An Eulogy for Daddy
July 25, 2001 -- Jackson, Mississippi
I look at pictures, Daddy, of you holding me as an infant, you so tall in your Navy uniform, looking so handsome, so straight with the deep black hair, all that wavy hair you had then. I never knew you with so much hair. And you really seemed glad and proud to have a son. You smile so deeply at my chubby face, holding me in your strong arms, at least they look strong. I don’t remember anything before maybe four or five when we were still living in the Fortification Street apartment just before Babs was born, so any memories of you holding me at that young an age are long gone in the deep recesses of my consciousness.
Momma says I was such a happy baby, and in a baby picture when I was about two, I sure look happy. I guess I was happy for you too, like Kate related you said she was for you. I don’t know. We never talked about it, what it was like for you to have finally a small child after you and Momma were married in ‘41. I look at the pen & ink drawing you did of “Tommy Lad”, so I can deduce that the reality meant something quite deep and meaningful to you. BTW, since I’m going “on the road,” I’m passing that drawing of me on to Thomas Aaron. He wants it as a memento of you along with the picture of me, naked holding him naked as an infant.
It sort of belies what Aunt Mary told us kids in one of our “reunions” at Beth’s during the early 90s that you never wanted children, Daddy, that you didn’t want to share your “Bobbie” with anyone, that Momma had to practically force you to impregnate her in 1942 with who I became after you became an officer in the Navy (btw, I haven’t foggiest how you became a Navy lieutenant junior grade – just another of the million or so of topics we were never able to talk about.) She desperately wanted your child, so that in the event you went off to war and were killed, she would have something of you to hold and to treasure for the rest of her life.
It makes sense to me, Daddy, that you didn’t want to share your beloved. I can be quite possessive myself in love relationships. Also being mostly a loner myself, I’ve come to accept that like you, in many ways I’m most comfortable sitting in solitude listening to my music, as I’m doing now listening to the CD from the Phantom of the Opera, which I saw with Jennifer and Eric in New York City a couple of week ends ago, as I write this about 4:30 a.m. on the morning of the day of your wake doing my own thing. I am truly your son; my apple didn’t fall far from your tree. And intimacy? Communication? Guess what, Daddy? I am more like you than sometimes I care to admit, even though for many years I made a fairly decent living teaching those skills to others. Just like us, eh? We’re damn fine writers, we just had difficulties writing each other . . .
The only time I remember you holding me as a young child was in the Fortification street apartment. We walked out into the garage, and you pulled the pull-string to turn on the light. When the garage burst into light, there was a snake wrapped around the pull-string. Did that actually happen? Did I dream it? I seem to remember it; another thing I can’t ask you about it. I don’t remember being afraid, even you being afraid -- just an isolated clarity in a sea of murkiness from my deep childhood past.
I have another photograph, Daddy, of me sitting on the front stoop of the new house on Hawthorn Drive. I’m five, maybe six, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and dark shorts. I am not a happy fella, a worried look on my face, deep furrowed eyebrows, pursed lips, looking like the weight of the world is on my small shoulders. What had happened in between the two photographs, those three or four years? The one, chubby cheeked, smiling wide-eyed, happy, so bright; the other so pinched, dark, full of angst. Surely not just the birth of Babs, the several moves, including the one to the new house, eh?
I doubt that you would have any answers, but I would have liked to have talked with you about this and so much more. Of course, Dad, over the last number of years, since the early 80s really, we’ve made a number of attempts to relate, to communicate -- we just weren’t very good at it, except for that “cluster of precious moments” we had the last visit in October of last year, which I’ll add here later.
There was that week in the summer of ’83 when I came down with Tommy. He was about three years old and an SRK, a spoiled rotten kid. We were very close, he slept with me, I coddled him, to a great extent probably I overcompensated, spoiling him to avoid the estrangement I felt we had experienced. It seemed the longer we were here, the more distant you and I became, the more critical you and Momma were of how I parented, or didn’t parent, him.
