Father’s Day 2017. My father passed away eleven years ago, but it still seems much more recent than that. I was struggling to come up with an appropriate way to summarize my memories of him, which is frustrating because there are so many aspects I’d want to capture.
And then I remembered the closing chapter to the autobiography to the memoir he wrote for my siblings and me (“The Little Round Man Who Goes Boom”). I printed out the chapter for everyone who attended his end-of-life celebration in May 2006. I hadn’t looked at it since that time. Looking at it now with the benefit of more than a decade to put my thoughts and feelings into perspective, I find it astonishing that a man who sometimes seemed so well-defended and sure of himself was able to see his strengths and weaknesses so clearly, and to laugh at himself and his foibles. [My friends will see a lot of him in me, too. The gift that keeps on giving.] I couldn’t possibly paint a better picture of him than he did himself.
So here goes:
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What is it that made Daddy Daddy? That’s easy: compulsive behavior and jokes, jokes, jokes. Everyone appreciates a good joke, and I hope that most of the ones I told were good, but it’s a little harder to figure out why Daddy spent so much effort arranging those cigarette butts in the ash-tray into such neat stacks, why it was so important for him to have all the folded socks in his sock drawer pointed the same way, and why the knife and fork had to be lined up precisely with the edge of the napkin (and that with the edge of the table). How could anyone so full of imperfections himself be so eager to leap on the misprints and errors of others?
In 1971 the physician that gave me my Agency physical exam examined me thoroughly, then spent about five minutes conscientiously studying my file. He looked up and said, “I see you’re a balloonist, and a diver, and a demolitionist. Just what is it about these dangerous things that attracts you?” I replied that it was a popular misconception that these things were dangerous, and that actually this sort of work attracted me because it involved no-frills equipment of the highest quality, precisely-designed and carefully made to do exactly what was needed. For illustration, I said that ordinary consumer products were shoddy compared to the uniformity and reliability of demolition materials.
Anyway, he established that I was particular about having things just so and finally went down the list in the “Miscellaneous” section of the medical form where it asks for yeses or noes about fits, fainting, miscarriage, sleep disturbances, and so on. He checked all the “noes” except one: triumphantly he placed an artistic check-mark by the “yes” on Neuropsychiatric Anomalies! A “yes” mark required an explanation in the Remarks section and, with a bold flourish and unconcealed satisfaction, he wrote “Devout and professed compulsive perfectionist!”
I was upset by this and asked him whether it wasn’t a harsh judgment. “Oh, no,” he said. “It is exactly the kind of neurosis you need in your work. Our job is to be sure that you have the right neuroses for the job. This has great survival value in your work.” I argued that this was not going to be all that obvious to anyone reading the form without considering the note in its proper context, but he chuckled and let it stand.
How nice to have a sock drawer, because it wasn’t until I got married that I did! And having one, why not treat it nice, arrange it as beautifully as can be and be proud? With so many aspects of my life beyond my control, why not do as good a job as possible on these aspects which can be controlled?
Mainly, I believe my neurotic compulsiveness created the greatest conflicts when I tried to make things more efficient and logical around home. Why store the Wheaties, the candles, and the bourbon together? Smoking is a nasty enough habit, I admit: why not at least have the cigarette butts over on one side of the ash-tray so you don’t start them smoldering with the fire from your present cigarette?
As far as picking on misspellings and grammatical errors, generally I pick at those who should know better or who hold themselves up as authorities in those areas. I don’t make a big thing over a dangling participle unless it’s funny: the humor is the thing. After all, I have been able to find vulnerabilities that some others might overlook.
And, yes, the continuous humor! The endless stream of jokes, limericks, the exaggeration and the understatement, the sardonic aside. All of that was just an attempt to extract a smile, to win approval or attention, to be one of the boys, to show that I shared their interests (usually sex) in the subjects of the jokes, and to be remembered; and, yes, to try to coax others to compete with me in my game of knowing the most jokes, telling them better, and being able to retrieve them on demand from a memory that only failed me in important matters. And, finally, to make someone happy by sharing with them something that I found clever, new, and entertaining.
In other words, for the same reason we take our kids to the circus. And for the same reason that Mother dragged me through that terrifying forest of knees each Christmas during the Depression to show me the electric trains in the department stores.
So now, thank you for letting me drag you through my knee-forest, for having made you sit through my circus. If the tigers really turned out to be pussy-cats, if the acrobats didn’t fly very high or very far, and if the clowns weren’t as funny, you must remember it was only a one-man show, just a little reprise of something originally much grander.
I guess you had to be there.
(John A. Ward, Jr., 1927-2006)