Blog o’ Gnosis

Yesterday I sacrificed a half-day’s work to go meet my father for lunch in San Rafael. We do this occasionally, meeting more or less halfway between our homes: he in Oakland, me on the Sonoma coast. Actually, it’s a longer drive for me than for him, but I don’t begrudge an old man his 15 minute handicap. I say I sacrificed half a day, but that’s only part of what it feels like to see my dad. After his heart attack 10 years ago, and especially after last year’s carotid artery dredging operation, I feel lucky for all the time I get to spend with him.

My dad and I have a historic closeness that is based more on character similarities than actual time spent together. He was a doctor with a busy private practice while my sisters and I were growing up, and the times I remember being with him the most all orbit around his work: some Saturday mornings he’d choose one or two of us to accompany him on his rounds of the hospitals in downtown Oakland. I have very clear memories of the nurses stations at all the old hospitals on “Pill Hill”: Merritt, Peralta, Providence. After he was done visiting patients we’d go get a hot dog somewhere, visit one of Oakland’s stately old parks and climb on the train cars, or go down to the Marina docks and look at all the boats. I remember one day in 1968 when he took me with him to a car dealership on Broadway and bought a new white Camaro convertible. My head barely made it over the countertop, and I watched the transaction carefully. He paid for the car with a check, because he didn’t want to reveal his financial particulars on any credit application. The man asked for his phone number and my dad got that annoyed look of suffering fools, and gave the man a bogus number. I didn’t blow his cover.

He was and is a very private man. He keeps his cards close to his chest, to the point of detriment in my opinion. Though we had an easy cameraderie, it was contingent on me not asking more than he could give. The first time I ever remember him saying he loved me was after my mom’s big 60th birthday bash, and I was driving because he was rip-roaring drunk. Even then, I said I loved him first just to see what he would do.

I come from a medical family. My dad’s father had been a Navy doctor, overseeing the building of Haiti’s first hospital among other things. His mother had been a nurse. He and his two brothers all went to medical school, and the one that didn’t make it through paid heavily for his failure. My mother was a physical therapist when she met my dad. Almost all my parents’ friends were doctors and their wives. When I was growing up, you just didn’t question the weight of authority that put on his opinion about all things having to do with health and, incidentally, life in general.

This presented a huge problem for me as a young adult, because of all my siblings I was the one who most wanted to go into the healing professions, but I wasn’t interested in the Western medical model and I also wanted to avoid conflict with my father. My solution was to drop out entirely and explore the lunatic fringe (my father’s opinion of my pursuits) until I found some way to satisfy my own ambitions that wasn’t in direct or obvious opposition to everything my dad stood for.

All these years I have been keeping a bit of a gloss on what I do when I speak to my parents. They don’t particularly want to know about anything they don’t already know about, don’t understand it when I do tell them, and forget the details soon after I’ve explained anyway. It’s a loss that I feel keenly, but it’s a compromise that allows me their generalized love and support, and allows them the love of their daughter without having to work too hard for it.

So I was surprised when my father, over lunch yesterday, asked me point blank if I still had my music distribution business, and if I was doing anything else for money. I took a deep breath and said yes, I do have another job, and it’s helping people look at their dreams. I love it, I said, and I’m good at it, and people pay me well for it. To my further surprise, my father replied, “Then do it.”

My father then admitted that he had only gotten halfway through the copy of Jung’s Memories, Dreams, and Reflections that I’d given him for his birthday a couple years back, before getting so disgusted he couldn’t continue. I told him I thought the biggest problem with Jung was Jungians, and he readily agreed and we had a shared chuckle.

Thus followed the kind of conversation I have always wanted to have with my father: a professional conversation. I learned more about his training as a neurologist where he had had to do several stints in psychiatry. He told me that he hated it because you had to explain why you’d given a patient a particular diagnosis, when for him it was more of an intuitive leap to see what was the matter with someone. His solution was to focus on neurology, where the focus was on organic and specific functions rather than on behaviors and emotions.

We talked about dreams and dream research, and I told him about the conference I’m speaking at in June, in a panel on dream incubation. He understood that I also don’t suffer fools, and that was reassuring to him. He appreciated why I choose to help people through pastoral counseling rather than from a clinical perspective. What’s more, and what was really revelatory for me, was he agreed that it was a smart idea on my part.

To have lived and worked for 25 years without this kind of approval from my dad has been heartbreaking at times, but has always fueled my resolve that I knew what I was doing even if he didn’t. I had come to accept that the kind of understanding I longed for was not going to happen, and continued on anyway with my passion for dreams and ritual. Then to suddenly have that conversation fall into my lap yesterday…I can’t even describe how it makes me feel, but tears are involved.

My dad is a crusty, conservative, sexist, jaded old man with a wicked sense of humor. He also has some fascinating stories to tell about his life. I told him I’d gotten him Jung’s memoir because I wanted him to write his memoir, that I think his life experience is valuable for others, not just for his daughter who occasionally pries vignettes from his heavily guarded heart. He looked at me and smiled.

I am as ambitious for my father as I am for myself and all my children. I believe our gifts are not just for ourselves, but for the world at large. We never know what story tossed carelessly into the public realm will touch someone else, and help ease the general balance of suffering in the world. But I have long since given up trying to change my father’s behavior. I doubt he will ever write anything down, and I’m pretty sure I won’t remember all he’s told me, either. Most of his life will simply vanish once he dies. But this conversation, this story, is worth holding on to.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 11th, 2006 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.