The New Rambler

I am not actually occupying Iowa City (although this being Iowa City, we are transforming, not occupying. Liberating was rejected on the grounds of being too confrontation and sharing on the grounds that someone did not want to share with the 1%). My six-month’s pregnant old lady butt is instead occupying my sofa, which is where I’ve been sleeping lately because it seems to result in less back pain that sleeping on my bed. But I did stop by the occupation/transformation at College Green Park last night and stayed for a couple hours worth of the General Assembly, which churned out a preliminary statement of intent and a statement of nonviolence in two hours.

If you’ve ever been a part of consensus decision-making, especially in a group of 200 people, you’ll know that two statements in two hours is actually kind of a record. As I was telling a friend, it’s always instructive to remember the story of the SDS chapter in New Jersey that once spent 24 hours trying to decide if they could take a day off to go to the beach.

Decision-making of the sort being practiced at College Green Park and in public spaces all over the country is not something a lot of people are really willing to do. Even those of us who participate in such things are likely occasionally to say Dude, let’s just pick a word already. But that, of course, spins off into a debate about whether and how words matter.

Regular life affords few opportunities for such debate. Oh, sure, advertisers and politicians argue about wording all the time. But advertisers and politicians have a mission that’s about convincing other people, not about satisfying them. Wording a statement as an activist is about convincing other people, sure, but it’s also about defining yourself. It’s about defining and creating the kind of world and society that you want. In the beginning was the Word, and in some sense even atheists function that way.

I loved being at the park last night not because I really love sitting on the ground for two hours and repeating everything everyone says in phrases and twinkling with my hands to show approval. What I love is seeing people engaged in the process of creating something, watching them get to feel — for some for the first time — that they are making something that is real and true.

When I got home last night, I listened to the Friday installment of Planet Money. I have a perverse love of economic news and analysis (I lay it entirely at the feet of Louis Rukeyser for being so funny and dapper), even though it routinely pisses me off. Despite what the right wing seems to think, NPR, especially in the form of Planet Money, is not even remotely left-wing. It’s taken as a default position that capitalism is good, that the democratic process as displayed in the United States works, that growth is good. I disagree with almost everything they say. On last night’s show, they decided to visit Occupy Wall Street. I was immediately worried. It’s going to be like the time they interviewed “a socialist,” I thought (although to be fair, they poked no more fun at him than they did at the folks at libertarian summer camp, who were checking the price of gold on their smartphones in order to calculate how much gold to offer for goods at the camp). But it was actually pretty good: they are the first media people I’ve heard to understand that the part of the point of the protest is the protest. What we want for the larger world is what we are creating for ourselves. If hundreds of people living rather uncomfortably in a public place and sleeping on the ground can come to consensus, why the hell can’t the grown ups?

I don’t speak for anyone else at any Occupy event. But for me, at least, it’s true. The means is the end. Or, as one of my favorite bits of writing from another era put it,

We conducted a long struggle, assuming responsibilities we should not have been made to assume, heartbreakingly alone until the end, taking time out from our studies and our lives to do a job that should not have needed to be done. And we comported ourselves with dignity and grace, on the whole unexpectedly so, and with good hearts and kindness for each other. Confronting an institution apparently and frustratingly designed to depersonalize and block communication, neither humane nor graceful nor responsive, we found flowering within ourselves the presence whose absence we were at heart protesting.

(excerpt from a letter sent by a Berkeley Free Speech Movement participant to the judge in their case, quoted in Michael Rossman’s The Wedding Within the War)

Your week probably did not start at 8:30 on Monday morning with a health care professional telling you that you were gaining too much weight in your pregnancy and that “if you keep this up, you’re going to look like the Michelin girl by the time you deliver.” At least, I certainly hope your week didn’t start that way. I’m sorry to say that mine did, and even more sorry that my response, rather than uttering an expletive or an eloquently worded rejoinder, was to burst into tears.

Of course, pregnancy may well explain that response, as well as my getting teary looking at BoingBoing just now (and damn, that was some fast CSS work on someone’s part) and reading my all the nostalgic Apple posts stream by on FriendFeed and Facebook.

But I didn’t set out, actually, to whine about pregnancy or reminisce about Macs (I’ve done that before) but rather to comment a bit on one of the other events of this apparently tumultuous week, the Occupy This, That, and the Other Place movement that started with Occupy Wall Street. Before the Steve Jobs encomiums started rolling in, most of the posts I saw online this week were either repostings of assorted Occupy signs (hell, I posted a few of them myself) or people complaining about the ways in which the movement, or the people involved, lacked focus, or direction, or goals, or objectives. Frequently these went together — Gosh, I love this sign! I sure wish they had a program!

