Father’s Day anthems

Published : 20 June 2011, 01:00 PM
Updated : 20 June 2011, 01:00 PM

Sometimes, when I have difficulty writing, I just start moving the pencil with the conviction that my thoughts will eventually coalesce into an article. I have been taught that this is the best way to tackle a writer's block. In much the same way, in my family's history, when times have become difficult, we keep struggling ahead in the conviction that our struggles will coalesce into a cohesive, meaningful future for our children — the North Star that guides our actions. This week, as my latest job interview lead nowhere and dismal financial news threatened the joy of this Father's Day, I remembered the obstacles that my father and grandfathers had to face to build their legacies. I wondered if my own legacy would ever measure up.

This week, my daughter graduated from High School, and at the ceremony, I was moved that she was one of the few to place her hand over her heart at the singing of our national anthem. For those of you who've never tackled its complexities, let me enlighten you: It was written by a man, taken prisoner by the British during the War of 1812. It celebrated the fact that the American flag, which he could see through his prison window continued to wave despite the attack. It celebrates the persistence of that "Star Spangled Banner", and the "free and brave" people who rally to it. It is an anthem that reminds us Americans, that, as long as free and brave (men) stand, those dark times will pass, and the banner of our liberty will survive.

As reassuring as that may be on some great, geopolitical scale, and despite the pride that it inspired in me, I guess I wasn't feeling very free or brave as the tuition bills from the college my daughter was to attend troubled my thoughts.

When one's children are young, and the cable bill hasn't been paid, your songs and stories are worth all the Nintedo DX's and Wii's on earth. Little children will listen to your bad poetry and love your ill-tuned songs. In their childhood, little ones have an intuitive sense that a father's expressions are from the heart, and represent the best that he can offer. Small gifts can be made more meaningful by creating extravagant scavenger hunts, leading the child from place to place by clues full of rhymes and innuendoes. With small children, one doesn't have to go to a restaurant for a treat; a father with little disposable income can feed his children at home and take his kids out for ice cream afterwards.

I always dreamed of being a writer, and knew that if I were to compromise this dream, it would signal to my children that they should, likewise, compromise their dreams. I have worked at many different jobs, and involved myself in the world of a not-for-profit corporation because it allowed me to include my children in what I did, and to use my life work to make the world a better place for them. I also wanted to prove to my children that persistence along one's chosen path would eventually be rewarded, if only the dreamer stayed the course.

I have been accused in these very pages by some of you, my dear readers, of being a tree-hugger. I proudly admit it. This weekend, on Father's Day, I returned to Long Island New York. I am now sitting at my father's computer (I didn't think AOL even existed anymore!). I think I'm actually on a dial-up connection! Downstairs, my dad is reading his Father's Day cards aloud; "You're like a big wise tree. You know all the answers because you've been growing for a long, long time."

From the window in the upstairs room where this old computer churns out my words, I look out and notice an old oak. This house sits on the site of my grandfather's garden, which was, back in his day, an empty lot. My father built this house so that they could be close to my Apu (Mom's father) when his health was failing and he was worried about who was going to take care of his wife of sixty years. The enormous oak that I see from the window is the same tree that once, with its twin, was spanned by two boards which anchored a homemade swing set that Apu rigged from a wooden slat and some rope.

My grandfather was a wonderful doctor, but a very poor carpenter. The splinters we got from sitting on those swings made the afternoon snacktime very difficult to sit politely through.

This Father's Day, I look out at those oaks, those two witnesses to nearly 50 years of my life. My grandfathers' legacies, on both sides of the family, are so evident. My grandfathers left us trees, land, and a whole new country. Their immigrant's courage, vision and work ethic allowed us to establish ourselves. They sacrificed everything to come to America, and they had the patriotism of those who truly understood the world, and for whom America had been a conscious choice. To America's credit, that choice, a single generation later, had become my birthright.

