Told you I was processing. Bad week with Pat memory issues and volatility. Made the purchase I described. Sitting right next to her. Played the whole endless video the more expensive panaceas use to make sure you are really really serious about needing help. Gates persuaded me. If there’s someone powerful enough to penetrate the titanium curtain the protects Big Pharma it’s Gates or Musk. They have the clout. Gates spent millions trying to save his Dad to no avail. Made me think of my own family encounters with declining age. So he embarked on a massive multi-billion dollar project of his own. Believable account. (I haven’t been to a doctor since I accidentally put my hand through a sash window trying to open it in an 18th century house in Greenwich more than 25 years ago.) Big Pharma is making vast amounts of money selling useless products to dying people with insurance. Already knew that. They tried to buy Gates out of his research discoveries, then to discredit his research, and (I like this…) he just kept getting madder. Now he’s trying to prove he’s right. Slick, state-of-the-art marketing approach. No problem. He can afford it.
I had seen multiple varieties of decline in my own family. The one closest to my own experience thus far is my Dad. Thinner and thinner, dental pain growing into more than a nuisance, memory not gone but reconfigured with holes that can still be patched but for how long? Physical frailty, increasing isolation aggravated by his wife’s parallel decline, a recurring mood of the world going to hell and I’ll be well out of it. Cancer took him. I made a last minute approximate peace with him at the end, but I never gave him a book. I gave my Grandpa Miesse a book but not my Dad. He’s the one, though, who made the rule about no family business no matter what the other writers do. Thing is, I know the book is there. It’s scattered in fragments all through my other works, not too revealing unless I pull them together into a whole of their own. Not coincidentally, May19 was his birthday. I imagine he’s glad not to be here.
Processing, you see. Supposedly only a few days till Pat’s pills arrive. No better processing for me than an instantaneous project I’m not sure I could pull off. I thought recurringly of Donald Barthelme’s Views of My Father Weeping. I admired the writing; I’d tried out the Barthelme voice myself as a young man (surviving example called ‘Portents’ in Punk City. I’ve deliberately avoided rereading the Views story because good as it was it also seemed a kind of cheat. An act of conscience, not revelation. Still, I looked it up and was immediately confronted with this amazingly relevant web display:
When I clicked on the little illegible box in the second column, I felt the ‘Serendicity.’ He was an Edward Hopper addict just like me. That business of sitting in a chair looking out a high-story window. I felt a cover coming on. I make lots of book covers, many of them my own contemplated books that already have a shape in my head and require only a difficult bounding exercise and tedious computer work to assemble and publish at Kindle. So I gave into temptation, did the covers front and back, and came away with a title of my own for a whole book about my Dad.
Barthelme and I had more in common than a fraught relationship with our Dads.
I knew about the fragments/wholes relationship because I have spent my life creating both. Trickiest part? How do you know when your assemblage of fragments has become a whole? There must be an understandable frame within which the selected fragments have a reason for being on theirmown and in contribution to the whole — which turns out to be more than the three dimensions of the wood and paint and finishing nails enclosing the Mona Lisa.
So I decided to go ahead and just take a whack at it whike I’m waiting on delivery of three bottles of pills.
**********
Views of My Father Living
By R. F. Laird 3
**********
Frontispiece
My Dad’s flying jacket from WW2 still hanging on a coat rack in our current master
bedroom. War changes a man and the sons and daughters he gives life by surviving.
The white smudges are housepaint. He couldn’t throw it away, but he could
try to reduce the strength of its embrace.
Did he? You tell me.
**********
Preface
This won’t be your usual sort of book. It owes its shape to two sources, Barthelme’s selected image of a window from a painting by Edward Hopper, who is one of my own favorite artists, and a film tour de force called “32 Short Films About Glenn Gould” (trailer). Both represent a degree of detachment from the varying perspectives embodied by the separate selections included. In any biographical effort of a person now deceased, the worst possible outcomes are the “My Most Unforgettable Person” lovefest of a Reader’s Digest essay and the vindictive/sly/condescending hit job of, say, Griswold’s “Obituary of Edgar Allan Poe.” This collection of pieces from more than 50 years of writing is not a summary judgment on the man who sired and raised and contended with me until his death at the age of 77 just before the turn of the millennium. He is not a symbol of the Greatest Generation, but he was part of who and what they were and did. I was too close to him to presume that my perspective is the definitive one. It is one perspective, hopefully fair in the choices of what was placed inside the frame from stories, poems, extemporaneous audio recordings, and essays written for a wider audience more interested in cultural perceptions than family gossip. My Dad despised gossip and the people who engaged in it. All the gossip I gleaned about my parents’ social circle was not from their lips but the children of more vulgar friends in the same social set. Not that there won’t be some revelations here. There will be. Let’s get to it.
