Chapter 3: In Which I Deplore the Use of Certain Words, Offer my Opinions on Coffee Party USA, and Compare my Father to a Notable Hemingway Character

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As a writer there are words I don’t much like to use, and not just the ones you might expect. I loathe, for example, the word “prestidigitation,” largely because it hides the magic it portends, and because “magic” is, by itself, both simpler and more beautiful. “Euphony” is another I don’t much like (because it’s not) and “logorrhea” sets my teeth on edge. “Eschew” pops to mind, ironically, as well.

And “futility.” Because it sounds as sad as it is.

Today is Father’s Day, coincidentally trailing by two days my father’s birthday. He would have been 79, a calculation quickly performed when I automatically thought to call him and, while reaching for the phone, found those thoughts redirected instead toward that oft-avoided word. Futility.

Over the years (and the many miles that separate one coast from another) we talked far less often than either of us wanted to. I have a tendency to live too easily without the touch of family, and he had a stubborn streak that insisted on outreach as a son’s responsibility. There were times when more than a year went by with only greeting cards exchanged.  It’s more than a year this time, too, and will continue to be.

The memories that come most to mind are, as expected I suppose, the early ones. In particular I remember sailing with my father, how he’d rent a small single-mast for a few hours and we’d head out onto the Pacific. Though never far from shore we seemed a world away, cresting what I realize now were tiny waves, tacking first right and then left, taming a taunting wind that there, on the water, held a personality never possessed on land.

Throughout his life my father almost-struggled his way from day to day, never quite the business success he wanted to be, or the salesman he imagined himself, or the father and husband that limned his desires. He was loved, and loved back—always and excessively—and he often seemed happy. But still he seemed pitted against a series of unseen forces—economic, emotional, perhaps even karmic—that forced futility, forced a sense of “nearly,” of “not quite.” Like Hemingway’s Old Man, who finally captures his life’s dream only to have it disappear one bite at a time, my father, too, watched the inexorability of metaphorical sharks take small but steady pieces from his life, right up to the last, the skeleton remains. A series of careers, some more successful than others. Three wives. Six children, one lost much, much too early. Constant struggles later in life to repair a roof, to help with college tuition, sometimes even to pay the mortgage. Still, my father had a wistful optimism, one that manifested itself in wanting to live bigger, stronger, louder than he knew he really could. Or should.

Yet from futility can come the small essence of success.  Children and grandchildren. Friends.

My father’s futility grew from the personal and so, despite the long odds, he always knew that the proper amount of self-sacrifice and hard work could win out. It didn’t, often, and certainly not at the end, but sometimes it did. Then there’d be steak dinners and premium beer. A new flat screen. A new car perhaps, with an upgraded hand-me-down to the son or daughter needing it most. Not so these days for many, for me. Not so the futility I feel. The futility I feel is larger, wider, more subsuming. It comes tinged with melancholy and is fueled by an anomie so self-supporting that one wonders if it will ever lift. We live, you see, in different times than my father, in times colored and flavored by hatred that travels at light speed. It is a futility not of the lost opportunity, but of the never found. We find ourselves now surrounded not only by friends, but by those who desire us hurt. Sometimes they even wear the same names, the same faces.

Recently a few dozen friends and colleagues, people who had worked together and whom I had worked with for the last couple of years, fell victim. Members, regular and board, of the Coffee Party USA are currently at war over the future of the organization, a non-profit ostensibly dedicated to fact-based, civil dialog on “transpartisan” issues: money in politics, the need for cooperation rather than conflict, the willingness to not just sit with those across the aisle, but to ignore the aisle all together.

In a desolate display of groupthinked mismanagement, the board embarked on an unconventional fund-raising plan, one poorly vetted and containing multiple conflicts of interest. When discovered by the members-at-large, they grew justifiably outraged. Given the principles of the Coffee Party (and, in theory, the brand of person attracted to the movement) the next steps should have been predictable: the differing opinions would seek reconciliation in a way that protected the organization, made the necessary changes to prevent such things from happening again, and moved positively forward.

It didn’t happen. Instead, the modus operandi of the age set in; futility, writ large, rang its Pavlovian bell and dozens responded. People with a history of calm, civil, and rational interactions turned rabid. The good-intentioned were vilified. Entire groups were demonized, declared “less than.” Lawyers engaged. Harassment, first threatened, arrived. Documents were leaked, then counter-leaked. Innuendo become the raison d’etre of those involved. Had it not all become so vile, so mean, the irony might have proved funny. But it wasn’t. Real people are being damaged. And others—also real people—gleefully inflict that damage. I’ve watched the hatred set in, hatred so hardened that many former associates will never be friends again, will likely never even speak to each other again. Attempts to end it have been nothing but a clichéd exercise in futility, as if futility is something actively exercised rather than something now merely inevitable.

And so I turn, further from the hatred, from the futility, and back to my own small world. Perhaps I’m the lesser for it. I don’t know, and right now I don’t care.

Today I wait for my own son’s visit. He’ll arrive late tonight, unable to depart until finished with work. While not a coast away, he lives far enough from me that any visit requires planning and an overnight stay. We see each other more often than I saw my own father, but still not often enough. I go there and he comes here once or twice annually now. He calls with more regularity than I ever phoned my dad, and we chat about work, music, or physics (a hobby of his). Sometimes he’ll tell me about something he saw on The History Channel, particularly if it has to do with one of the many modern-day enigmas that fascinate him, like JFK’s assassination or how the Fed controls the money supply. It’s fortunate that he calls, since I have somehow absorbed my own father’s practice of waiting rather than initiating, a habit I fight against when I remember to. A day goes by, then a week, then sometimes another before I realize that I don’t want him looking back, wondering rather than knowing about my life’s little futilities. These are the ones, it turns out, that matter to me, the ones I have energy for, the ones of importance. These small-f futilities, I now realize, are simply life.

The sadness I still feel, though, comes from wondering why everyone doesn’t just focus on the small, on ourselves and those around us, those things that are, in the end, the most important. We need only to realize that the small can become the large when repeated often enough, and by enough people. Why must we respond when given our lines on a larger stage? Whose ends do we serve? Whose words do we speak, words that—given choice, we would ourselves loathe for the hurt they give? If we would all just think about those small relationships, and the value of their simple reality, then perhaps the words we would hear would not be those we abhor, but instead those that matter. Friend. Ally. Companion.

Person.

 

Read since last post:

·         The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1953)

·         The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron (1968)

Currently Reading:

·         The Town, Conrad Richter (1951)

Still Hanging Around:

·         Honey in the Horn, H. L. Davis (1936)

COUNT: 19 read, 68 to go