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I remember …
When my father was 98, he sat at our dining room table during a meal, listening to the conversation swirling around him, filled with righteous indignation about some perceived societal wrong. He looked at us, and calmly, as was his wont, announced, “If you keep crying in your handkerchiefs, all you will have is a wet piece of cloth.”
My father, a resistance fighter, escaped France by foot over the Pyrenees in 1942 and was imprisoned for nine months in Spain by Franco’s regime while on his journey to become one of De Gaulle’s Free French in England: a man of few words and many deeds.
I remember him, when I was 8 or 9, telling me to protest when I felt some injustice had been committed and my subsequent walking around with a placard, to everyone’s amusement, shaking with both fear and determination. I no longer remember what the issue was, but I remember feeling I was trying to emulate him and make him proud.
My father had a commanding presence and an emotional distance, a fierce integrity and a matching rigidity.
I miss him more than ever in these troubled times. But I sure will not be caught dead crying in my handkerchief.