Somewhere in my Islip office is a folder with a stack of letters, of correspondence between us in the late 80s, maybe early 90s when I was trying to establish some kind of connection with you. As with so many efforts in my life in many areas of endeavor, there was a lack of follow-thru on my part. As well, Daddy, I sensed, a difficulty on your part to respond in kind, which contributed to this effort also fizzling, drifting off into inaction.
Then, Daddy, there was that time in ’92 or ’93 when I drove down here with Tommy and we all sat around the kitchen table, talking about your shame with your Father, Lonnie, how he was a gambler, how hard that was for you, how shameful that was. Also how difficult it was when your best friend, Will was it? from Monticello became an alcoholic and died so young from the disease. I don’t know if you ever really understood, or accepted my alcoholism. I remember early in my recovery coming down here, oh maybe ‘75 or ‘76 and leading a meeting over on West Northside Drive with me being hell bent in trying to shock you and Momma with how awful and degrading my drinking/drugging was. I may have succeeded too much. Silly of me, I suppose, to be so intent on negatively impressing you so.
Anyway, as I grew up, as a kid, I remember we grew more and more estranged: you would retreat to the phonograph player in the living room to listen to your @#$%^@*^#$% Classical music, and I became more and more engaged in my activities outside of the house. Once I remember taking you on a Boy Scout camping trip, which was most uncomfortable for us both. By high school I hated Classical music, and you hated emerging rock & roll. I remember once you caught me in the old Greyhound station behind St. Joe, squandering your and my hard earned pocket money from the paper route playing the pinball machines.
We were never able to talk about boy and Daddy stuff: hunting, fishing, baseball and football, war – I was so ashamed, Daddy, that you didn’t go to WW II; that was one of the major reasons I volunteered to go to Vietnam. The snot-nosed, little buggers here in the neighborhood kidded me unmercifully during the 50s, when we built our forts and played our war games, about how you must have been a coward, a sissy. It was much later that Momma showed me the stack of letters you had written to the Department of Navy, requesting sea duty, all turned down because someone had to teach navigation to the poor saps before they got shot down or bailed out over Dresden or Tokyo. So little did/do I know.
So ironic that your first major depressive episode happened the year I was in Vietnam -- actually, Daddy, the main reason I volunteered for Vietnam was as a suicide mission myself, due to my drinking/drugging. Pretty ironic, huh? In ’68 you failed in killing yourself here at home, and I failed in killing myself by going to war because you didn’t.
I do so wish we could have talked more about how weird and wonderful life and living is, about crying and grieving and laughing and wondering, stuff like this and stuff like that. I wish I would have read you more of my poetry and talked to you more about my war. How wrong it was then, how much I hated it -- yet ironically also how much I loved being there and doing it, how it has shaped every waking moment since. How much I have come to hate this country I fought for and what it stands for, the evil empire it has become, as the world’s only superpower, violating all of it’s sacred founding principles and values in the politics of greed and globalization, since I’ve come back. The barriers, however, in your life and in my life were just too hard and too high I guess for that to happen.
Sitting out in the backyard with Meg and Edward Tuesday afternoon, Daddy, I scared Meg with the vehemence of my still keening rage about that dirty little war in Southeast Asia I volunteered to go to 34 years ago this past April, our nation’s longest and most ignoble war. It’s kind of sad (see I’m getting more comfortable saying that word about us), you took all the anger and rage in your life, at your crazy-making upbringing with Lonnie and Grand-mu-mu, going from Bible belt, backwater Monticello, Mississippi to super-progressive far-left of the most socialist Indianapolis. You turned all that dark energy against yourself. I, your son, have so much of that same dark, dark energy, and I still explode it bombastically out in verbal onslaughts and seething rants. When Timothy McVeigh was executed several weeks ago, a deep part of me sighed a prayer of relief that there but for the grace of God go I!