Watching activism take place on the internet makes me feel very, very old, and weirdly nostalgic for the days when I was handing out flyers that said, “meet on the Pentacrest at noon and the Ped Mall at 5 the day the war breaks out!”, because of course we didn’t know when the war was going to start (this would be the “first” Gulf War), and we wanted to have a plan, and we couldn’t email everyone, much less invite them all to a Facebook event.

The group that made those flyers was called Operation US Out, and I attended its very first meeting, when I was fourteen. We had a program, or at any rate we had five Points of Unity, the idea being that if you agreed with these, you were part of the coalition, regardless of your position on, say, abortion or Israel. The only ones I remember now (1990 was some time ago, and I’d have to look the rest up) were “Troops Out Now” and “End the Poverty Draft,” but the idea was to create some simple demands we could all get behind and rally around, so that we could build a broad-based coalition and gather the maximum possible resistance.

That worked, to a point, the point in question being when a group of mostly women decided that OUSO was being dominated by either men or International Socialist Organization members, or ISO members who were men, and they thus decided to form a separate group called Women Against War. I stuck with the original group, as that’s where my friends were. I knew the people on the steering committee. Of course, they mostly were ISO members, as tends to happen with new activist groups on college campuses with active ISO chapters, if Chicago decides that’s where ISO members should focus their energies. The idea of a Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist group is, at least in part, that you’re creating a vanguard for the revolution, because when the time comes, you’ll need to have people who are organized and know how to get shit done. Consequently, ISO people tend to be very organized and know how to get shit done, and while everyone else is sitting around and dithering about whether the group is anti-war or pro-peace, or whether or not to include demands about Palestine, or what have you, the ISO folks are going around and booking meeting rooms and getting march permits and making and copying flyers and generally, well, organizing. But I digress.

The Points of Unity weren’t, as it turned out, enough to preserve a unified group, and I’m not sure at all that they were ever mentioned or covered in any newspaper story about our actions. As my friend Meg says, you can be sure that at a rally of a thousand normal looking people, the newspaper photographer will find the one guy on stilts, and that will be what shows up on the front page of the paper. I love the guys on stilts, and the people with the giant puppets, and the Radical Cheerleaders, and the people who go around doing guerilla plantings of organic pumpkin seeds, and all the other forms of spectacle we have on the Left, but I do acknowledge there’s a certain problem of media representation.

I’ve since been involved in various other struggles that had programs and demands. Students Against Sweatshops had three very specific demands, all of which had been endorsed by a remarkable list of groups and people and institutions (shouts out, Tom Harkin!). To this day, eleven years later, the University of Iowa has still only met two of them (joining the WRC and drafting a licensee code of conduct — they have yet to drop out of the FLA). The sit-in and its associated spectacle, and the years that followed, were specifically designed in an attempt to bring attention to these specific and particular demands, and they were covered, to some extent, in the stories told about us. But of course they were very complicated and involved understanding things about factory monitoring and labor standards and the right to organize and a great many other things that don’t make a good caption on a picture of a bunch of unwashed college students.

And yet we did accomplish some of our goals. There have been improvements. Mostly those were the result of a lot of grueling, irksome, behind the scenes work. But you know what happened that first day of the sit in? The administration joined the WRC, something they’d refused to do for months. I don’t think they did that due to reasoned demands. We’d already made those. I think they did it because there were a bunch of grubby college kids bike-locked together in their offices. (Well. People weren’t grubby yet. It was the first day, before we started camping out in the hallway.)

I’ve long been a fan of Frances Fox Piven’s Poor People’s Movements. If you’ve heard of Piven, you’re probably either an old lefty or a fan of Glenn Beck. Given that you’re reading this blog, I’m betting on the former, although you never know. I’d like to think my father would read my blog if he were alive, and after agreeing that “main ideas belong in main clauses and subordinate ideas belong in subordinate clauses” and that bourbon is preferable to Scotch, I’m not sure he and I would see eye to eye on anything. Piven’s book is about various mass uprisings of the poor, some of them organized somewhat but most of them simply the result of huge numbers of people reaching a breaking point.

The folks occupying Wall Street do not have a great deal in common with the tenement dwellers who went on rent strikes in Piven’s book, but there’s a quality of unrest that I think they share, and a quality of demanding something – even if it’s an inarticulate, intangible something — but something different from what they have.

