精品文摘：My Father, My Son, My Self_美文

精品文摘：My Father, My Son, My Self

This new empathy for my father has led me to a startling insight: if I am still resolving my feelings about my father, then when I was a boy my father was still resolving his feelings about his father.

He raised me as a result of and as a reaction to his own dad, which links my son not only to me and my father, but to my father’s father and, I suspect, any number of Harrington fathers before. I imagine that if the phone had rung as the first Harrington stepped of the boat, he’d have answered by saying, “Hellll –o.

For reasons to profound and too petty to tell, there was a time years ago when my father and I didn’t speak or see each other. I finally gave up my stubbornness and visited unexpectedly. For two days we talked, of everything and nothing. Neither mentioned that we hadn’t seen each other in five years.

I left as depressed as I’ve ever been, knowing that reconciliation was impossible. Two days later I got the only letter my father ever sent me. I’m the writer, he’s the milkman. But the letter’s tone and cadence, its emotion and simplicity might have been my own.

“I know that if I had it to do over again, he wrote, “I would somehow find more time to spend with you. It seems we never realize this until it’s too late.

It turned out that as he had watched me walk out the door after our visit – at the instant I was thinking we were hopelessly lost to each other – he was telling himself to stop me, to sit down and talk, that if we didn’t he might never see me again. “But I just let you go, he wrote.