nine student takes about half an hour from our home on the farm, and we leave at 7:40 in the morning. We use our wrists as shock absorbers as we fly over the railroad tracks in the valley. I ask Dad what we'd do with our cups if we were to get into a car accident — would we try to chuck them out the window? And he laughs and says he's wondered the same thing.
We listen to the news on the CBC.
For road trips, Dad makes the best sandwiches, their secret an everlasting mystery — what does he put in them? Is it the butter, thickly slathered?
The thick layers of thinly sliced meat? I'll never be able to recreate those sandwiches.
Once, just before crossing into the States, Dad and I stop to buy fruit from a roadside stand to eat on the drive; at the border, the guard informs us that we will have to surrender our Canadian plums and peaches. Dad is so infuriated by the arbitrary stupidity of the demand that he angrily eats several peaches, juice dripping down his arm, while the border guard observes impassively from his little booth. Dad urges me to do the same, but I demur, somewhat diminishing his stand.
* * *
My dad is a quiet man, in many ways — shy, I think, with a complicated past that doesn't always make sense. I once wrote him as a character into a story only to have the editor return it with the remark, "This doesn't sound very plausible." The plot twist in question was when the character (i.e., Dad), a hippie bar musician with a fondness for soft drugs who has moved to Canada to avoid the draft, goes back to school and earns his PhD in Anabaptist history and becomes a respected scholar and beloved professor. I can see now why the editor said that. It doesn't sound very plausible.
My dad was also a peace activist who moved his young family to a country at war; he worked on farms, driving tractors and slopping hogs; he helped build silos as a teenager; he flunked out of Princeton, also as a teenager; he married very young and divorced, a secret that was kept from his children (i.e., us), the product of his second marriage, for years; the son and grandson of missionaries, he grew up speaking Spanish; he played bluesy songs on the piano, the soundtrack to my childhood, although he never learned how to read music; he taught Peace and Conflict Studies, yet his divorce from my mom, after thirty-four years of marriage, was marked by extreme acrimony.
In short, Dad is a person of contradictions. Aren't we all?
"Wouldn't it be great if parents were perfect, if parents made no mistakes," he once said to me, in a moment of sadness, when we were arguing, I think, although arguing is far too strong a word — we were not at peace with each other, we were struggling to see the other's point of view, we were hurt and bewildered and trying to meet up somewhere, anywhere.
* * *
I write fiction, and in my books and stories I've not yet managed to write a father character who satisfies me. This troubles me, but there it is. The fathers I've written have been absent, or silent, or charming and narcissistic, or even violent, at best bewildered, at worst destructive — always inadequate, not only as fathers but also as characters. I can't explain this problem, and it pains me. Does my failure to write strong fatherly characters imply a hollowness in my relationship with my own father? Does it reveal a lack between us? I fear this, but I refuse to believe it.
I know my dad.
But when asked to describe a father, my mind travels to clichés. I am pintsized, looking up at a generic father who has a beard, a deep voice, who is powerful in some unnamed but slightly frightening way, who is irritated by our noise and play, who wants to be left alone, around whom we must sneak and from whom we must hide, in order to have our fun. His life is separate from his children's, fundamentally, fatally, as if he lives in a different world altogether, as if he is foreign to us and we to him, as if we can't see the extension of a deeper self in the other.
This is not my dad, this is an amalgam of dads I have known, or dads I remember knowing, which probably also includes fictional dads. I've read a lot of books. (Where, in the preceding set of clichés, is the version of the father with whom the child feels safe and protected?) The real father, my dad, is too complex to be pinned down. During my childhood, he was a disciplinarian, sometimes stricter than our mom, but sometimes calmer. When I was a teenager, he tried to pay attention, to ask the right questions, to listen, but he couldn't help judging my choices, which shut down my answers, sometimes. And as an adult I worried about disappointing him by leading a traditional life, getting married relatively young, having four children, when perhaps he would have wanted for me a more cerebral existence, a life as an academic, which I did not turn out to be, despite striving to be for many years.
