My Father Before Me Read Free

intractable habit of obscure origin .
    And I have filled it with poetry. Or, no: poetry has risen from that silence and contains it. Of that which is most unsayable and wreathed in uncertainty, I have found, to my relief and comfort, poetry speaks.
    In the private act of reading or writing a poem, in the solitary immersion in language, in its exquisite balancing of meanings and its nuanced music, I have felt most deeply myself, most intimately aligned with my sense of the mystery of existing, with my sense of being small and temporary compared to whatever it is that is operating beyond me, maybe through me. A poem can feel like an intermediary, a minister, between me and the bewildering universe. It completes an electricalcircuit between the known and the unknown, between my own individual experience and the shadowy operations of the reality of which that experience is a part. That might be why, reading a good poem, I feel a jolt.
    Such pleasures, I nonetheless remind myself, occur in solitude, in the safe cave of the mind. I am, finally, my father’s son—and my mother’s. I crave my privacy, including privacy of thought.
    Picturing my mother and father as children, I imagine them, even among their siblings and parents and grandparents, as being essentially alone, within a spotlight and surrounded by shadows. They were products of the Depression and were not long removed from their ragged ancestors who first came to this continent: hungry, hard-drinking Irish immigrants, illiterate but skilled at farm and railroad work; and sturdy, stoic Norwegians and Swedes who helped people the hardscrabble landscape of the upper Midwest. From family habits passed down to them and from their own uncertain circumstances, my father was trained to rely on himself and my mother on herself. If the story of their lives together is a tragedy, maybe it is the tragedy of two people who never learned fully to rely on each other. My father was expert at the wry aside and explanations of the intricate workings of a home’s electrical wiring, but he kept the intricate workings of himself to himself—the feelings and thoughts that would have helped his wife and his children know him better, maybe love him better. And he passed that inwardness on to his children.
    In the household created by my parents, I learned to speak carefully, with forethought, or not speak at all. I am not gregarious. In a group of people, I sometimes find myself watching myself being among them; I watch myself watching myself. “What are you thinking?” someone asks, and I can’t say. How could I begin to? I tend to be reticent, slow to articulate my thoughts to myself, measured and deliberate in my articulation of them to others. As a child, I had aword for what I was: shy. As an adult, I forgive myself sometimes for my reserve, telling myself that I merely desire to express my thoughts as accurately, as precisely, as possible. At other times, I tell myself I am lazy or scared, unwilling to say aloud the wrong thing for fear of making myself vulnerable: to some hazy, undefined reprisal from my listener or, worse, to some discomforting knowledge about myself.
    Silence, truly listened to, can begin to whisper and reward us with inklings of understanding. It can remind us of the unfathomable mysteries into which, and out of which, we are born; it can reward us with the consoling news that we are necessarily small and imperfect and therefore deserve to forgive ourselves; it can reward us with poetry. Silence, retreated to long enough, and used by a man as a hiding place, even as he projects to the world one identity after another—soldier, husband, father, career man—can make that man a stranger, to his family and to himself.

– Part II –
    Asleep at the Post

4
    Girls are lined up on one side of the gym, boys on the other. It’s a high school mixer, 1946: the big-band records are playing. Eddie Forhan, sixteen, a junior, is