SOME FAVORITE MOMENTS FROM “DEAR DAD,” THE MOST PERSONAL OF MY LETTERS TO MEN OF LETTERS

 

One posting ago, I said I would be rereading the “Dear Dad” letter in my book, Letters to Men of Letters. Now, after a Father’s Day 2021 reconsideration of that letter, I found some excerpts to quote here. I want to see what it feels like to have those words appear in this new setting—one that by dying at age 63 in 1983, my father never could have imagined. I will be quoting myself below.

 

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This will be my 33rd year at Yale, where I have been happily teaching French, helping students write better papers in all subjects as college Writing Tutor, and being part of the English Department's teaching team for a unique creative writing experience called Daily Themes, which has a long, storied history of producing famous writers. I find it thrilling to have the chance to work with such talented students.

 

 Although I am on leave this fall, I know that today is Move-In day for the new freshman. I never lose sight of how important these milestones are, and of the hard work and sacrifice that led to these parents producing a child who would be welcomed to Yale. Similarly, at the other end of their journey, as I watch students with whom I've often had the privilege of working during the four years of their undergraduate career, I love to watch from the sidelines their family's pride and joy as they receive their diploma. So I'm sure you would be proud and pleased that I, too, have found great happiness and satisfaction in my work, as I saw you do. 

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"Ripeness is all." I have always loved that quote and I even used to think I understood it. But now, as I near the age of 70, I see that I am just beginning to get the picture. Part of the excitement of writing this book that I am sorry you did not live to see has been the role of serendipity and propinquity—such musical words!—as I have noted how often what I read and encounter in everyday life seems startlingly in synch with the particular author on whom I am focusing my attention. I have felt alternately absorbed and disoriented as I waver among now, then, and now, as my current self writes these letters that include so much of my past self. Ever a musician, I tend to think in musical terms. Am I trying to avoid cacophony? Am I in search of harmony? So far, synchronicity is what’s turning up, and I have no quibble with that. “One is always at home in one’s past,” says Nabokov. Fellow exile André Aciman said, “All we have in the end is ourselves, our loneliness—not even our memories but how they’ve lied to us…I, too, one day would have to learn to be alone again, but in the end the work of memory is the work of loneliness.”  

 

I frequently walk by New Haven’s historic Grove Street Cemetery, and it looks like a nice place to be. Further, that it’s populated by so many honchos suggests that they are less likely ever to be disturbed. And I’ve always said that sooner or later everyone who is anyone comes to Yale, so chances are that this might be a good final resting place. I am going to look into it. To be there would also be in keeping with my life choice to enjoy being a small fish in a big pond. 

I once wrote, 

 

“It’s fall, and death is in the air. But then again, it always was. From Day One. Life is what we do to keep ourselves from noticing.” 

 

Perhaps what I should have said is “To write is what we do to keep ourselves from noticing”?

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I’m glad to see that I still like what I wrote in this “Dear Dad” letter. I’m thinking (hoping) that you would have liked it, too.

 

Happy Father’s Day now, and every year.