Against my mother's nursing degree stood my father's rickety eighth-grade education. Her status as a registered nurse made her quite marketable, even during the Great Depression. She held down two jobs, actually—eight hours a day at St. Mary's Hospital, followed by another shift of private nursing. My father's employment, when it happened, was always described as temporary or part-time.
Temporary and part-time also describe the conversations I recall having with my father. Our words revolved around the subject of correction, my correction to be specific. In fact, the word conversations is a stretch; they were more like monologues with the same painful ending. I was sent to my room to drop my pants, and my father would whip me with his leather belt. Such displays probably made my father feel a semblance of power, but I knew that even his role as disciplinarian was defined only because my mother, the matriarch, willed it.
Day after day, my father would go out walking, always looking for work, wearing out his shoe leather. But I can't help but believe he was also out looking for something more, something
he couldn't have put into words but felt on a daily basis. Maybe he was looking for himself and he knew his father back at the house was no help. Maybe he was looking for dignity, a belief that
someone was proud of him. But my mother refused him that kind of respect. I don't know for certain what he searched for, but I do know that every day, he went walking.
You don't always get what you ask for, but you get what you get. Amy was a survivor; Emmett was a searcher. Together they made up the tallest trees in my forest—mother and father.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
—Robert Frost, "The oven Bird"
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In