Legends live on
Houghton, William J.
A FATHER'S IMAGE OF THE PAST LEGENDS LIVE ON ALIVE, CRANKY, WARTS & ALL By mid-high school, our children often rushed past me, shouting back that they would be home later, and it grew harder to...
...Some of the best family legends involve trips in a car...
...Even when we groped through the door of the cabin, nothing was visible...
...Suddenly, the engine went dead and all the lights went out...
...These family legends are strong...
...Asked why, he answered, "I had to because she didn't know how to do it...
...Picking them out could hurt or excite, but they led to stronger emotions...
...Thanksgivings and Christmases blur together, but there are other meals as well: the time we boiled five lobsters, or prepared a caldron of fresh corn, or, just as grand, the time we made fresh cheesecake but couldn't wait and ate it still warm...
...Of course I do...
...Another peculiar warp to these memories was that while I pictured myself as large and independent and my children as small and dependent, over the years the children have grown physically imposing, clever, and gifted with idiosyncratic views...
...It was during this unpacking that I discovered those episodes 8: 5 June 1992 Commonweal that make up the legends of our family...
...But others, often about seemingly minor events, were what constituted the stuff of family legend...
...A FATHER'S IMAGE OF THE PAST LEGENDS LIVE ON ALIVE, CRANKY, WARTS & ALL By mid-high school, our children often rushed past me, shouting back that they would be home later, and it grew harder to recall what our agreement was on curfew or the plans for next weekend...
...In college, they were catching planes for the coasts, or foreign shores, and it took more elaborate invitations to arrange a dinner together...
...The daily grind of growing up was the rough ore: tons of dirt and rocks...
...Many of my favorite memories are of our children's growing verbal precocity...
...I know they are partial, both fragmented and slanted, and every member of the family would probably supply a different list, or surely a different version...
...They catch us in the flesh, in the act...
...Now, I am lucky to join in their conversation...
...One is discerning and sticking to the truth, which includes some unpleasant news (the mortgage, taxes, poor health, creaky knees, further repetitions of overly familiar experiences, etc...
...We could see nothing in the blackness...
...The car's power steering and power windows seemed to guarantee an unaccustomed control...
...In fact, the general effect of my recollections is that of a silent movie: more flash and flicker than steady light...
...There's a photo of his dazed face, smeared with spaghetti sauce...
...During one such melancholy phase, I started to unpack boxes from several moves and unearthed a hoard of memories...
...These seemed to stick in the mind like a stubborn sandbur...
...The other is our image of the past, the family legends...
...They are like edited copy, shaped by the needs of the present...
...One of these is roots...
...My son loved spaghetti and, at age two, almost finished a massive platter when he fell asleep, face down, on the remainder...
...The character of each individual stood out dramatically in them: alive, cranky, warts and all...
...Great chunks of the past are obscure for me...
...I admired and envied their enterprise—it was just what I wanted for them—but I started to miss our spells of fun together, our leisurely periods of joint rumination, even eye contact...
...There is no doubt that the bond of family affection can be extolled too much, the web of affection be drawn too tight, chokingly so...
...These legends tend to be the stories family members recall to one another: "Do you remember the time when...
...But another doctor said there was nothing wrong and has proven right...
...But I found that after an initial rush, the photographs began to pall...
...By a quirk of fate, there is a breakdown, or we get lost, and only by good luck and determination do we navigate to a safe harbor...
...Do I exaggerate these ordinary stories, and emphasize selected features...
...Some of these family legends were of the children when they were small and dependent...
...Commonweal 5 June 1992: 9 Now that our children have moved away and we are left to tend the property, we take solace from two things...
...Our son, at the same age, was given a definition of "infinity" and shuddered, "It's too much, too much...
...At five years old, the same son took a favorite married babysitter, herself childless, into a room and showed her an anatomical drawing I had given him depicting intercourse and conception...
...One daughter was told she might have cancer and we were overwhelmed...
...A defunct generator, we found out later...
...They show that we were true, reliable, and in harmony, at least for a particular, fleeting instant...
...Augustine remembering rolling fields of continuous sights and sounds...
...One of our daughters, at four years old, yelled above the noise of the crowd to a stunt pilot, "Watch your ass...
...Our feet felt their way, inch by inch, down the macadam and then a dirt road...
...Other legends are of practical jokes—less funny or more funny in the retelling?—and of childhood illnesses...
...Now, I'm not some St...
...All too often we search in vain for community in jobs, schools, clubs—forget about the state—when there is a better chance of finding it in this small group...
...WILLIAM J. HOUGHTON 10: 5 June 1992 Commonweal...
...This is the usual course of the generations, but my family "legends" tend to downplay that...
...There were no lights in the woods or the fields around us...
...There are also the stories that culminate in the mythical meal, a crowd around the table...
...We gave each other respect and love, and our family stories stand for that...
...Some memories were simply too massive to digest at a single sitting: births, deaths, wars...
...I have memories of crowds of children rushing across a broad expanse—a field of grass or a hardwood floor—with a crowd of spectators on the sideline...
...And there were the trips to movies, like the gray December day we went to Bergman's Magic Flute, were bathed in the warm music and color of the film, and came out of the theater into the magical transformation of the first snow...
...the other, wings...
...But turning on the light switch, we were flooded with the warm, safe light, and amazed to recognize the bedraggled wanderers we were...
...But these legends are my talismans, smooth rubbing stones I carry, clicking them together for comfort...
...While I cherish my luck that my children are alive, healthy, and bright, nevertheless dark shades were never absent for long...
...The deep itch to outdo one's sibling was seldom soothed, and my wife and I were not free of such urges ourselves...
...We were driving in a newly inherited Thunderbird...
...The spark seemed to have gone out of the car, and perhaps all of Western civilization...
...They were too much, all of the images becoming frozen and static, and I had to put them aside to remember more: at which house did this happen...
...Some were more threatening...
...The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults...
...Those illnesses were terrifying at the time: weeks of croup and lights burning in the middle of the night...
...Once, in late October, we traveled to a remote summer cabin...
...I wondered: Why am I paying the mortgage if the rooms are empty...
...These are stories of triumph now...
...But I find I need them even more when we are apart or we have had another quarrel...
...There were cartons of tiny clothes, slightly gray and stiff with mold—hard to imagine how cute they once were—and boxes of unsorted snapshots...
...And with the process, some mobility and pinkness of cheek came back to the faces in the pictures, reflecting perhaps what I had felt at the time...
...There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give to our children," Hodding Carter has remarked...
...Peter de Vries said: "Who of us is mature [enough] for offspring before offspring arrive...
...The children looked small and distant at first, and I feared for their shins and necks...
...For in real life, we quarreled much of the time, no one was completely satisfied, and everyone wanted more glory...
...My wife and I could do nothing but hike to the cabin, carrying sleeping children and the ice chest...
...The latter were the most powerful stimuli of all...
...We quarreled, it is true, but at times we came together, we connected...
...But then I would spot one of my kids in the thick of the pack, free and making his or her way in the general throng...
...I was left staring at the wall...
...Now we bring out these legends after family dinners, after dessert and coffee...
...It was midnight and we were a mile from the cabin...
Vol. 119 • June 1992 • No. 11
