Dad arrived home after fourteen-hour workdays. When I heard him come through the door, I bolted down the stairs from my bedroom, gave him a big hug, and began my litany of the day’s highlights. We’d be sitting in the Green Room, Dad on the brocade couch, his suit rumpled. I sat hopefully on a Harvard chair in front of him. Earlier, before he got home, I enjoyed fantasies of being a grown-up in the Green Room. There was a Steuben sculpture of Excalibur in there, in two pieces. I loved pulling the silver sword out of its crystal stone.
Dad liked scotch on the rocks. While he sat on the couch with his drink, he would rest his left hand on a small black-walnut block, topped with his silver calendar. The calendar was engraved with the dates of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Thirteen Days. It also bore his initials, RSM, and those of the president, JFK. This calendar had been a gift from Jackie Kennedy.
While Dad was sipping his drink, I recounted my seventh-grade football game from the afternoon. I had a big run right up the middle of the field, splitting defenders, cruising toward the end zone. His eyes faded a little, while his fingers traced the calendar. I realized that he was not listening to my story. He was remembering, silently, the days of the crisis. He wore a still expression. He was being hollowed out. Gazing up into that distant face, I started to think, Is it time to get out of the room?
When his ice clinked, or his hand moved back to his lap, our conversation resumed its rhythm. He coughed. It had been a blip. I kept babbling.
This is my strongest memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The one object, the silver calendar, after the fact. In October of 1962 I had no idea that Dad was going to work every day feeling afraid of not coming home. My parents did an amazing job of buffering. I don’t even remember going to church, as many people did during that time. Mom and Dad’s protection of me was so total, so complete. I remember visiting the home of Dad’s deputy secretary of defense, Roswell Gilpatric, on the Maryland shore. They had an underground shelter, and our families got to go down there to explore. Climbing down the ladder in my cowboy boots and ducking my head into the darkness, I thought it was an adventure.
My mother and father were my bomb shelter, more than any bunker. I enjoyed the particular attention given to the youngest child in the family. Free days with Mom and Dad were the highlights of my childhood. Some of my best memories involve riding in the family Ford from Ann Arbor to the sandy shores of Lake Michigan near Old Mission. Sometimes, on a very long drive, I’d rub Dad’s sore back. In the winters we always went skiing. After a long day on the slopes, there would be back rubs all around.
Long before we used sunscreen and ChapStick to prevent sun damage, my lips cracked during those sultry hot summers and bright snowy winters. And of course I would lick them because they hurt, and this created a large red circle of soreness from my nose to my chin. My mother lovingly referred to me as Happy, because I looked like a clown, but also because I had a predilection for being happy.
My family has something called the “chipper gene.” My wife coined this term after I had lived for years without knowing the diagnosis. The chipper gene is a way of getting by, and also a bit of a curse. Sometimes I don’t even notice myself being chipper, the way you don’t notice your own hand gestures.
One of my father’s favorite catchphrases was “It’s a glorious day!” That expression summarizes the whole idea of the chipper gene. He would say “It’s a glorious day” constantly, regardless of what kind of day it was. The sentiment survived all the changes in our relationship. When my daughter, Emily, was just five or six years old, she picked up on it. She would parrot Dad by saying, “It’s a glorious day, sweetie!” She’d lower her voice and puff out her cheeks, her eyes taking in the grins of all within earshot.
Glorious days come every so often, not every day. I started to realize this in my midtwenties and thirties, when I began to address my own mental health through counseling. Meanwhile, I think Dad’s mental health deteriorated starting in his sixties. As I observed him over the last decades of his life, I realized that his glorious days were few and far between.
I remember one instance when we were at the Watergate hotel restaurant together. Out of the various dinners we had, this one stands out. It was after my mother’s death, and Dad had been living in an apartment in the Watergate for a few years, having moved out of the Tracy Place house. I felt happy to be with him, but when we sat down at the table, he seemed immediately agitated. He was coughing a lot, a symptom of diverticulitis of the esophagus, which he struggled with throughout his later years.
The server greeted him politely, but Dad rushed him.
“Sir! Two chardonnays.”
As we waited, he kept trying to get the server’s attention. “Sir! Sir!” He wanted to know when the wine was going to show up. I talked to him about farming, and I tried to lead him to a question about my children. It didn’t work. When the wine came, he finally started to relax.
