Out Of The Old Black Bag
OUT OF THE OLD BLACK BAG
My Old Man: “Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices”
Musical Accompaniment: “Leader of the Band” by Dan Fogelberg
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
— James Baldwin (1924-1987), American author and activist who wrote passionately on the subject of race in our country. He grew up in Harlem, New York and was inspired by the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.
I had absolutely no awareness as I was running the Detroit Marathon in October, 2017 (read “Strange Magic in Motown”) through an impoverished part of the Motor City called Paradise Valley that the literary champion Robert Hayden, who spent an emotionally traumatic childhood in foster care in that neighborhood, would write the poem that would become not only one of my dear favorites, but an instrument of personal redemption as well.
Robert Hayden, born Asa Bundy Sheffey, was so severely nearsighted that he refrained from playing sports. Fortunately for the sake of myself and many others, he became an avid reader and writer.
Hayden was indeed a favorite of the literary circles; he was so much revered that he became America’s first African-American Poet Laureate. His simple poem, “Those Winter Sundays,” describes my old man better than I, his oldest son, would ever be capable of:
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
The youngest son of Hungarian immigrants, my old man “Rocky” (an appropriate moniker since he had quite a temper and was intolerant of any and all “bullshit”) lost his father in essence at a very early age due the incapacitating depression acquired from a lifetime of supporting the large family characteristic of that time period by working 7 days a week in the anthracite coal mines of northeastern Pennsylvania. Because he grew up emotionally fatherless, Rocky compensated by “being everything” to his wife and 2 sons. I vividly remember him shoveling snow at the crack of dawn with hands heavily calloused by shoveling chemicals into a centrifuge in the process of making vitamins 6 days a week. I was a vitamin-maker’s son (rather than a cabinet-maker’s son like the “leader of the band”). The vitamins were called “Zestabs”. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
I was about 9 years old when my mother insidiously developed the symptoms of dementia characteristic of the neurodegenerative disorder which inevitably led to her institutionalization. By the time the diagnosis was made 6 years later, the family had only been held together by a thread — by Rocky’s superhuman survival instincts and efforts.
I marveled that he would awake at 5 AM and make us breakfast, work a physically demanding job all day, and make us supper every night (sometimes Hungarian delicacies) before helping us with our high school homework or plodding through the laundry before the days of automation. The devoutly religious Hungarians placed their trust and hope in every word of the Bible:
“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame….” (Romans 5: 3-5 English Standard Version)
However, at one dire point the bank threatened to take away our home to pay for medical expenses. Being teenagers, we argued with him and insulted him when he cried because “we were not a normal family.” I constantly only felt sorry for myself. No one ever thanked him.
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
OF LOVE’S AUSTERE AND LONELY OFFICES?
The extreme stress took its toll and Rocky died at the age of 53, never seeing his vitamin-maker’s son graduate from medical school or the birth of his 7 grandchildren. But like the song, I always felt that his “blood runs through my instruments and his song is in my soul.” I tried to practice medicine with the compassion that I unwittingly and subconsciously learned from him through the love and devotion he showed to his wife and sons and all the world.
I finally realized that the memories that tormented me the most were “the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” I was finally able, after a lifetime of self-pity and self-reproach, to understand the universality of suffering and its binding ties, that childhood is “boot camp” for a lifetime of challenges, and that it is never, never wise to delay saying thank you to those who love you.
I think nobody ever captured the soul of the poem better than African-America writer Bianca Vivion Brooks:
I read the poem and at once found myself engrossed in my own memory. I, too, recalled the coldness of my childhood home and the “austere and lonely offices” of my father’s love.
In his verses, Hayden made me feel seen. The poem provided a kind of relief, to know that my childhood was not a complete anomaly, and that others had grown up in similar spaces where love was convoluted by anger and loneliness. That day Robert Hayden became my favorite poet.
However, she concludes with this rhetorical question:
Is it enough to look like the artist if you do not recognize yourself in the art?
Father’s Day, 1955 — or maybe it was Christmas! They were the very best of days and I had absolutely no awareness of that at the time.
Thank you, Rocky! Happy Father’s Day from all of us — including your grandchildren! It is never too late to try to repay superhuman love.
Enjoy all of Dr. Kovatch’s previous essays on The PediaBlog here and here.
source http://www.thepediablog.com/2022/06/16/out-of-the-old-black-bag-25/
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