I remember way back at one of those early OUSO meetings someone was trying to get people to pin down exactly what our solution to — oh, I don’t know, the global oil market? the problems of capitalism? — was. Another member stood up to speak and said, “You know, I don’t know. But you know, we elect this huge bureaucracy. We elect these people who are supposed to figure out how to make the things we want work. Isn’t that, like, their job?”

And to a great extent, I think that’s what the Occupy movement is saying. No, we don’t have a solution to the global debt crisis or the student loan scam or the unemployment rate or anything else. But dude, people in government, captains of industry, leaders of the free world — isn’t that your job? To which I can only say yes, yes it is.

I do not care if you do not like poetry.

People often ask me if I like children. The question always cracks me up. “Sure,” I say. “I like some children.” I mean, really. Would you say to someone, “Do you like people in their 40s?” I like some children just the way I like some people. I don’t really see them as a separate category.

I also like some poetry although, as a matter of shorthand, I am often apt to say simply that I like poetry. But that’s untrue as a whole.

I do not like Wordsworth.

I do not like Robert Frost or Robert Lowell or A.E. Housman or W.H. Auden very much.

I do not like Jorie Graham, though God knows I tried to for a long time.

There are a ton of poets I have never read and whose work I thus can’t comment on at all. And my like or dislike has nothing to do with whether or not the poet in question is any good. I have very little notion of what that means, and one of the beauties of giving up writing for librarianship is that I no longer have to know what it means, or get into arguments with people about it. My job is (among other things) to find books that people like, books they are in the mood for, books that work in some way for them. I’ve always loved Sam Johnson’s line that a man ought to read just as his inclination leads him, for what he reads as a duty will do him little good. I just didn’t realize until I got to library school how closely Johnson’s views mirrored the second and third laws of library science:

Every reader his or her book.

Every book its reader.

And there’s the wonderful essay by C.S. Lewis in which he talks about how if someone goes back again and again to the same book, no matter how terrible you may think it, you may be sure that for him “it contains a kind of poetry.”

I’ve been unpacking my books in my new house, but I’m not done. Yesterday I was hit by a sudden and intense desire to reread some of Diving into the Wreck, which I own but can’t currently find. A normal person, I suppose, would see this as a good reason to unpack some more boxes, but of course I am not a normal person, and I work in the library, so my first inclination was to see what all we had by Adrienne Rich (and thank you, library selectors of years past — there was The Fact of a Doorframe just sitting there waiting for me to check it out).

I regard a sudden and intense desire to read a particular bit of poetry — or to read poetry at all — as highly peculiar, but perhaps it is no more peculiar than pregnancy cravings. (I don’t have cravings, just aversions. Please, whatever you do, don’t offer me chocolate.) And as things go, there are certainly worse vices, and things that are much harder to obtain.

I read poems, but I never write them. I thus blame the following entirely on my friend Aliki, who convinced me this weekend to play something called The Poetry Game*. I should know better than to fall for such traps. Make of it what you will.

Range

Crow, titmouse, lilac, blossom:
the hillside in spring as you ride
up the cablecar
and see the things that are there
and the things you only imagine
ephemera
the canon of spring
the shoots that rise from underground
as the creek rises
the engines starting,
John, Jennifer
the speed of approaching summer
when everything will bloom
when love will run out of control
everything quicker and quicker
the green overwhelming.

It is early spring.
The worlds now hover in your throat.
You cannot speak, only wail
cry,
climb as the cablecar climbs
to reach an altitude where you may
look at the hillside below
as down at an auditorium
empty
afraid only of what might come.

*The game, should you want to play it, involves taking turns naming a list of words. Then everyone has to write a poem (see, I didn’t realize this part before we started) using some, all, or none of the words. We had 30 words total, and I think I used 23 of them.

The events I’m supposed to remember, the ones that are supposed to have changed my life, are 9/11 and the Challenger explosion. And I do remember them: I was in my fourth grade homeroom, getting ready for handwriting, when Mrs. Gale came to tell us about the explosion, and I was just out of teaching a rhetoric class when another grad student asked me where she could find a classroom with cable TV on 9/11. So I remember them, and I even had ties to them — one of the teachers at our school had been a finalist for teacher position on the challenger, and I had friends in New York, including one who saw the second tower fall outside her window the day after losing her job. But they aren’t the things that changed my world.

