the logical song
In August, my family and a few friends met in a cabin at Malabar State Park in Ohio to remember and share memories of my dad. What follows is an expanded version of the thoughts I shared then.
The cabin we met in has a small claim to fame. It appeared in the first scene of the movie The Shawshank Redemption. It was where the events that set the whole movie in motion took place.
A lot of the movie was filmed in Richland County - almost all the scenes at the prison were filmed at the old Mansfield Reformatory, long closed and now a tourist attraction. The hill where the money was buried is across the road from Malabar, although apparently the tree is gone. Scenes in town were shot in downtown Mansfield, which still has a couple streets full of buildings from the 1920s. You have to get away from the freeway that divided the county - and the farm Dad grew up on - and from the gas stations and fast food that grows like a fungus alongside. But once you do that, Richland County, Ohio, can be a heartbreakingly beautiful place. You can understand a director falling in love with it.
By coincidence, The Shawshank Redemption was the last movie I watched with Dad. I was home visiting; I was flipping through channels to find something to watch that wasn’t a cooking show or Ice Road Truckers. Shawshank happened to be just starting. I was pretty certain Dad would be familiar with it, and it had been a long time since I had seen it; I had forgotten most of the plot. We enjoyed watching it together.
If you asked me to list Dad’s favorite movies, I would include Cool Hand Luke, Papillon, maybe Mr. Roberts. I tell people my favorite movie is Lawrence of Arabia, and I’m sure I saw that the first time with him. Two things about this list occur to me now. The first is that, maybe these weren’t so much his favorite movies as they were my favorite movies that I watched with Dad. I wasn’t so much into something like The Guns of Navarone or some historical drama that actually might have been his favorite.
The second thing that I’ve realized is that each of these movies has a protagonist who is in some way fighting the Man. Who is unjustly accused and maintaining his innocence - Shawshank certainly fits in that regard - and refusing to kneel, or in the case of Lawrence, fighting the bureaucracy and stupidity of the British Army. Dad was a kind of clandestine rebel. It’s funny because he worked at senior levels in state government most of his career. He managed big teams of people. He was the Man. But he had an antipathy for injustice, a feeling of fighting for the little guy.
Someone once told me I had “a keen sense of injustice.” I don’t think they meant it as a compliment. In any case, I think it’s one of the things I inherited from Dad. I inherited his curiosity, although not his discipline. I inherited his temper, but not his self control. I didn’t inherit his athleticism, but I got his stubby legs. And I got, in my own form, that desire to be on the side of the underdog.
For nine months I have been trying to remember my earliest memory of my dad. I am aware that that doesn’t make any sense: There are things I can remember, and one of them is the earliest, and that is by definition my earliest memory. But stay with me.
My earliest memory, I am quite certain, is of the day of the moon landing in 1969. We were at a cottage on the shore of Lake Michigan where television reception was and is dubious at best. My memory of that day is mostly of people huddled around a snowy, grainy image in the dark cottage, while very little happened, not enough to interest a boy not yet four. I knew it was Important. I couldn’t sit still for it. I remember going outside into shocking sunlight. It’s possible I was sent outside to keep from annoying the older folks. It was the brightest day I can remember in my entire life, I remember the day like it was an over-exposed photograph. I remember running around in that blinding sunlight alone.
That is probably my earliest memory of anything, and I know that Dad was there. He created a giant, V-shaped antenna out of aluminum foil so that our little black-and-white television could pick up the broadcast of the moon landing from Chicago, 70 miles across the lake. But that is not exactly a memory of Dad.
I have many memories of doing something, being somewhere, with him. The time we drove to the Reds game, my first professional baseball game. My dad drove us there and back. I remember riding in the back of our Volkswagen. He was obviously there, at the wheel. I can’t picture him. Or times we would go out to the farm, in winter, huddle in the cedar-sided shed that he had built - that he had built himself, designed himself, that was the shelter there for a few years before the house was built. There were two calves, and I can picture their breath in the freezing air. But I can’t see Dad, can’t picture his face.
After seven months of thinking about this, the best I can do is that I remember planting trees with him on the farm. They were pines. I don’t remember if this was before or after the house was built. We had planted a row of Scotch pines, maybe two - I could go and look - and a few rows of white pines. They were tiny seedlings, maybe six inches high. He explained the difference between the trees to me, showed me how deep to plant them, how far apart they needed to be, that they would grow and as they did we would thin them out to make room for the ones that were healthier.
A couple years ago I posted this on Instagram:
So I hold onto that memory like a treasure. And probably embellish it, as one does.
But, another story about those pine trees: When I was in high school, on summer evenings, Dad would often sit by himself on the back deck, into the dark. It was the old house, before the porch was enclosed. He would sit in a chair with his feet up on one of the railings, with a drink and a cigarette. Meditating, and self-medicating, if we’re going to be honest. One evening, I asked Mom why he was doing that, what he was doing out there. I don’t remember her response, but it didn’t particularly answer my question.
Some other time, I went out on the porch for some reason, to clear the picnic table or whatever. It was after dark. He said to me, “Chris, I’ve finally done it.”
(I think he called me Chris. He used to call me “Old Man,” from the time I was old enough to talk. One day - here’s another early memory - one day I asked him in the way of a child why he was calling me old. He explained to me that on ships in the Navy, the crew - if they liked him - would call the captain the Old Man - even though the captain might be a very young man, younger than some of the other officers. But I think he called me Chris that day.)
“I’ve finally done it,” he told me.
“Those trees have finally grown tall enough that when I sit here I don’t have to stare at that light next door.”
This would have been, you know, something like fifteen years later.
When I was writing the first draft of this, I was going to draw a parallel with some of those characters from our favorite movies; I was going to say they were rebels, but they were patient. In Shawshank, Tim Robbins’ character, Andy Dufresne, has a plan, and he sets it in motion, and then the only thing between him and his goal is time. I wanted to tie these things together neatly as qualities that Dad had.
But then I started reviewing the plots of some of those other movies. Cool Hand Luke? Not about a patient man. And T.E. Lawrence, at least the Lawrence of the film, might have been the least patient man who ever lived - which is probably why I made Lawrence of Arabia my answer to the question, “What’s your favorite movie?”
So … I can’t write that version of this remembrance, but the attempt reveals to me that while I may have Dad’s sense of injustice, and his rebellious attitude, but patience is another entry on the list of things I didn’t inherit. And so looking at those trees today becomes maybe a different kind of gift: a reminder to carry forward with me.