NOTE: The hyperlinks in this Preface are a good way to test how you will return here if after following some link you can’t seem to back out of it to where you were here. You know your own device better than I ever will. I recommend you make a notation of the site you’re reading this on, give up early if you feel lost and simply return to the document. Probably a 30 second trip with practice. Good luck.
2. A True Story from TBB’s Book of Rationalizations.
3. The Guy in the Picture
4. The Gatsby of Greenwich and the Lords of Salem
Be patient. He’s there throughout…
5. Inside Lord Laird
I answered a query for info about Dad and they inserted a link directly to my post.
6. French Test, 1963
Life changing for all of us
We watched him fly us safely through the mission.
The beginning of inevitable and widening separation
7. The Mercersburg Hurry-Up to Harvard and Destiny
From my post More Thoughts on Orchestration’:
“I was twelve when my dad drove me to Mercersburg for my interview. We drove through the little towns in central Pennsylvania in the TR3, singing together with made-up lyrics for each ‘burg. Admission wasn’t an issue. Their question was whether it might be appropriate to enroll me as a sophomore because my SSATs pegged me at grade 12 in academic capability and I’d had years of French and Latin at St. John’s. My dad said no. I was a 5’0” squirt and already at least a year and a half ahead of my chronological grade level. So I was enrolled as a freshman (“Junior” in their system) taking courses in Latin 2 and French 2, and an A-level class in English. I never failed to make high honors at Mercersburg (90 general average or better) until the final marking period of my senior year, when I had indulged in the Senior Slump of tradition. I applied to just two schools, Harvard and Yale, because my acceptance had been assured by both before the application deadline. I entered Harvard as a sophomore in the Fall of 1970, apparently still in hurry-up mode.”
Then, in that first year, my Dad’s Mercersburg vanished.
The drugs and the politics arrived all at once. I knew it was epic. My Dad never got it.
From my post More Thoughts on Orchestration’:
“Rewind time. My dad had lightly applied the brakes in 1966. That turned out to be a momentous change factor in my life. A turning point that has affected everything since was the Mercersburg Chapel Walkout of 1969, when I was not a senior yet but an ‘upper middler’ who had just been appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Mercersburg News, for many years one of the highest rated prep school newspapers in the country. My response was to put out the only ‘Extra’ in the paper’s history, put together in less than half the usual time, and capturing the events and the opinions of both students and faculty for the permanent archive. 50 years later I was contacted by members of the Class of ‘69 who had been ringleaders in the walkout, and they wanted to invite me to their 50th Reunion to discuss my memories of that and why I had opposed their own participation in it. As I had. After hearing their convenient memories and rationalizations of their actions back then, I refused their invitation. They were who I feared they would be.
“All human organizations, whatever their charters say, are themselves inhuman. This does not mean they are inert. They possess the artificial (i.e., ‘imitation’) intelligence of rules and algorithms usually best approximated by game theory. Everyone who participates in the organization is subjected to incentives for advancement and penalties for opposition to the reality the organization accepts. The incentives are promulgated from the top, the most powerful game players in the organization. What is rewarded? Loyalty, obedience, subservience to those in charge, results that a superior can take credit for, whether the supposed accomplishments are real or contrived. What is punished? Refusing an assignment or an order, insisting on ethical responses to circumstances that will embarrass the organization or cost it money, organized opposition by subordinates to a plan, policy, decision, or presented supporting data, going outside the organization to correct a wrong or a grievance, whistleblowers. Why certain kinds of complaining, like sexual harassment lawsuits, are lifetime career killers in entire industries.