Those things were my father’s death, which I don’t remember the date and time of — I wasn’t there when it happened, and I was only five years old — but which I have a visceral reaction to every year on that date — and watching the vote on the “first” Gulf War come in on January 15, 1991. I was fifteen years old and sitting in a mess of sleeping bags and blankets on my best friend’s living room floor, and we were watching the vote on the tiny television we’d dragged in there to watch movies the night before. We had been organizing against the coming war, which we knew would happen but still believed, maybe, that somehow we could stop. But that January day, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, we sat there and watched senator after senator vote to authorize the use of force in the Gulf. The air war started a few days later; the ground war began on my best friend’s birthday. The only dissenting vote from a Republican in either house came from our own Senator Chuck Grassley. I’m fairly sure it’s the only vote of his I’ve ever agreed with. He spoke at my high school when I was a senior, and I asked him about it, and he said that he simply felt that not every other avenue had been tried, and I respect him for that still, although I wasted no time at that event lambasting him with the rest of my classmates over gays in the military.

The war started for me that day, and it never really ended. We were bombing Iraq with some regularity all through the 1990s. Economic sanctions imposed on Iraq resulted in the deaths of thousands there during that decade. The Iraq war that started in 2003 seemed to me just a continuation, not a new event, and the war in Afghanistan that started a month after 9/11 seemed all just another part of what George Bush the first called the “new world order.” That’s what changed things for me.

My mother graduated from college in the spring of 1968. At one point in grad school round one, I was immersed in reading about that period as part of the research for a book I was then trying to write. I asked her one day what that was like. I couldn’t imagine the experience of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy being shot within weeks of each other. I thought it must have felt as though the whole world was falling apart. What did she remember about it, I wanted to know.

She thought about it awhile. “I was very absorbed with your father, and with worrying about getting into graduate school,” she said. (This was around the time she was also applying to secretarial school programs in case her PhD plans didn’t work out.) Finally she came up with something. After Dr. King’s assassination, Cornell University sent a letter to my godmother, my mother’s best friend, who had applied to graduate school there, saying they were establishing a scholarship for minorities, and did she belong to any minority group? Elizabeth, who is smart alecky as well as smart, wrote back and said yes, she was Phi Beta Kappa and a church-going Christian.

You can’t predict what will change your life. I’ve spent twenty years getting told I’m unamerican, that I should move to Canada or Russia or China. I’ve seen institutions I thought well of disappointment me again and again. It doesn’t particularly faze me anymore. The first cut is the deepest, and that’s as true of political betrayal as it is of romantic loss.

A lot of people will spend today in remembrance, and an equal number will spend the day trying not to remember. I think surviving is always a balancing act between the two. I’ll never forget my father; I’ll never stop trying to change the world, but I can’t spend my whole life on either one. Among other things, I’m going to have this kid to raise and take care of, and he will someday have to encounter his own losses. I don’t know what one does about that, except to keep on living.

Somewhere out there, perhaps, are still the three installments of The New Rambler I wrote in the weeks after 9/11. That was back in the days before blogs, when The New Rambler went out as an email, and I got around to putting it up on the website when I had the time. I never got around to it with those issues, and they were lost when the computer I wrote them on died. If anyone reading this happens still to have copies, I’d be grateful if you could send them to me, for the sake of the historical record.

I said to someone online yesterday that third grade was awesome. And indeed it was.

It was the year my best friend showed up at Lincoln, because the alternative school she’d been going to closed. I had an excellent homeroom teacher, and Dan and Tim and Aaron all sat behind me, and one day I figured out one of Aaron’s puzzle tricks faster than he did. All of us were terrible at remembering to bring things for Show and Tell, and so we resorted each week to our pockets. In those years, I always kept things in the pockets of my windbreaker — stones and pieces of string and bits of balsa wood and my first jackknife and the acorn caps that we colored in with pencils until we’d worn the pencil lead down to a nub and the inside of the acorn cap looked like dark pewter. And of course marbles. That was the year we played marbles. Every day at recess we were up in the corner of the field, where no grass grew, drawing circles in the dirt and explaining the rules to newcomers: two in the game to shoot, and you got to keep any you shot out. I lost a great many marbles. But it was worth it, even when Dan showed up with his cheater marbles — miniscule white things that were impossible to move. He never lost any of them.

It was one of the years another friend and I went creeking after school. I still always wore dresses in those days, and we were convinced creeking was probably illegal in some fashion, and so whenever a car passed by us on River Street, we’d duck down to avoid being seen, me with my legs spread in a wide squat to keep my skirts out of the water. It was also the year we decided to go as Little Women for Halloween. We both checked the book out of the library in September, and every night we’d call each other up. “I’m on chapter five — what chapter are you on?” I got to be Jo, of course, because I had the brown hair. My mother sewed a dress for me — red calico with green ribbon and off-white plain eyelet trim, which came out less Christmasy than it sounds. (“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents!” I practiced my lines a lot.)

