My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents by Jonathan Silin (free novels .txt) 📗

always seemed to catch them off guard. Was it simply that they couldn’t organize themselves quickly enough to say anything, or that they felt the machine to be a 70 n jonathan g. silin

personal affront, a mechanical barrier designed to prevent privileged parent-child communications? Eventually there were brief, cryptic fragments that ultimately gave way to more fully realized, if formulaic, communications.

My mother’s are the briefer. First, she calls out my name as if entering a house and trying to determine if anyone is home: “Johnny, are you there?” Hearing no reply, she identifies herself, “It’s your mother.”

Of course this is totally unnecessary, for who else but a mother would use a long-discarded childhood diminutive, Johnny. Finally, she asks that I call “when you have a chance.” While outwardly signaling respect for my full schedule, this last phrase implicitly underlines the need to make my return call a top priority.

For his part, my father is more playful and has developed the phone message into a literary genre. There are still moments when he stumbles, pregnant pauses from which I worry he won’t recover quickly enough to avoid a broken connection. But then the hesitant, sandpapery voice, the result of the first surgery and subsequent radiation therapy, returns with new assurance. Unlike the uniformity of my mother’s messages, my father’s vary wildly in length. His style is eclectic, dare I say postmodern. The structure is that of a business letter with opening address and closing salutation. The overall impact, however, is that of the carefully crafted camp letter, the kind I used to receive as a child in the 1950s. No faxes, e-mails, or telephone calls in those days. Growing up in New York City, I was packed off to the Adirondack Mountains for two months each summer—no wimpy, one-week specialty camps. Luckily, my parents were conscientious correspondents. My mother’s letters were chatty and upbeat while my father’s were more tightly controlled missives. Given his busy life, it was the fact of the letter that had to be appreciated.

Now, forty-five years later, with more time on his hands, he has clearly come to appreciate the communicative potential of the well-left phone message. The address is always direct, an emphatic call to attention, “Jonathan. This is your father speaking.” His commanding opening is then followed by a disclaimer made in a gentler, more re-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 71

laxed tone, “This is not a medical emergency. We are both fine. Well, actually, there is no change in our physical condition.” Here my father adjusts his initial assessment of “fine,” which implies an acceptance of their many new disabilities, to a “no change” status. He skillfully edits his words to achieve greater literal accuracy and emotional authenticity. He describes but prefers not to pass judgment on their condition.

My father’s request, the reason for the call, is couched in formal language appropriate to the world of business in which he spent most of his life. “Please call me at your earliest possible convenience.” Now there is one of those long, unnerving pauses followed by a second disclaimer. “Nor is it about fiscal matters,” the topic of many tense phone calls during the last years. “There is something that I want to talk with you about,” a shorter pause, “and it’s not a problem with the help, either,” another arena of ongoing difficulties for us. Finally, the closing salutation echoes those long-ago summers, “Love, Pop.”

My father signs his missive with the term he uses to refer to his own father, not the way that I refer to him. I have adopted the more formal “dad.” With its increased distance, this form of address allows me to talk with greater ease about routine matters related to sustaining the body as well as to managing life-threatening illnesses. My father identifies with his father, Nathan Silin, for whom I was named, who died before I was born. I am more comfortable removing myself from such a generational link in order to fulfill my caregiving responsibilities.

My father’s message is teasing and seductive, a side of his personality that only becomes visible to me late in his life. He tells me what the call is not about while refusing to reveal the actual reason of the call. At the same time, he heightens the drama by reminding me of all the potential sources of apprehension. He provokes my curiosity and tries to lure me into a speedy response. He is a master strategist, determined to get my attention.

There will be no record of my parents’ success at coming to terms with modern telecommunications. My phone machine has a promi-72 n jonathan g. silin

nent blue delete button but no hard drive on which to transfer their messages. No mere recordings, however, could capture the way their brief dispatches resonate with the past, when pen and paper provided a simpler and more fluid, if less rapid, mode of connection. Nor could they capture the feelings of potential loss and vulnerability that this last stage in my parents’ life has elicited in me. At the time, I savored their mastery of a new technology, glad that it hadn’t obliterated the familiar style that permeated our interactions. I even wondered if I wouldn’t turn on my computer one morning and find an e-mail from Pop@aol.com.

Now that my father has no voice at all, the juxtaposition of my days in classrooms with young children and evenings at my parents’ apartment makes me all the more attuned to the power of written language.

My father would be all but helpless without his yellow pad and pen, which allow him both practical communications as well as moments of playfulness and pleasure. Because of the pressures on measurable performance in schools I see too little fostering of authentic appreciation for the written word. Both experiences send me back to childhood, to wonder about my own early struggles with reading and writing.

I was what euphemistically