The
celestial orbs, seen on clear nights are objects of great beauty and
mystery. Yet, their behavior is
clock-like in its repetitive precision.
Javert, in one of his soliloquies in Les Miserables describes the stars
eloquently, “You know your place in the
skies, you hold your course and your aim / and each in your season returns and
returns, and is always the same.” These
suns are much like the sons who walk this earth. We all traverse, if we are fortunate, a
pre-scripted list of phases. Though less
elegantly modeled through the equations of mechanics, they are nonetheless
well-measured, well-defined, and infinite in their cyclical repetition.
Initially,
boys revere their fathers. Any attempts
to emulate them are acts of insecurity, not genuine belief that true mimicry is
possible. After all, father holds
certain advantages of his longer stay upon the earth, most notably his physical
size and strength. In this stage, father
is deified by his ability to throw a ball a manner we cannot ever hope to match
and answer questions with an intellect we can never hope to attain.
Next,
as children, while we still lack the physical fortitude and knowledge
repository of our fathers, we grasp the fundamental fact that his advantages
are age-dependent, and that we too, one day, shall gain that which time has
already bestowed upon him. Now the
boyish attempts at emulation are more fervent; impatiently, we wish for the
years to speed along and deliver with them the cognition and athletic capacities
for which we so desperately yearn.
This
phase continues, but its sentiments are short lived. Frustration is inevitable, as the urge to
compete is born. Much as the young lion
covets his rightful place as the king of the plains, we want our throne long
before we are ripe to receive it. We
note our first pangs of resentment, after all, our father has no more control
over the passage of time than any other man, woman, or child. Why should his temporal advantages bestow
upon him such authority and superiority?
If the gap is to be closed inevitably, why not right now? Such is the reasoning of the embittered
teenager…wedged firmly between video games and surreptitious observation of the
newly-grown bosoms of neighboring classmates.
Soon
we decide that we fully grasp the zeitgeist of our age. Our fathers are superfluous providers of
food, shelter, and other necessities.
What viable contribution can come from someone whose generation’s
defining cultural experiences centered around protest songs and enough
hallucinogens to ensure that Lucy wasn’t the only girl with kaleidoscope eyes? Now, the only wisdom we wish to take is the
certainty that if it was suggested by our fathers, the wisest course of action
was to do the opposite.
A
period of transition ensures. We
recognize that our father’s traits, both desirable and deplorable lurk within
us. Interactions are a mix of
appreciation and acrimony, conversations span the range of friendly to fierce,
from collegial to confrontational. We
struggle to decide how we are like our father, and how we will choose to
deviate from his path. After all, to
deny our similarities would be beneath our obvious intellect and savvy
(wink-wink) at this point. However, to
follow him directly would be to deny ourselves the individuality we’ve coveted
all along.
As
we settle into our adult experiences, professionally, romantically, we
rediscover the emotions of the very first phase, albeit in a decidedly
different context. Now, it is no longer
father’s ability to throw a baseball or his uncanny ability to know the answer
to any and every question on the tip of our tongue we covet. It is contentedness, stability, the knowledge
that we have, finally, established ourselves in the world. Our fathers are flawed, like everyone else,
they are not unlimited in their aptitudes as we once believed. However, we appreciate this fact, as it gives
us hope that perfection is neither required nor expected.
We
recognize our father’s skill sets, their wisdom, and their flaws. By this point, the athletic torch has long
since changed hands, unceremoniously, many years previously. The intellectual torch is passed too in its
time, and yet, wisdom remains a different beast. We realize that their temporal advantage,
which yielded such advantages in our eyes as children now has sapped them of
much of it. We realize that our time
sharing the planet with our parents is inherently finite, and that one day, we
must play the role for another that our father has played for us.
And
so it goes…if we are extremely fortunate.
No comments:
Post a Comment