My dad grew up without a dad; he had no model for the role. If my dad were a fiction writer, it would be perfectly acceptable for him to write empty, hollowed-out father figures or golden fantasy father figures. His father died suddenly, of a cerebral hemorrhage, when my dad was nine months old. And so my dad was raised by a single mother.
Did he worry about becoming a father himself, about fulfilling the role? Did he wonder whether he was doing it right, with nothing to compare his own efforts against? Dad's mother was a high-energy, efficient, steely woman, who had no tolerance for the chaos caused by little boys; I cannot imagine what her sex education would have consisted of. She sent her teenaged son away to a private boys' boarding school. She rescued him, from time to time, or tried to. Her methods would not have been particularly gentle, I think. She is still alive, mellower now in her mid-nineties, but nevertheless fired by the same remarkable energy and drive.
In that regard, my dad doesn't take after his mother.
He is fond of naps.
He works steadily and patiently on projects that require a long devotion; he's said that he could have been a monk, bent over the pages of a book in perpetuity, and I believe it. And yet he is an amiable social creature and always has been. Even when my parents' marriage was fraying, they kept a welcoming house with an open front door — feeding their children's friends, hosting visitors from afar, making meals for colleagues and students and acquaintances. For years, they billeted international students or took in teenaged boarders, extra bodies in a house already filled to the rafters. I am the eldest of five children. Our house was never quiet, nothing like a monastery.
On Sundays, when we were all still attending church, Dad would stand in the front hall hollering that it was time to leave: we were going to be late! The scene would inevitably escalate as we dawdled and looked for earrings and pants and lost boots. Dad would threaten to go out to the car and start honking the horn. The front door would slam shut, and the car horn would indeed begin to honk, a rather distant sound, if you were still in the bathroom applying mascara. After some little while, the horn would go quiet.
The front door would crash open. Dad, hollering, hopelessly, helplessly, comically: "Couldn't you hear me honking?"
We were always late for church.
I think of the futility and humour in that scene. Did Dad feel like he was dragging us all along behind him — our heavy unwilling bodies — expending a level of energy impossible to sustain, trying to ensure that we were raised as good Mennonite children in the tradition of his forefathers and -mothers? And is he disappointed, now, that none of us are regular churchgoers, not a one?
My dad is a man of faith. He comes from a long line of missionaries, but he is not an evangelist by nature. He has never tried to sway or persuade or pressure me into believing what he believes; instead, he has tried to show me by his actions, or to open a conversation. Like all good teachers, he asks questions and he listens to the answers with interest and curiosity, without judgment, even if he does not agree. I learned that skill from him.
* * *
There is a story I want particularly to tell.
On the Sunday after September 11, 2001, I went to church with my husband, who is not a Mennonite, and our baby boy, then four months old. We drove half an hour to come to the church, which my dad still attended, alone, as he had for a number of years.
My dad was preaching.
I remember where I was sitting, in a wooden pew with long maroon cushions on the right-hand side of the large, bright sanctuary. I remember that the church was packed full. People were searching for answers, for comfort in the face of terrifying images — of airplanes flown as weapons, skyscrapers falling down, dust and death and destruction, and the drumbeat of war. And I remember what my dad said. He stood at the pulpit and he was himself, so perfectly, that I will never forget it. He stood before us, mirroring our grief and bewilderment, asking our questions. He said that he did not know what to say. He said that the image that haunted him most, and he could not say why, were the people who had been trapped at the tops of those buildings, unable to escape, choosing to jump.
He said, "I can't stop thinking about them."
And then he opened the Bible and read to us from the Sermon on the Mount. He told us that reading it had given him comfort. He shared that comfort with us in a manner that was simple, straightforward, grief-stricken, and honest. What I'm certain we were witnessing was the power of vulnerability and the power of truth, a mirror for our grief, reflected through my dad.
I will remember that moment always.
Afterward, people crowded to thank him with tears in their eyes. They wanted to hold his hands and tell him how much what he'd said had meant to them. I tried to tell him, too, how profound his gift was, in that moment, but words failed me. Dad wouldn't take credit for what he'd done. Don't thank me, thank a higher power.
