|
|
|
Last Updated: Nov 14, 2008 - 12:49:26 PM |
Across the lane in front of our house stands an immense cottonwood tree – a “Trinity tree” – three massive trunks arching upward from a common root. Each spring, this giant looses a blizzard of cottony white tufts, spreading far upon the breeze – and piling in snowlike drifts six inches deep in the front yard, until a heavy dew or May shower presses the seeds to the receptive earth.
In our family, cottonwood season marks a time which changed our lives forever. On May 14, 1992, my father breathed his last in a hospital bed in Hopewell, the hometown of his youth. Two days later, we waded through ankle-deep cotton in our dark mourning clothes – perpetually linking Dad’s death with this particular arboreal phenomenon.
In these fast-changing times, I’m constantly astonished that my father is still remembered. The generations who elected him to three terms in the House of Delegates and three more in the State Senate are declining in number – absolutely, and even more rapidly in proportion to the vast influx of newcomers who never knew him.
Yet seldom does a week pass without someone stopping me to speak, and recalling the remarkable man who gave me my name – and so much more.
I miss him.
Not, certainly, as much as my mother does – for theirs was a true romance, forged in testing times – including wartime separation. A romance celebrated and kept vibrant by such things as their shared love of the old standards, which they sang together – or to each other – and to which they loved to dance.
Yet, at the same time, they were best friends – sharing the kind of companionship which can only come about when two individuals of rare intellect and wit find each other amongst the madding crowd.
My sister and I miss Dad, too – each in our own way. He was a remarkable father – very much the embodiment of fiction’s Atticus Finch – with the added virtues of knowing every constellation in the sky, remembering every joke or cornball gag he’d ever heard, and being the best card player I ever saw.
There’s an old saying that every writer secretly writes for only one reader – often one who can no longer be reached. If that’s true for me, I’m not aware of it. Perhaps that’s why I still can’t find the voice for my novel.
I certainly don’t write for Dad. In a lifetime, I’ve had a few ideas which hadn’t already occurred to him – but not enough to sustain a weekly column. When I was a kid, Dad would set up situations allowing me to solve some practical problem. These brainstorms gave me confidence in my own abilities, but as I grew older, I realized what he’d been up to.
I can count, on the fingers of one hand, the times when I actually apprehended something before Dad.
But if I don’t write to my father, I’m fairly sure that – in another sense – I write for him. The essential philosophy underlying everything I write reflects an attempt – however imperfect – to keep alive his fundamental approach to public life.
I am not my father. I can’t draw on the life experiences – Depression, World War II – that shaped him. But whenever I attempt to wrestle with a civic issue, I’m aware of how much I owe him – and how concerned I am to follow the logic of his public career.
Which is not to say that I can speak for Dad. No one can speak for the dead. Times and circumstances change. Human understanding grows – particularly in the sciences – while old wisdom is sometimes lost. The very meanings of words undergo a constant evolution.
It’s folly to believe that anyone can truly assert what some past figure would have thought about modern questions. This fallacy lies behind many kinds of fundamentalism – including the judicial philosophy which holds that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its original meaning.
Or literalist theologies which rest on the impossible assertion that they do not interpret holy texts.
When I write on some public matter, I understand that I’m applying my own understanding of human nature, the workings of history, and the personal and civic virtues. Yet I must acknowledge that the seeds of this understanding were largely sown by my parents – and particularly, on public matters, by Dad.
If I cannot certainly say how he would have viewed any particular modern issue, I have a profound sense of the link between Dad – a conservative Democrat who defended “states’ rights,” yet idolized FDR – and my “progressive” self.
And it pleases me to think that – against the background of America’s shifting ideological and partisan wars – the apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree.
Fred T. Gray has been gone sixteen years. I could write pages, but nothing more profound than the words which Shakespeare gave to Hamlet:
He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.
© Copyright by Village Publishing
Top of Page Comment
on This Article
The
Village News office is located at 4607 West Hundred Road Chester
Mailing address is PO Box 2397 Chester, VA 23831
Phone: 751-0421 Fax: 751-9155
Office hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday - Friday call ahead for
other hours.
Statement
of Journalistic Ethics
|
|
|
Village News:
Read right 'round the world.
|
|
