You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
“Discontent that casts a shadow grey/Upon the likeness of a summer’s day,” was one of my melancholic father’s favorite aphorisms, and even he would not deny that he spoke from personal experience. For whether he was gazing out the window at the stragglers from the Single-Room Occupancy hotels that lined our Upper West Side street in the 1960s, or contemplating the ocean waves from a solitary bench upon a Jersey seashore boardwalk, or spinning electrifying tales of people and places, ghostly presences hovering in absence, my father wore his characteristic “lean and hungry look.” A physical and emotional wreck was his un-ironic self-description. But for me he was the personification of unrequited desire, living proof that lived life was not good enough, at least not for him.
So is it any surprise that I harbor wishes to feed and bury ravenous ghosts, and spin vitalizing tales of hope while riding the waves of despair?
My father’s bitterness and perversely calculated misanthropy, his contempt for “underdogs” who were admittedly his doubles, inspired in me an inchoate love for human spirits living underground. My blind spots are mirror images of my father’s. I insist that people are colorful, and he insists they are only shadows.
My father died over 30 years ago and from this safe distance I can acknowledge my love for some of his idiosyncrasies, his staunch refusals to be hypocritically “nice” or conform to social conventions. He taught me to question authority, to be suspicious of status and television advertising, and to find beauty and solace in the natural world and the world of ideas. My fondest memories are of him engrossed in a book or perched precariously on a tiny makeshift balcony, his neck stretching outward toward the horizon, yearning for connection.