My Father
"Never compromise your ideals. Never give in to defeat or despair. Never stop journeying merely because the way is long and hard. It always is." - Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
The most precious moment in my life is one I was never supposed to see. When my father abruptly left MIT during his doctoral program in the 1980’s, we were strangers. He didn’t know his first date with my mother was going to be at Cook’s Farm Dairy (er - rather, was supposed to be there; he get lost driving), nor that they would have four kids, the youngest of which (me) would go on to defend my coffee preferences with near-equal fervency. Likewise, I couldn’t have guessed that I would have the type of dad to let me follow him through every library, cafe, and hidden study spot around campus for an entire year. The type of dad who said “why come see me?!” like it was an easy fix-all to my problems (and as if I was gutting his heart if I refused). To be fair, I have since learned that galavanting around with him does solve pretty much everything.
But, alas, we were inconceivable concepts to one another in the 80’s. My father couldn’t have known he would be cloaked in velvet burgundy and grey, bowing his head as a four-foot long royal blue Doctoral hood hit his shoulders, while his wife and children watched on. My heart flipped through a plethora of emotions, unable to settle on just one, or even a few. Something unnameable, so overwhelming it didn’t even belong inside a body, torrented like sheets of rain down my ribcage, so harsh my heart just burst. I sat in a floral dress in the aisle seat fighting the lever rising in my throat.
At college, my peers are manned with apple-pens to take meticulous, color-coded notes on their tablets. It was quite a culture shock, coming from an online high school where my 5-star notebooks were threadbare by the end of the year, cramming three lines per single space for the sake of keeping one semester to just one book. For all my supposed ‘efficiency,’ I wasted plenty of trees, drawing haphazard diagrams only to rip them up, once down the middle then straight across. This ritual is comforting for me; it’s what my father does with old newspapers and half-baked ideas. He’d shake his head once or twice before a brief pause, reaching for a protractor and pen to commence the next iteration. Sometimes he’d take leave from his desk for an hour or two, retire to the kitchen table and scribble illegible morse-codes in an unlabeled flip-notebook. I assumed it was like the paper-ripping ceremony; it must be a repository of premature real estate plans. I was mistaken. Apparently, Palgrave-Macmillan took to the flip-notebooks, which doubled, and my father authored two books on the 2008 financial crisis.
My father wore a plaster-mask that had begun splintering years ago. Perhaps it started with the books. Perhaps a gut feeling on an unremarkable afternoon, who knows. Beneath it’s apathetic agreeableness and even composure, chronic nausea. The type he swallowed down with a sip of lemon-seltzer water across from a greasy-faced Big Somebody who promised a round on him when the deal was closed. A nausea riddled with guilt as he took in the life he provided for his wife and kids as an automaton—an actor of himself. There was no Papa Ed insisting he rest on the first floor of the boat when my dad got seasick on their summer excursions. No, this nausea was indigenous to the center of his chest. It’s a travesty to an ecosystem to kill vegetation that is only natural. In this perverted definition of natural, my father was meant to silence his mind; it made him smaller for others to sleep better. To feel bigger. He did this very well. At times, however, I suspect he was close to not.
My father protects his own with a veracity that need not be reciprocal. When he loves, he would poison himself for the sake of the person pouring it into his mouth. He is loyal, nearly to a fault. I observed such a relentless sense of duty to others often gets you hurt. My father’s integrity is unshakeable and idealistic. In some ways, it has caused him great sadness. In my opinion, it has also made him beautiful.
In a medieval-esq robe, he moved towards my mother and I on the rooftop deck where his small group was gathered for photos. All around his feet lay the last remnants of a mask; but there are no words for this. How can you casually say that you saw your father for the very first time? My dad has a particular fondness for Joseph Campbell’s hero's journey. Little does he know, he is mine.
My father seldom overtly discussed the importance of managing time, staying focused, and cutting out unnecessary distractions. I absorbed these lessons by example; in lieu of classmates, I studied near him throughout much of middle and high school. In preparation for his return to MIT, he dedicated six hours a day to reviewing calculus, statistics, and packets of problem sets, all while managing a real estate development business. It wasn’t an unfortunate necessity for his return—it was a privilege he poured every fiber of himself into. His focus is so all-encompassing, it transports him to another realm; I imagine it as a serene lily pool, accompanied by lo-fi music. Although his primary focus was economics, true to form, he became enamored with AI and computer science, enrolling in courses across various departments and attending every guest lecture—much to the chagrin of his thesis advisors. My father’s romance with learning is lifelong.
Joseph Campbell forewarns “you enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your full potential.” Should one enter the forest in daylight, any tracery of scuff marks usurps authority from intuition. Following them christens us with legitimacy, easing the panic of every step seeming arbitrary. For Campbell, entering the forest at dark is not a sentencing, but a treasure. As night blankets our senses, the surety of our path is hardly certain. We cannot glean who has their head nodding, or who is grimacing. Its validity is something we must coax up from nothingness. A dogged self-reliance compensates for our lack of visual acuity. Perhaps Campbell suggests it is the greatest blessing to know what darkness draws out of you.
My father’s capacity to recontextualize his past as a story of redemption as opposed to regret and victimhood granted him freedom independent of any person or circumstance. He did not return to a self-abandoned, but rather created himself through emerging from that self-abandonment. I would have never understood the extent of his discipline and resolve, had I not been privileged enough to watch him at an age where I could grasp the significance of his journey. My father’s perseverance sets a standard that wrenches me onward, even when each step feels excruciating. He has shown me that we can metamorphose against all odds, at any time, no matter how static the air. His example is one I hardly approximate, but living up to it constitutes my deepest purpose in life.