Gee, I wonder what ever happened to the old 410 shotgun I used to oil and keep clean in the old boyhood bedroom; oh yes, and I don’t want to forget to take your violin with me. I can take that on the road, and maybe I’ll take up fiddling again. One of my regrets is that I gave up playing the violin to concentrate on playing football. I could have done both.
During adolescence and high school, I think much of my rebellion and anger was mostly directed toward you, whose anger and rebellion was directed mostly against yourself. You came to all my games, all my theatre productions, all my chorale concerts, supported me passively in all my activities, but we were never able to relate, just to talk, boy to man, son to Father, young man to older man. I’m so sad about that. There, it slipped out; I’ve said it again -- I am so sad about that, and I must bear the responsibility for not insisting, demanding that we do it more.
When I left Jackson in ’61 it was mostly to get away from you, and my disdain for you and the small, little life, I judged you to have at Gordon Marks and in Jackson. You know, Daddy, you and the advertising biz has always been oxymoronic for me. If there’s one bidness that’s cutthroat and vicious it’s advertising, and you with your super gentleman’s sensibilities and your fine-honed honor thrived in it, got the highest awards in it, not despite your honor and honesty, but because of them. Yes, Gordon Marks, especially the spoiled son, Sutton, took advantage of you and your talent, you and your craftsmanship. Yes, that hotshot Madison Avenue guy, retiring from the big time came down and stole the Deposit Guaranty account away from you, but you always delivered quality and authenticity, value and service, characteristics that make you far more loved in this city, in this community than they will ever in several lifetimes know the meaning of. Speaking of quality, authenticity, value and service, my generation has made a mockery of such traits in hollow slogans and bottom line metrics only. We who rebelled so boisterously against your generation in the establishment during our pampered youth that you provided for us became the largest, most spoiled youthful generation in the history of the planet, not trusting anyone over thirty. And we have outdone your generation, Daddy, in spades, in overarching greed, conspicuously consumptive cancer, and diseased values. I rant, I ramble.
After your internal battles with your demons and dark side, at about the age I am now, you went on to honor your friends and associates in business, creating legacies to them and a legacy for yourself as a chronicler of the histories of ordinary men and ordinary institutions, even an ordinary city, Jackson, doing extraordinary good deeds and excellent good works. You became a writer of history, the common stories of extraordinary events, and today you shared the billboard of the funeral parlor with one of the greatest writers of our era, Eudora Welty. It is fitting. It is just. You deserve each other. And I imagine you are in heaven looking down at us, sharing a cup of tea and crumpets, discussing small matters, momentous or mundane. Better yet, yes, I envision the two of you, dancing a jig in exuberant glory of IT all.
You know, Daddy, despite all the estrangement, all the resentment for a life between us mostly unlived, all the bitterness for what we did not have, the far greater truth is that I *am* your son, and you gave me despite our outer estrangement a core of value, a legacy of talents and skills as well as a set of deep principles which have inexorably shaped and molded me, Daddy, to be the man that today at 58 I am still in the process of emerging myself to be. I sit here listening to rousing, deep, beautiful music, whose love you gave me, despite myself, looking out the window of my first childhood bedroom in the early light of the day we shall wake you . . .
What a wonderfully ironic twist of words, Daddy, you will “waken” today in the eyes of your family and community from this earthly mortal coil to “a better place to be” after the days, weeks and months of living a mostly institutionally dehumanized life in nursing homes, to the arms of Grand-mu-mu and Lonnie and Will and Lassie and Bambi and all the others near and dear to you who have passed this illusory earthly veil, so that you can reconnect with them on the other side. So that you can also prepare a place for your beloved, Momma, when it’s her time, as well as to prepare a place, to recon, to be the advance party, to scope it out, to get the skinny, for me and for Babs, for Kate, for Meg and for Beth and for all our chillens that’s better, deeper, realer, according to the always loving will of the Holy Spirit who rests and holds us all, all of the time in His/Her/Its loving arms throughout eternity . . .
