The Complexity of the Older Generation; Impressions of My Father

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Naga_Fireball
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The Complexity of the Older Generation; Impressions of My Father

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Although it's not a cut and dry thing, the maturity level and intelligence of the average person in the 45-to-65 year age range, as I get older each year I am more & more astounded by the intelligence of my father and his inability to embrace who he was.

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I was awoken early this morning by a relative who was physically ill. But yesterday I was thinking of my dad. It's easy to fixate on the way he physically died, or the way his birthday being Valentine's Day probably makes the whole family sad. That isn't who he was.

My father was the youngest of four children, military brats. He was brilliant and streetsmart from all the schoolyard fighting and drug culture of the 70s and 80s. I have no doubt that he got mixed up in bad bad shit.

Dad was the type to tell others half jokingly, to keep it simple, stupid. He could have made Einstein feel stupid in 30 seconds. Of that, similarly to the issue of being familiar with trouble and the underworld, I also have no doubt. There was nothing simple or stupid about my father. He made mistakes, sure, and wasted some time, but people are crazy if they think the wheels weren't turning, that his mind wasn't processing every little thing it could reach for in that Kentucky farm that served as a prison for a "monster" too smart for his own good.

When my father was a little boy, he had elaborate imaginary friends, miniature circus animals who lived in his ear, that at the age of 4 or 5 he proudly described to his older sister. After being made fun of by his brothers, he chillingly announced that he had "killed his friends" in order to stop the abuse.

This was a child with an active mental life, who populated inner worlds with the information he was receiving from outside.

He loved to fish, to travel, to search far and wide for arrowheads, Indian marbles, ginseng and fossils. He was an expert marksman who as an adult eventually hunted with a bow because "rifles weren't sporting".

He was a voracious reader of anything scientific, political, or Western. He knew how to build porches from scratch and keep numerous cars running. He chopped wood for his brother and made sure no one got hurt working in remote areas of the farm. He resolved disputes with dangerous, gun toting neighbors, pulled senile grandfathers out of ditches, babysat his grandmother and even called adult protective services for her once.

This was a man who transitioned from being a tobacco farmer in Kentucky to being a semiconductor research facility worker in a space suit in less than a year. He knew the name of every major species of plant and tree on our 300 acre farm. He not only knew what an Angstrom was, but in what context and how to describe such things to others.

He did not seem to get any sort of real kick out of knowing so much. He didn't go out of his way to browbeat people with his superior knowledge. If he had a serious flaw, it was the way my father presented himself as only a few steps above white trash, when he was so much more.

I think about my husband's music education and how he hates jazz. I recognize my father's reasoning in the way I explain the function of the style. A music meant to complement and encourage active conversation while also providing privacy and a free form. A brother's tune. My dad would have dug it and understood just about every nuance of any situation. Except for when people were expecting him to perform.

My father did not agree with the things he taught us kids about measuring up to expectations and performing to standard. He sounded so desperate to teach us the things he could not accept.

I never saw my father more happy than when he cast aside society's stupid expectations long enough to actually enjoy himself and use his talents as a naturalist, guide, adventurer.

He would tell us girls, There are too many goddamn people. When his son was finally born, I was already turning 12 and my dad was slowing down from a lifetime of stress, alcohol, depression and perceived failure. My brother did not get to see my father in prime form. He saw the echo, the long shadow of a distant fire.

I didn't get to really know my father either. But one thing I do know, he was probably one of the smartest people on earth that no one really knew about at the time, and no one who knew him at all will ever be able to forget it... how hauntingly, totally, tragically displaced he was, living in a time like ours.

This probably sounds very melodramatic and grandiose, but you'd have to have met this guy, to know what I mean.

He was the saddest clown, the loneliest wise guy, I've ever known. I remember how small he looked, laid out in his coffin after the Oxy took him from our lives. How inadequate an expression of human value, is that tiny box at the end. None of the things he loved would have fit in there with him, except perhaps those tiny animals from his earliest years.

How heartbroken I was when the pallbearers started lowering the casket into the earth over which my father had once so proudly tread. The unnamed flowers, the unseen animals, the unpicked morels and the lofty thoughts too far for most mortals are all we have left.

And of course, the dreams in which he now appears, and the places he loved. Surely he remembered them more fondly than they seem to remember our frail, transitory forms!

How I wish he had not died.
July 2017 will mark the 10 year anniversary of his death, and I have not finished grieving.
Brotherhood falls asunder at the touch of fire!
He finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not coloured like his own, and having power
To enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause
Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.
~William Cowper
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