In my family, a total of six people — my paternal grandparents, and my mother and her family of four, had all emigrated to the United States by 1951. Sixty years later, that small group had yielded a total of 53 descendants (and several on the way). My grandfather's house next door is still in the family. My sister bought it from my brother. Of my parent's grandchildren, half of them can claim that home as the first place they ever lived.

This Father's Day, I think about the legacy that those generations were able to leave us, and all that my father has been able to do to support me. Unlike my grandfather, my dad is a talented carpenter. It is his hobby. He is a first-generation college graduate who became a college president. The land he purchased in the Adirondack Mountains of New York has become the family retreat, acreage that will be cared for and maintained for generations to come. It is his hard work which allowed me to pursue my dreams.

My dad, a great student of American history often quoted John Adams to describe his ambitions for me:

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

I am the product of a long line of successful fathers, heroes all to me. Each was able, in some way, to pass on a wonderful legacy to the next generation. And so I wonder, will I ever be able to add to that legacy? Will I be able to increase the blessings of future generations? Have I been a father worthy of the lineage?

I look at my son, who is at that age where boys grow visibly, literally overnight. He has clearly inherited my genes — my looks, my energy level. But we live in a place where the educational system cannot measure up to the one I received growing up. I have been forced to homeschool him in order to give him what I deemed to be an adequate preparation for college and beyond. If I am the painter, the poet, the musician or the potter, what is left for my son to become?

I live by words, the most transient of things. Words are vulnerable to translation, levels of literacy, and the odd status of intellectual property in this world. I wonder what trees my words can possibly plant in the garden of my future generations.

So, on this Father's Day, I'm wracked with doubts. I have finally become a published author, and my writing has been solicited more in the past year than ever, and yet I've never been so acutely aware of my unemploy-ability. I know that my grandfathers both lost their fortunes, one to War, and the other to the Great Depression, and they both had to start over. Neither was doing too well at my age. Both managed to leave their legacies. I mustn't worry.

This morning, I got my Father's Day gifts from my children. Among them, I got heartfelt poetry, a gift certificate to an ice cream parlour, an illustrated version of a story I'd told to my daughter nearly 20 years ago, and Father's Day card that required an elaborate scavenger hunt to find. The same treasures I'd taught my children to value they had returned to me with interest.

This evening, I turned to the Bangladeshi National Anthem.

Your National Anthem mentions trees, a testimony to permanence, as seasons pass. I imagine that these are comforting images to your people that have known some cruel seasons. I imagine that the mango-groves mentioned in the hymn are a homage to the generations that cultivated those trees, and I can picture banyan trees, magnificent plants with many roots cast into the earth, but somehow unified. Your anthem reminds me that each of us longs, for the sake of our children, to leave our national landscape a little more golden.

Please forgive me if, because I am reading your National Anthem in translation, I am getting a false impression of the meaning of the words, but I feel your Bangladeshi words have a message for me as I struggle with my ability to provide a golden land for my American children. Your hymn reminds me that while a golden land and the legacy of its nature is important, it emphasises that the heartfelt appreciation of the gifts is, itself, a legacy worth passing along.

Your anthem reassures me, Bangladesh.

I am not yet capable of adding a square foot to my children's inheritance. I am unable to provide them the best education money can buy. Still, at least I have raised children, who by their gifts, have proven that they have hearts capable of resonating like a flute when they glance toward the sky, to appreciate the perfume of a flower-spangled grove, or to drink in the words of their ancestors as nectar to their ears.

In that I may venture to claim that I have raised them to be very… Bangladeshi.

God Bless you all. Happy Father's Day.

—————————-
Frank Domenico Cipriani writes a weekly column in the Riverside Signal called "You Think What You Think And I'll Think What I Know." He is also the founder and CEO of The Gatherer Institute — a not-for-profit public charity dedicated to promoting respect for the environment and empowering individuals to become self-taught and self-sufficient. His most recent book, "Learning Little Hawk's Way of Storytelling", is scheduled to be released by Findhorn Press in May of 2011.