I can recall the shape of a bending ski track. The redness of his cheek on a winter’s day. I remember certain patches of wildflowers, where they grew, and trailside lunches. I remember eating walnuts on hikes and ski trips, carrying them for him—their weight in my bag. Why, then, in remembering that dinner, a time when I know I witnessed him in such quiet, restrained agony, do I have to search my memories? I recall the simple and pleasant things about the restaurant. The white tablecloths, a view of the Potomac. What he said, how he treated me, and what we did afterward—these things I don’t remember very well.
The need for my days to be glorious has impeded memory. And it impeded understanding for decades of my life, the critical ones when we were both men, equals, not just father and son.
My father’s Cuban Missile Crisis calendar, a gift from Jackie Kennedy in 1963
Nowadays, the notion that every day is glorious seems like an inflexible expectation. We had many of those in my family. There were several innocuous yet unbreakable rules: no gum chewing, tuck in your shirt, never say damn, look people in the eye, be a good Scout, don’t tell lies, wake up early, no need for a bathrobe, don’t join country clubs, golf is a waste of time, work hard, never quit. That last one was literally the opposite of what we needed to do in Vietnam.
There were also more complex expectations. I think Dad expected me to understand and accept him, even when his complexity crossed the line into hypocrisy.
I remember one conversation we had about right and wrong. This was in the mid-1980s. Following my mother’s death, Dad had retired from the World Bank and begun a new career that consisted of serving on numerous boards and writing books. At that time I still viewed him as a basically decent person with occasional bad judgment. I can’t remember where we were for the talk, but it was probably a camping trip. We were probably drinking a can of sweet red wine. I raised a question about hard choices.
“Gray is everywhere,” my father said. “Especially when we think that we know the truth.”
“You really feel that way?” I asked. It had never seemed so. Not in our house, not in our relationship. I had always thought that things were clear to him. The rules had been clear, his love for me had been clear. The gloriousness of life had been clear.
Perhaps I poked at it again. “I never thought of that, Dad. What do you mean?”
The conversation ended haltingly. We got into our sleeping bags and lay on the ground under the open night sky. I anticipated waking up in the morning and shaking the dew off my bag, and I hoped Dad would say something to shake away all the lies between us, everything that had created such an absence of understanding. He soon fell asleep, without saying the word Vietnam, having said no more than what he intended. I watched the stars, which in the moments before sleep stood out as very white against a sheet of black.
On my desk sits a Buddha. It’s carved from rosewood, a deep red-brown. I like to think that many hands have held and polished it.
A small infant climbs on the Buddha’s warm, round belly. The infant’s eyes are wide, gazing up in an adoring and joyful expression. The babe’s mouth is open as if in the middle of a gurgling laugh. The Buddha’s mouth, lined with ivory teeth, returns the laugh.
This Buddha was my father’s. It sat on his desk in our Washington home. To the best of my knowledge, he bought it in China. During World War II, he had served in the US Army Air Forces Office of Statistical Control. He was deployed to India, where he used his statistical skills to organize the transportation of fuel and cargo. He was also responsible for analyzing bombing operations to make them more efficient. Dad only ever told me one story about this period of his life, his actual military service. One day he flew a B-29 mission over the Hump, the eastern end of the Himalayas, and landed on an airstrip in China. As he peered from the bomber’s window, he saw hundreds of Chinese peasants pulling a stone roller the size of a small house, attempting to smooth the rough surface of the landing strip. In an instant, a worker tripped and was crushed to death as the stone roller ran over him. The Buddha in my office, to the best of my knowledge, was purchased during that trip.
I wonder what that Buddha meant to Dad. Did Dad see himself in the omnipotence of the Buddha’s great, smooth head? Did he feel the joy of the infant climbing the curves of the Buddha’s belly, possibly wondering if this would be his experience with his own son? I wonder why that story from his brief time in China—briefly miraculous, suddenly tragic—was the only one he told me.
Buddhism teaches us that life is full of suffering. Only by accepting this fact can we begin practices that will alleviate our suffering. This is the opposite of denial. I look at the small, polished figure on my desk and think that the Buddha would laugh at hearing an expression like “It’s a glorious day” uttered during days of war and sickness.