Whew! Sorry, Daddy, got on a raving roll there -- along with love of music, from you I have been blessed and gifted with a(n):
• Love of words and crafting words
• Deep sense of justice and racial equality
• Appreciation for simplicity in material needs, not wants
• Value of friendship
• Value of books and the written word
• Passionate sense to learn and to seek to know more
• Respect for dignity and protocol, though often still I flaunt it and rebel against it
• Ability to live up to commitment and to one’s honor “for better or worse”
• Belief in the common good and decency of all people, regardless of race, color or background
Lastly, Daddy, from you and Momma I grew up with a very progressive political view, not only about race relations, but about the whole spectrum of political thought, which was quite liberal, even socialist, especially compared with the mostly conservative South. No doubt this was due to you being shipped off to live with the “Black Sheep” socialist wing of our family with Eleanor. I also really regret that we didn’t talk more about her and what you experienced there, your knowing Paul Robeson, your experiences during the Depression. So much we could have spoken about had we taken the time . . .
Later today, Daddy, at Wright & Ferguson and tomorrow at St. James, hundreds of Jacksonians, those here in the community as well as folks from Monticello and some from afar, the Wilson’s, Aunt Mary, etc. will gather to honor you, to pay respects to you, to salute you for the life well lived, well crafted, well served that you lived. As your son, though much of it remains mystery for me, is not directly understood by me, was often in my callow youth spurned and ridiculed by me, I will watch proud and humble, grateful and with heartfelt joy that though I didn’t understand and walk much of your path with you, I am very open-hearted glad and happy for you and for Momma and for all of us that you did . . .
I love you Daddy . . .
Your son,
Tommy-lad
P.S.
Here’s the prose poem rendition I made of that last conversation we had in the den my last visit down last October:
One Cluster of Precious Moments
Father and I are sitting in the den. Momma and the girls are in the kitchen preparing the noon family meal like we always do on Sundays after church. Our relationship as his first born has always been strained, even estranged for most of our 57 years. For many reasons, which I understand, but still am emotionally vulnerable to, he never wanted children, did not want to share “Bobbie” his lover/sweetheart/hostage, our mother with anyone.
I ask him what he does with his time at St. Catherine’s, the Alzheimer’s facility where he is, which is excellent and most caring.
He pauses for a moment and slowly replies. “I think about all the friends I’ve had, all the family I’ve know, each of you children, your friends and children, my grandchildren. I think how grateful I am to have known so many wonderful people. It fills me with such gratitude.”
“That’s really nice, Dad.”
We sit in silence for a while, listening to the tick-tocking of the mantle clock.
“That’s a really nice sound. The mantle clock tick-tocking,” I say.
“Yes,” he replies.
“I was with you, oh I guess around 11 or 12, maybe younger, when we bought it as a birthday present for Mom up in Fondren Place.
“I remember,” he says.
The tick-tocking seems to slow, focusing all reality into each passing beat.
“Yes, each tick, each tock is so soothing, so comforting,” he says after a slow passing while. “Such a nice sound.
“Yes, Daddy, it is.”
P.P.S.S.
In 1965-66, Daddy, while at Xavier, Otto and Diane Kvapil, my theatre mentors, introduced me to the poetry of ee cummings. We did a theatrical presentation consisting only of the words of his poetry. One of the poems we performed is the following poem, which even at that time resonated deeply with me. Even though I was most estranged from you, Daddy, I fantasized then, 36 years ago, reading this at your or Momma’s funeral, because even then it reminded me of the deep quality of your love, your devotion, your caring for each other. As rebellious, as bitter, as self-and-other-hateful a youth then as I was, I recognized, Daddy, that what you and Momma had was a good thing. Here is the poem:
if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven or
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses
my father will be (deep like a rose
tall like a rose
standing near my
(swaying over her
silent
with eyes which are really petals and see
nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my
(suddenly in sunlight
he will bow,
& the whole garden will bow
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