How does the larger community within which these organizations operate prevent ethical and performance catastrophes from destroying companies, firms, and other powerful entities within a nation’s power structure? Historically, this has been the mission of formal education and, perhaps more importantly, the role of Dads in the nuclear family.
Dads? Really? It’s been forgotten for quite a long time now. There was a division of labor between fathers and mothers, hopefully with considerable overlap between the two. Mothers were the constant proof of unqualified love for the child, the master of what happened inside the home and its routines; much of the adulation once accorded to motherhood itself was reinforcement of that ideal female role. The child comes first, before the parents, before comfort, before things. The house was her nest for raising and protecting her young. The mother was willing and usually able to protect the child from all kinds of danger, and the newspapers were happy to run stories about the mom who lifted a car off a child’s foot. That kind of thing.
Dads weren’t as good at the unqualified love obligation. They were usually the breadwinners and often not home. They were also the recipient of the situations they faced when an angry mom told the child, “Wait till your father gets home.” Simple spankings, before they were ruled out of bounds by child psychologists with delinquent kids of their own, were Dad’s job. While the mother applied ice to the black eye administered by a bully in school, it was Dad who surreptitiously took the kid out to the back yard and taught him to counterpunch in self defense. And to seize an occasion as soon as possible. It was also Dad’s responsibility if the bully happened to be his kid to put him in the car and take him to the house of the victim and apologize, in full view of the bullied child’s parents. (I have seen this done. It’s not an invention of screenwriters.)
Sunday School and other church-related rituals for children had a role to play as well. Complemented by parental support, not just as a drop them off and pick them up chore. What was the lesson today? Do you understand it? Conversation. Listening to the answers, answering the questions. The abiding lesson has to be that there is right in this world and wrong in this world. It is everyone’s responsibility to do the right thing. Including parents.
How is this part of the defense against organizational influences proceeding? I was shocked when I read the Twitter responses by fathers to the Hunter Biden pardon. How many said Biden’s fault was lying that he wouldn’t do it, although they, personally, would issue such a pardon for their son because he was “my son.”
I know damn well my Dad wouldn’t have pardoned me. And I wouldn’t do it myself. You see, it is as much part of the Dad’s role to protect the world from his son as it is the mother’s to protect her son from the world. Children are not supposed to have a license to cheat, steal, break rules in sports, use foul language, be rude to their mother, or hit girls (no, girls shouldn’t do it either). All of these can be punished without a belt or food deprivation. My paternal grandfather told me he spent so much time “sitting in the corner” that he read the Bible cover to cover two times over. My own Dad accomplished quite a lot of correction with a Look. It wasn’t a threat. It was a communication of anger and disappointment.
The schools are supposed to play a parallel role in loco parentis. Bullies are far more unacceptable than a bullied child who defends himself or herself. What do teachers (say they) usually see? Just the punch thrown alongside the locker of the one who claims to have been retaliating for bullying. Who gets punished? The one who’s not used to concealing hostile acts. Bullies are much more skilled at alibiing one another and carrying out their worst assaults in secret. And we wonder why the bullied ones return to school one day with semi-automatic pistols for the bullies AND the sheep who watched it all and never told a teacher. And the teacher who turned a blind eye to all of it. The lesson about never being a whistleblower is taught in school, early and unforgettably. The teacher also never sees the secret price paid by the whistleblower in the bullysphere.
Universities, particularly professional schools, have an enormous obligation to insist on comprehensive ethical instruction for students of law, medicine, business, education, journalism, and even those in preparation for ordination. The ethics of professions are more important by far than the money or advancement they offer, because honor is not a commercial property to be traded for promotion or career safety. Sadly, the universities have also lowered their admission standards and dumbed down their curriculums accordingly. We really are stupider now (See Context document, 2023, Part 3)
When my father retired from his 37 year career with a major chemical company, he told his director that he had worked through most of those years without being lied to, even when the news was bad. The director suggested that he had been naive. My Dad said, “Fuck you,” and walked out. I had never heard him use that word myself.”
That’s a complete draft for now. I mentioned obstacles in the title. Don’t know of any platform that could or would publish such a multimedia potpourri. Don’t know if you can read the PDF files I created with Acrobat. Don’t know much at the moment.
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