My Father's Passion

 

"Whan that Aprill with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;..."

(When April has pierced March's drought to the root, and the rain's virtue has made the flowers grow;...)

That opening to Chaucer's 1391 Prologue to his best-seller is particularly fitting for my Spring visit - and our last, as we knew - with my son to be with my father, and his grandfather.  Our anticipated arrival had just been preceded by an uncharacteristically massive snowstorm for early May.  As we flew into Denver however, that was not only over, there was no trace of it having happened, but for some damaged trees.



Those May mornings were like being stoned on acid (not that I would know) or going through the Bardos (as fitting as quoting Chaucer, in this case).  Crisp hardly even describes them - the colors and the smells were intensely themselves, unique and familiar both.  This was where I'd spent my entire childhood, nine months out of the year, and with those mixed memories I took a long walk insisted upon by my six-and-a-half year old son, about ten long city blocks in East Denver, right up to 14th Ave., one before Colfax, and on to Krameria where our King Soopers supermarket was.  For nothing, just because.  Just because he loved it there.  Just because he insisted on peddling all the way on Uncle Richard's, then Uncle Greg's, and finally his father's, ancient blue, sturdy-metal-true tricycle - a half-century old.  And he managed it, the whole way.

With every dismounting, carrying the trike with one hand over the next street from curb to curb, and remounting; with every eyeful of sparkling beauty in color and form, every beloved scent of May's lilacs; with every slow step, over the cracks, which only the Zen-of-Child normally would force you to in-joy and deeply experience when taking even the most banal paths you'd been over hundreds of thousands of times - but now as if for the first, both eerily familiar and eerily new, and for that:  ineffably poignant, embedded in eternity, your eternity; with all this, and falling in love again with my childhood, my Denver, my son - yes, acid could not even come close.

My father loved Walt Whitman, and I ought to have read "Leaves of Grass" aloud to him, as he lay in a hospital bed in the livingroom, there in the house I'd grown up in - a house so big then, and now so very small.  But he got Eliot.  I had brought my T.S. Eliot, quite aside from the fact that this livingroom boasted a library wall which surely would have had Whitman and Eliot somewhere amid the massively complete Shakespeare.  But I had my worn little copy of "Four Quartets", carried with me since I'd first discovered this masterpiece of English and of profound literary significance and earthy mystical insight, some 23 years earlier.

My liberal, Reform-Jewish father typically considered himself agnostic.  He was curious, a lawyer who liked word and fact and meaning, very conventional and reserved, a gentleman - and he was a warm funny guy who could surprise us with his actual depth of feeling and comprehension.  And he was dying.  And this sharing in depth and dying, this reading of Eliot's "Quartets" became both crown and cornerstone of my life with my father - and a passion we shared in our own personal and unique encounter.

His three sons, during respective visits, had brought and given him each his own particular gift of respect and gratitude, touching on his individual relationship with our father.  And mine was to bring his grandson from Berlin - and Eliot.

During our two weeks together, I sat on a low children's folding-chair just level, at his bedside - my voice close to his ear, four early mornings in a row, at an hour he was most clear.  As that east-facing picture window drew in the gradual rays of thousands of relived childhood mornings, I read aloud to him, one Quartet per morning, roughly a quarter of an hour.  He followed every word with rapt attention.  As he was the only one I know to whom I could have read this and it be appreciated, drunk in, and actually understood, in all its nuanced erudition - and depth - I was likewise the only one who'd have been sitting there reading it to him.  Eliot's "Quartets," read just as they were written and meant to be read, expressed the bond my father and I shared, our passion for English, more than even all the Shakespeare in the world would have done.  The work is universal and decidedly English, both.

On the second or third morning, my lad Joshua was acting up - I sent him to our room and told him to come out only when he'd settled down, as I was about to read to Grandfather.  Each of the four sessions was laden with a shared concentration of quiet intensity which was not to be disturbed - and it was not.

Each Quartet built on themes primarily stressing the generations and old folkways juxtaposed with existential relfections, addressing what is often dismissed as the most banal of life's rituals and rites of passage, comings and goings, birth and dying, celebration and loss, struggling with mortality and acknowledging eternity - in an earthy, surreal familiarity with all that he phrases and reintroduces from Quartet to Quartet, which one can only regard as deeply, masterfully poignant.

My dear son came out of our room after ten minutes or so, just as I was in the middle of that morning's reading.  I did not interrupt myself, and he (uncharacteristically) did not interrupt me either, but climbed, ever so gently up onto my lap as I continued without missing a beat.  There we sat, in the dawn's early light, forming a tableau of three generations:  the one lying on his deathbed, the one sitting beside him reading as from the Bardos, the one sitting on that one's lap (understanding no word spoken but knowing as a child, what nourishment is) - while Eliot spoke to us of generations living, and of generations passing.

My mother crossed the room at that moment with a basket of laundry, being much in her element, as we were being in Eliot.  Eliot ruled, he owned the room.  My mother stopped short right there and took it all in, muttered only that she'd wished she had a camera just then.  I smiled and gestured only, that we'll never need that camera, as this moment with all its impressions, which so embraces us in our entire past together, our here and now, and an eternity which is ours to take with us - is and will remain deeply embedded in our hearts, as would no snapshot ever, ever do justice.  She nodded, and brought her laundry out.  Eliot was being served - and digested.  For the road ahead.

(I couldn't be there at his memorial service; my penned eulogy was read for me, and consisted primarily of Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night," written for his own father.)

I'll fittingly close this with Eliot's own closing of the last section of the fourth Quartet:

                                       V.

"What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.  And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.  And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration.  A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.  So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

   "We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always -
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one."