I kept D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths in my desk that year and read bits of it every day during silent reading. My mother still read to me every night. I’d settled in well at our new house, and I no longer got lost walking home. Walking to school in the morning still involved the shortcut past the pipe that was, according to my friend, actually a Civil War cannon, and through several backyards, whose owners had thoughtfully provided us with stepping stones, and through the valley that, in the spring, was nothing but violets. It was a good year.

That’s what I say about it now, anyway. Those are the parts I like to remember.

It’s also the year I started getting dragged to therapists once a week. I was a bad liar and never knew what to say every week when the same kid asked me why I got to leave school early that day. It was the year someone first called me fat. It was the year I began to have doubts about that Civil War cannon and the year I started to perceive, more than ever, that class divisions were something that some people actually cared about, and that those people were going to make my friends’ lives miserable as a result.

I always think of myself as having had a happy childhood. My grandmother always says I was miserable as a child. It’s hard to know whose sets of memories to believe, or even which ones of one’s own to choose. But this autumn, back in the city of my childhood, I’m going to cling to pieces of string and bits of balsa wood and go looking for some acorn caps.

I was born back east.

Anyone with an ordinary understanding of the geography of the United States will, upon hearing I was born Iowa, immediately wonder about my grasp on reality, and they might be right: a lot of people here question the grip on reality of the greater population of Wyoming, where I used to live. You see, out there, “back east” means anything east of Cheyenne. I lived there for five years, and the sky over the Big Horn Basin shook me loose from my previous understandings of time and space and a whole lot more. I don’t live there any more, but I will never be the same.

I moved back to Iowa to be closer to my family, and, as it turns out, to have a kid, although that wasn’t part of the initial plan. I’m unwrapping the dishes in my house now and getting the news of seven months ago in Wyoming, when I packed them up in the pages of the Casper Star Tribune, the Billings Gazette Wyoming Edition, the Powell Tribune, the Cody Enterprise, and the Northern Wyoming Daily News (sadly no longer called the Worland Grit). I have a canister of bear spray and boots with Wyoming dirt engrained in them. I have a calendar of pictures from the Shoshone National Forest and enough topo maps to paper a room in my new house. I still subscribe to High Country News. But I can hardly bear to look at these things.

Outside my window now I see giant maples, and crickets sing all night, loudly enough that it keeps me awake, loudly enough to drown out the memory of the trucks on WY120, the calves crying for their mamas, the coyotes laughing. I say that word with two syllables now: cuy-yote, not cuy-yote-ee. I don’t look up at the sky at night because I can no longer see the Milky Way. People at work tell me they’re going hiking this weekend, and I’m baffled. Where? How? There is no wilderness here. I keep leaving my car windows rolled down and then riding home with my skirt getting wet, because I forgot that back east, it rains.

Everything is smaller here except for the parking lots. The sun isn’t as bright, and the people all move close together. Only the Amish use horses for work.

It sounds like I hate Iowa, and that’s not true. I was born here; my son will be born here. We will eat tomatoes with our hands in the summer and grow them in our backyard without a greenhouse. We’ll canoe in lazy rivers and dance to music downtown all summer long. We’ll have excellent medical care and all the books we could ever want. But we won’t have stars, or lodgepole pines, or cabins miles from anywhere, or encounter moose or elk.

Some people are born in the place they are meant to be from: it’s as if they got to skip the step where they are merely half a person, floating around waiting to meet their other half. They were made from whole cloth, and they root where they are planted. Others of us, though, are more like the sea creature fossils you can still find here in Iowa (and in Wyoming). I imagine they are dug up from underground and face the light of day and wonder where the water is. They are dried out and at home now on the ground, but surely they remember the ocean.

Dear Internet,

I interrupt the irregularly scheduled programming around here to let you know that I am expecting a baby boy in 2012, due in theory on January 20.

Thank you in advance for your congratulations and good wishes. I am not sure I can recommend moving 1200 miles, starting a new job, getting pregnant, and buying a house all in the course of nine months, but I never like to do anything by halves.

I’ll doubtless write more about all of this, but in the meantime, I just wanted you to know.

