The Story of My Father by Sue Miller

Author:Sue Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307432667
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Her habit is to moon about.

Waxing, waning—

Flux.

Some days full-face, smiling, whole.

Others attenuated as a nail paring.

Written off.

Surely this is how he would proceed—steady as the sun, working—even in his grief.

This was not the way it happened, though. That steadiness, that dailiness, that seemingly permanent temperamental need to be always at something fell away from him. And my education into the disjuncture of his dying, its inconsistency with his life, began here too. No wonder I resisted understanding it.

It helped me in my resistance that he seemed much the same interpersonally for several years. He was interested in all our doings and stimulated by company, by intellectual events. He and I spoke and wrote often. I kept most of his letters, his script precise and vertical as always. He described things he’d seen and done.

Reds [the movie] is well worth seeing. The hero looks like Ben. It’s long and sprawling, but finally focuses in on a taut and convincing triangle—O’Neill, Reed, and Louise. And the climax in Russia in the revolution is wild adventure. There is a fascinating chorus of elderly survivors: Eastman, Henry Miller, etc., who reminisce periodically, and Emma Goldman, Lenin, Zinoviev play their parts in the action.

He sent me advice about my new life teaching, about my work:

Don’t be intimidated by your students. After all, the incoming freshmen are fresh out of high school and the senior prom. They are enormously different from first-year graduate students, even those who are only twenty-two.

And:

I’m sorry that you were bumped from the advanced writing class. I suppose the dean figures that since he has to pay the full professor’s salary anyway he might as well get a full work load out of him. But if you are producing, that’s better yet.

He sent me clippings from the paper of things he thought I’d be interested in as well as things that amused him. One about a man who’d “accidentally” shot his mother-in-law (not badly), claiming he’d mistaken her for a raccoon. Another:

A Hopewell [NJ] man allegedly snipped off the long braided ponytail of a Cranbury woman as she jogged along Pretty Brook Road Sept. 19, about 5:50 p.m. The braid extended down to her waist, according to police.

The woman told police she screamed and the man ran north on Pretty Brook Road. She ran to the nearby Pretty Brook Tennis Club where two staff members and a club member pursued a suspect.

He was cornered by the three hiding in a pond on Princeton Day School property, within a patch of lily pads. The man was held at bay until the arrival of police. . . . He allegedly used a pair of scissors in the assault.

I can still laugh out loud when I read this old clipping, so like the germ of a Cheever short story. And it reassured me that my father would notice and be amused by such a thing. He still had his sense of humor then. He still took pleasure in what was offbeat in life, what was Thurberesque.

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