February 28, 2015

The last time I rose from my sleepless bed before 4AM I spent some time considering the rueful nature of my father. I positioned him in space somewhere, hand on back of neck, speaking with the perpetual sigh in his voice that said, "You don't know. You just don't know." I want you to realize the lie in that portrait, the romanticization of a man who made himself impossible to know, but then who wants to contemplate or even to admit -- much less read about -- the fundamental incapability of knowing such a primal figure, yet that's the fact: To not know my dad is part and parcel of what it meant to be his son.

And yes, I understand, as The Great Man once said, that our parents are destined to remain a mystery to us, and in fact, I have even acknowledged my willingness to let them remain so, but goddammit, he said, hearing his father's voice come into the world, half authentic utterance, half uncanny simulacrum, that don't mean I've got to like it. But then, I don't suppose anyone said I had to like it. The truth is that within certain culturally loaded boundaries, which is to say the imperative to "Honor thy father and mother," it's all up to me -- to decide how to feel, how to represent, how to take his spirit into the world.

And so, what do I give you? It moves me to tears even to think of it. The man who pronounced himself "pretty much a failure in life" as he neared the end of his road? The emotionally distant creature who came home from his work week to rest in his chair, maybe watch Jackie Gleason on Saturday, do a little grilling on Sunday, then get in his car to head out for points unknown on Monday? He who was capable of such rages, such unexpected bouts of tenderness as to absolutely confound? No, The Great Man was right, I think, in asserting his unknowability, and it helps not at all that it's supposed to be in the very nature of things for that to be true.

I wish I could have known him better. I wish so much that he had been wired differently, but then I don't suppose that would've been my dad, would it? And I really believe that I knew him better than he knew himself, hence, my demurral at that harsh self-appraisal toward the end. I know, I honestly and truthfully know, that the statement "He did his best" fails the test of restorative justice, but at the same time, life is not a test, goddammit, if anything it's more like a game into which we're placed with limited skills, then told, Go into the arena and contest unto the death. In that light, to do one's best is the only thing.

So if I prefer to think of Jack Hanley, my dad, in slightly sweetened fashioned from the man who actually snored on the other side of my bedroom wall, the enigma who seemed simultaneously so large and yet so small, I ask the same ounce of forgiveness for doing so that someone will have to grant my boys as they struggle with what it meant to be my sons someday. I remember clearly when my dad said he was sorry in words to the effect of "I wish I'd been more patient when you were growing up." At that moment he got every ounce of forgiveness I could offer and gratitude for what it had meant to be his son.