“[…] did not know my father at a time when he
was becoming; he seemed always to be the unchanging same, the force I had to
deal with until long after he died one summer evening in my twenty-sixth year,
massively and unforgivably died, while I was becoming the fluid, negotiating
self I was to be for the next thirty years. He died without absolving me of
taking up space in his life and, more, without teaching me that only I could
absolve myself of that. I have done so, and now in my turn am trying, in middle-aged
retrograde, to absolve him of the space he continues to take up in mine, space
I could put to better use.
I have now outlived him
by two years, yet I see him more and more often in the mirrors I look into, in
the squat genetic shaping of my body to his. Getting to and passing the age at
which he died was more of a hurdle than I thought it would be; I faced that
moment, and the ones subsequent, with increasing fears that I am more mortally
than empathetically his son. I can claim only an amateur psychologist's
understanding of him, and that mostly by analogy with my own middle-aging and
my own experiences as husband and father. I have no idea what he felt or
thought, whether he thought at all, whether he thought he had time for or
needed reflection.
He probably didn't know
precisely what he wanted, but he knew he was more likely to find it in town
than in the country, somewhere other than home. He mostly wanted to escape the
farm that he hated, to escape whatever of hardship or ignominy he connected
with poverty and rural life. More than anything he wanted respect and
respectability, two different but not incompatible things.”
(Noel Polk, Outside the Southern Myth)
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