Sunday, January 27, 2013

To My Father (In All His Forms)

Today is my late father's birthday, a day my family remembers as we all feel his absence most poignantly. Along with my family, I miss him terribly as well. People tell me that he and I have the same smile.

The myth of Orpheus (my students well know where I am going with this; I can feel them roll their eyes and say to themselves, "Here she goes again!") cautions us against looking backwards. Orpheus, the musician, convinced the gods of the Underworld to let his dead wife's soul to follow him out of the Shadows; the gods agreed, with the condition that he not look back until both of them are out of the Underworld. Orpheus agrees and somehow holds his patience until he is out of the Underworld, waits a bit, and turns around, hoping to see his beloved smiling at him. However, she is not out yet and he loses her all over again and spends his days mourning him, unable to do anything else, until he is torn apart. This myth resonates heavily with me. I have tried very hard to avoid looking back, no matter how strong the lure. The myth cautions that every time we look back, we lose that which we love the most, all over again; who can afford any more losses?

There have been many days when all I've wanted to do is submit to debilitating grief, rage against the most basic principles of existence, and I am ashamed to say, I have indulged in this. When I was young, this was my nightmare, a world without my father. Then I grew up, made choices, and it turned out that I never saw my father once I immigrated.

Before my patient reader resigns to a litany of self-pity, let me stop. This post is about celebrating all those we miss, not a list of all things we miss about them. Yes, I miss my father's voice, his laughter, the way he said my name, his fingers circling my wrist in protection and comfort, even his silent rage. Then, I went back to visit my home town after over a decade of having left it, imagining that my father's absence will yawn at me and I was apprehensive.

What happened, however, was the absolute opposite. I saw my family alive and well, his favorite foliage swinging in the breeze in our backyard, his favorite knick-knacks on many, many shelves, even the cadence of his speech and pitch of his laughter every time I talked to anyone in the family.

The time away from my father during the first years of my immigration taught me to seek him in the world around me. I learned to recognize my father's voice when I heard his favorite songs; I learned to enjoy the sunrise and sunset for him; I learned to remember the maxims he repeated and use them as guiding metaphors. I was pleasantly surprised when my daughter picked up the violin in middle school for her music credit; I was happiest when she would practice, since my father used to love his violin and played all the time.

Now, even though I miss my father's presence all the time, I do not feel his absence any more. Every time I see my sibling and cousins, every time I meet my uncles and aunts, every time I get an email or message from my mother, every time I see my child smiling, every time I see my niece concentrating, every time I see my nephews laughing, I feel my father's presence. The nightmare world of my youth does not seem nightmarish at all!

Today is his birthday and we all have greeted each other in his name. I raise my tea cup in his name, on this warm, silvery day, as I look forward to enjoying my Sunday afternoon, stretching out infinitely before me. I know that somehow, somewhere, I will meet my father in many many forms and I only pray that when I do, I recognize him as we share our smile.

Saturday, January 19, 2013

To Explore Brave New Worlds: A Boston Weekend

Vacationing is most effective when it doesn't just offer an escape from the debilitating regularity of a routine, but goes beyond to open a window to a completely new reality. I do not mean an alternate reality, like a visit to the land of What If; I mean a world that has gone on inexorably, crossing unimaginable horizons and thresholds, one that redefines our very reality. My trip to Boston did that for me: it showed me a brave new world, so that even the railroad tracks in the middle of the street looked incredibly cool instead of impractical.

I spent a couple of days getting to know all about Paul Revere and Beacon Hill. But then, across one of the bridges, lay the cobblestones to another time, more Star Trek than Revolution. I walked past places that were as exotic and improbable as any that the Starship Enterprise could boast knowing; I walked past 100 Technology Square, with MIT buildings owning all horizons all around; Microsoft proclaimed its newest generations on a live billboard in Kendall Square; next to a crepe place, a large window advertised the map of the human genome; across the street were the MIT center for cancer research and center for brain research. Really, I felt like I was perched on the edge of human civilisation. My worries about the cats' feeding times, my child's dorm bill, and the price of gas seemed embarrassingly trivial, even outdated.

There are some cities that just call to me to own them, invite me to explore their labyrinthine alleys, discover new worlds in their roofs and skylines, and through it all, a river runs, lending a touch of the archetypal, cities that, for lack of a better descriptor, simply sing to me. I can barely resist this song, and the fusion that Boston is, with its stately architectures that dream of London and Florence, with the red vein of Freedom Trail that runs through it, with the little ducks all in a row, it hums with a heady aria. People who know me often mistake me for a history buff, but I can barely aspire to be one. My personal touchstones for European history are based on the most unreliable of all historical sources, Shakespeare, Malory, Gildas! So it would be safer to say that I am passionate about and attracted to the drama of human experience that history promises, rather than to a commitment to keeping a chronological string of events untangled in my head. So it was with Boston, which spoke hauntingly of Paule Revere's lanterns, and in the same breath, claimed Leonard Nimoy as its own.

In Cambridge, we passed by this really beautiful local college. There was snow on the ground and the sky looked like a desert with tree skeletons scratching at its cold, grey expanse. But students skipped and strode purposefully and all but danced the extremely serious nature of their excitement at returning to their Alma Mater after a winter fortnight away. This local institution proclaimed its universal appeal with an insignia that summed up its mission in a word, Veritas. Here, as I witnessed the active pursuit of ancient truths, I inhaled and knew the thin, cold air that stratifies the very pinnacle of the highest achievements of our species, from the mundane concerns of lay visitors, awarded a glimpse of the busyness of the business of being human.

I return humbled and enriched to my blue-gold skies and lands of eternal summer, back to my trivial routine. My hope is that this entry shall remind me of this sweet air that I had once breathed, sauntering around in one of the Coops, buying a fridge magnet in exchange of a promise to these cobblestones of many future tramplings.