GETTING MIRED IN MEMORIES

By definition e.g “Looking Ahead,” I should not be doing this. A phone call from my cousin prompted me. He responded to my blog wishing that I could live long enough to see how “it all comes out.” He finds a lot of comfort in reminiscing. I do too, but I told him too much reminiscing becomes a trap. You become mired in the past. The future takes a back seat to all your old war stories, your “past-improved” memories. Worst of all, it places you in the sometimes boring company of other people whose only pleasure is to look back.

Having said I wouldn’t – I am going to. My cousin and I talked about my father. I told him I had, years ago, written a piece about what my father missed by taking his own life at 41. (Reasons for that choice have never been clear to me.)

My memories of my father are mostly positive. He was my guide to growing up, or at least to learning the things you need to have a chance to grow up. He spent hours with me talking. He’d do quizzes for me to sharpen my brain. By the age of eight I knew the capitals of every country in the world; I understood geography so I could print, in my mind, a map of just about anyplace. My father gave me that.

I have already written in my blog about Mars, that it was my father who stimulated an interest in space, hence my fascination with the latest news about settlement on the Red Planet. He made me learn serious music, although I disappointed my family by not practicing. He made me read poetry, and with the sponge-like mind of an eight or nine year old, I discovered an inherent skill at memorization. (A talent I have not maintained.)

But just as I will not be around for human settlement on Mars, my father missed everything. He was an advocate of air travel, when there were a few routes traveled by DC3s, then the queen of the sky. He took me on my first airplane ride, sitting on his lap in a Tiger Moth. (He didn’t fly, he was a passenger. My cousin had the same experience – his first flight was my father’s doing.)

But he missed so much. He never saw his grandchildren. His attraction to science was enormous. He took me to the World’s Fair in New York in 1940 where I saw my first TV. He never lived to see it regular television. He never lived to see computers or cell phones or Japanese cars. He didn’t live to enjoy my success. He would have loved my sailboat.

Perhaps my tenderest memory is of him coming home from an exhausting day at his law office (exhausted because there was no business) going into the living room and taking out his violin. It was almost always the same piece: the theme music from the film “Intermezzo” with Leslie Howard and a newcomer – Ingrid Bergman. In the film the music is played by Tassy Spivakovsky. My father was no Spivakovsky. He always made it beautiful through the single line theme. Then he came to the hard stuff: double-stopping. He charged at it. He always crashed. Always.

It’s only now; with me finally back at the keyboard that I realize what was missing: he did a lot of wishing, but he lacked the discipline to work it out, slowly, one note at a time, over and over until he got it right.

He went to his grave never having played that song properly.