I would call that power grace. My dad might call it God, or the Holy Spirit.
* * *
This past fall, I took my daughter, Flora, who is eleven years old, to visit my dad and stepmom. Flora was working on a school project for which she needed to interview a relative who had come from another country, and she'd chosen Grandpa Arnold. I sat curled on the couch, my stepmom nearby in a reclining chair under a blanket, Flora very upright and professional in a straight-backed chair holding her notebook and pen, and Dad leaning back in a comfortable chair opposite us, taking time to consider Flora's questions. He told her about elementary school teachers he had liked and disliked and about animals he'd had as a child living in Puerto Rico (a pony, and a dog, though I noticed he skipped mentioning the pet rooster, which his mother killed for soup one day — a story that fascinated me as a child).
Flora was most excited to ask one particular question: "What was Mom like when she was little? Was she like me?"
My dad smiled at this. He was very relaxed and calm. "Enthusiastic," he said. "Your mom was always so enthusiastic and curious about everything."
The answer might have been for Flora, but it felt like a gift being given to me. In that instant, I saw my child-self through his eyes, and I saw how loved and cherished she was — I was; I am.
As the conversation wound down, Flora asked her last question: "What is one thing in the world you would change if you could?"
Dad sighed deeply. "Death," he said. "I would make it so no one would ever die." He looked at my stepmom and smiled with deep sadness, and she smiled back at him from across the room. She was wearing a knitted hat and drinking tea, preparing for another round of chemo to fight back the cancer that had settled in, terminally, we'd been told. We talked about Dad's idea for a little while. We didn't stop there, if you see what I'm saying; we questioned the concept, we had a conversation: we wondered whether a person would simply get older and older and never die, or whether a person would stay a certain age and never die — and would the world get too full? Would there be room for new people? — and in the end, my dad said he could see that it wasn't the most practical idea.
But he still wished for it.
* * *
Am I capturing him? Am I coming close?
I told him last week that I'd been asked to write this essay and that I still hadn't gotten started. "I've got lots of ideas and lots of scenes in my head, but I just can't seem to write them down," I said. "Something seems to be stopping me; I'm not sure what." He laughed and said that awhile back he'd been asked to write an essay on mothers and sons, but had refused. He didn't explain why, and he didn't need to: too complicated, where to begin?
Even to begin with love does not seem sufficient.
"I have only good things to say," I said to Dad.
Of course, that is not completely true. And yet, it almost completely is.
When I think of my dad, it's the good moments that flood my memory. The car rides, as I've said. The quiet conversations. The smell of rich food cooking — stacks of Swedish pancakes devoured on Saturday mornings with sugar and butter and syrup; spicy pasta sauce with hamburger; a rice dish with tomato sauce that we called "guiso," which we would eat hot and covered in melted cheese; countless pots of soup, vegetable-beef or potato or fish chowder; mashed potatoes loaded with cream cheese and butter. My dad cooks like we are farmers coming in from hard labour in the field.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Finding Father"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Mary Ann Loewen.
Excerpted by permission of University of Regina Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction by Mary Ann Loewen, ix,
The Father Character by Carrie Snyder, 1,
"The Revery Alone Will Do" by Rebecca Plett, 11,
Requiem in Three Voices by Ruth Loewen, Mary Ann Loewen, and Lynda Loewen, 19,
Finding My Father by Cari Penner, 31,
Technologies of Affection by Ann Hostetler, 41,
Seven Times with My Father by Magdalene Redekop, 57,
Go For It: Writing My Father's Story by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, 69,
Reflections of a Grateful Daughter by Carol Dyck, 79,
Our Lives Together, My Father and Me by Hildi Froese Tiessen, 89,
Journey by Jean Janzen, 103,
The Reluctant Farmer by Maggie Dyck, 113,
My Father and the Pieties by Raylene Hinz-Penner, 127,
Memoried with the Feel by Elsie K. Neufeld, 137,
Contributor Biographies, 163,