Love,
Laura

My trusty car Viktor is equipped with a radio/tape deck and one of those doohickeys that you plug into your cigarette lighter so you can play your iPod through your radio.

Well. That’s the theory anyway. Last week I pulled the entire cigarette lighter out while trying to unplug my phone charger, and I haven’t been able to fix it. And many weeks before that the eject button on the tape deck fell off, and so the tape that was in there got stuck. This left me with two options to listen to on my trip this weekend:

1. U2′s Rattle and Hum
2. the radio

Now, I love revisiting 1988 as much as the next girl with a crush on the long-haired Bono of that era, but I have discovered that it is, in fact, possible to tire of “Pride (In the Name of Love).” That left the radio. There are about three public radio stations I can pick up between here and my grandmother’s house. They were all playing Fresh Air. In succession.

That left commercial radio, about which I have the following observations.

• The song “Band on the Run” is far, far more popular than it should be, even if Paul McCartney is playing in Chicago this weekend.
• There are many more songs than I thought that have only one lyric.
• Astoundingly, I have not yet tired of listening to “American Pie.”
• While good country music exists, none of it is played on the radio.
• Everyone seems to like the minute length of their music blocks to match their radio frequency. I wonder if the higher frequencies get less money from advertisers, or if they just make their advertising blocks longer.
• Soundgarden is now classic rock. And not like early Soundgarden. Like “Black Hole Sun” Soundgarden.
• Rush is the most popular progressive rock band according to some poll or other. Jethro Tull comes in third. I heard “Thick as a Brick” twice, and that was okay.
• Someday Billy Joel will die and we will all be subject to more renditions of “Piano Man” than anyone has ever heard in a bar. Or should have to.

Note to self, upon preview: fix your damn theme so the bullet points look nicer!

Queen Anne’s Lace
corn
cattails

Oxford
Montezuma
Brooklyn
go

West, young man
the man once said once

upon a time
this was the West

That’s what I wrote in my head on the way to Ministries Retreat. I was there to make a little video.

My grandfather, who had left my grandmother many years before, killed himself when I was three months old. I never met him, though I’m told he heard my babbling over the phone. My father killed himself when I was five and a half. I have two friends I’ve known long enough that they remember my father, at least a bit. One has never met her father, as her mother left him before she was born. The other has a father who barely acknowledges her and who was never married to her mother, though he has been married to a number of other people over the years.

I’ve never been too keen on Father’s Day as a result. I pass it off as part of my eternal hatred of holidays perpetuated by the greeting card industry, but in point of fact, I have perhaps understandably mixed feelings about the whole notion of fatherhood, and precious little experience with it myself.

When I was in fourth grade, there was a girl in our school whose mother was dying of cancer. We all made cards for her, at the instruction of our teachers, and everyone was terribly solicitous toward her. It was terrible for her — I knew that even then — but at the time my primary emotion was envy. She had a parent dying and people knew about it and understood it. Her mother was dying for a reason. I thought nobody knew how my father died, and I didn’t want anyone to find out. I was convinced it would simply brand me as crazy.

In years since, of course, I’ve come to know many good fathers — fathers of friends, and, now that I am older, friends who are fathers. They are to a man good men and good fathers, and I’m honored to have their friendship.

And I was lucky in many ways: I did not have my father for long, but for the five and a half years he was here, I had the best father a little girl could ever have wanted. He was never the dependable parent — he was famous for running out of gas, or for getting on the wrong bus, or for forgetting crucial things like my breakfast — but he was good and true in many other ways, and he loved me and he loved my friends, and he did some of the things their fathers were not there to do, giving them rides home and taking us to story time at the public library, and buying us rainbow sherbet afterwards.

But on this Father’s Day I’d like to take a moment to remember absent fathers, difficult fathers, even bad fathers. We carry their genes with us, even if we don’t know how or what they mean. I’ve been told I wash my hands the way my father did, for instance, and I know that I got his hair, and his temper. Who knows what other bits of him are lodged within me, or what bits of the fathers they never knew are lodged within my friends?

Those of us without fathers still, somewhere, had a father, and I believe we still honor that, or that we have to find some way to, because you can’t, as Malcolm X once said, hate the root of the thing and not hate the thing itself. I can’t, of course, actually speak for anyone else here, but I cannot hate my father. He was difficult at the best of times, and of course he left me in the most final way possible. But I cannot, and do not, hate him.

And so today I remember John M. Crossett Jr., professor, printer, doubles tennis player, drinker, pipe smoker, tyrant, and, most importantly, father. Much love to you, Daddy, wherever you are.