On My Father's Centennial, 10.4.2024

Too often when we write
About someone close to us,
We wind up writing about ourselves:
What they meant to us, 
How they affected us.

No shame there:
We all live in our own dreams,
No one else's.

But I want to try and think myself
Into his head, maybe more than in the past.

We must have seemed willful to him,
And ungrateful for the opportunities we had.
He was filial to his father,
Even though there were bad memories there.
(In his decline, when he couldn't
Reliably remember who I was,
The memory of his father's creditors
Beating down the door
Was one that recurred often for him.)

What did it feel like
To be 17 years old
When your country was attacked
By the land your parents came from?
(You could see the battleships burning 
From your front porch.)

What did it feel like
To be a 20 year old first lieutenant
Interviewing survivors of a firebombing
And an atomic bombing
On behalf of the government 
That sent the bombers?
(You could speak the survivors' language
Because you grew up speaking it.)

He must have had a deep inner life
When he was a young man.
The books he had in his library
(Dostoevsky, Eliot, Thomas Mann, Camus)
Pointed to that.
(I took some of them with me
When I left home for good.)

He was musical too, in his youth:
Played violin in orchestras.
At college, he was able to 
Discuss scores with music majors.

By the time I knew him, he
Seemed inarticulate and 
Socially awkward away from
The work that defined him.

As men of his generation did,
He got on the treadmill
Of making a living
And spent his years
Responding to circumstances
He didn't create
And couldn't have foreseen.

He was comfortable there.
He knew the rules
And how to play the game.
Home was harder.

I've lived some of that now
And think I understand him better
But still, when I took my wife
(This one, not the first one)
To meet him, he told me
As we were leaving,
"You don't have to come back here
When I die."

I guess there was some guilt he carried.
I have some of that, too.
In dreams, I'm always a failed college student
Who can't find the way home.

Perhaps I regret disappointing him
In ways I never realized
(Although I'm content now
With the life I've had).

But here's the thing:
No matter what we went through
Years ago, when we were grappling
With how to relate to each other,
He's still in my head every day,
In a positive way, I think.