Since I am revising my new memoir — Now, From Antiquity: How to Survive the Death of a Father — I’ve decided to bring you a section. This is chapter four, with the subtitle of:
Tibetan Prayer Flags
“I still remember my great-great grandparents who spoke with English accents,” said my father who at that time – five years before his death – was ninety-three years old.
His deep even voice rode the breeze. “They lived around the corner from us. In the summer, they sold snow cones. They always had plenty for me and my friends. My favorite flavor was lime,” my father paused.
We sat by the Delaware River, the same river he swam in as a boy, and talked. Then he said, “I still remember them scraping the ice.”
As I write this more than four years and some months after my father’s death, I take a moment to imagine old people with English accents sitting on the sidewalk in a rowhome neighborhood in the City as they chopped ice.
They may have been sitting on chairs on the sidewalk as they scraped the ice over big steel buckets. The buckets might have been a silvery gray, the color of metal. A drop of water may have dripped down the side as the cold bucket sweated against the hot pavement.
The kids – my father and his moon-faced friends – would have oohed and aahed when my great-great-great grandparents brought out the brightly colored syrups in large jars. My father as a boy would have held out his cone and without asking what flavor he wanted – because he came every week in the summer, and she knew what his favorite flavor was – his great-great grandmother would have smiled widely and squirted lime syrup on the rounded top of his chipped ice on his paper snow cone cup that was tapered into a cone at the bottom
Or maybe she would have asked (in an English accent), “Lime again – what do we have here – a little Limey?” and then rolled her eyes. But when he said yes and smiled (as if she held the key to his happiness), she would have smiled too – because he was family, her flesh and blood, her door to the future.
Then he would have smiled his magical smile, that lit up his face and erased his crossed eyes. When my father was eight, a botched operation to correct his cross eyes blinded him in one-eye for life. But that might have been in the future then. My father may still have been seven, with eyes that were crossed. But he could still see out of both. When he stared down, he saw the bright unnatural shade of yellow green seeping into the newly shaved pieces of ice scooped into a snow cone by his great-great grandmother who had lived in England.
As I write this in the present moment of 2021, I can feel this is my bones. I know his great-great grandmother with the English accent would have known my father’s choice flavor of snow cone, because he was her favorite. How could he not be – with his chubby rosy cheeks and his locks of blond hair that might have been just like hers. I have the same blond wavy hair as my father. It is a genetic trait that came through him from somewhere.
I can feel this as I write – more than four years and some months after my father’s death – because I know that his ancestors are my ancestors. This is how it works. But I don’t know that I ever really thought about this when my father was living.
About five years before he died, my father and I sat next to the Delaware River in a small historic town in Pennsylvania called Bristol – about a twenty-minute drive from Levittown. The sky was blue. Here and there white wisps of clouds made gashes in the blue above the flowing muddy brown river in front of us.
We brought our own folding chairs in the trunk of my red car. Jean – who I referred to as his lady friend although he began referring to her as “just a friend” — was sitting on the folding chair to my right. I sat in the middle next to my father.
When we first arrived and were deciding where to sit, Jean had insisted that I should sit in the middle next to my father.
“You only have one father,’ she said. This is her way of telling me that I should talk to him now while I still could. I offered the middle seat to her, but she insisted that I should take it, repeating what she had said about my father. Grateful for her acknowledgement of my place in my place in his life, I sat in the middle, next to my one father.
After I put my chair in the middle and sat down on the sturdy navy canvass seat, I looked down at Jean. Her long white hair fell over her thick navy sweater. She looked back at me with a meaningful smile. Her blue eyes were set in her small oval crinkled face with a pointed chin. The irises of her eyes were cornflower blue – not too light and not too dark. I smiled back and took a moment to inhabit this moment with its windswept sky over the large rocks before the river which were square as if they had been hewn from a quarry. To the right of that the boat dock jutted into the brown river. I could tell from its bumpy surface, that the river had fast-moving currents.
I must have known then that the moment with my father sitting beside me would not last forever. It was temporary like everything else. If I had thought about that too much, though, the moment would have vanished. Moments tend to lead forward to another moment and eventually to what we think of as the future but what is really another present moment. The present moment also leads back to previous present moments, to history, to antiquity — to the picture of the Parthenon which was on the apartment wall in my father’s childhood in his family’s home in the the mostly English and Irish immigrant rowhome neighborhood of Fishtown in Philadelphia — which was once a present moment.
I recognize now, more than four years after my father’s death, that my father’s great-great grandmother and great-great grandfather with the freshly made snow cones and the English accents are my link to antiquity. As I write this in the present moment of 2021 in my office in the back of the house, I can see the leafy trees in our back yard through the screen in my back window. We have three fast-growing Hazelnut trees that tower over the tall wooden fence to my left where our violin-playing neighbors live.
Through the back window, I can see the colorful Tibetan Prayer Flags that are strung on our side of the more than six feet tall wooden fence. Inside my window on the windowsill, a large rosemary bush grows. Above that, at the top of the deep painted white wooden indentation for the window, are a string of smaller Tibetan Prayer Flags in the same colors and designs as the outside flags. Inside, the three-inch-deep squares of deep sky blue, stark white, chili pepper red, bright yellow and forest green quiver slightly inside from the air from the outside coming through the screen. A fan set on low inside my office circulates the air.
Tibetan prayer flags are strung – especially high in the mountains often near Buddhist meditation retreats – to spread the message of wisdom, strength, compassion, and peace. Tibetan Buddhists believe that the prayers, of compassion and goodwill to all, are spread through the wind. The five colors of the Tibetan Prayer Flags represent the five directions (center as well as west, south, north, and east). The flags are also said to represent the five wisdoms of harmony, perfect wisdom, compassion, wisdom of sight, and kindness.
Tibetan Prayer Flags have spread in popularity. I often see them hanging from fences and front porches in the City. Even people who are not Tibetan Buddhists stop to admire the colorful and tranquil flags flapping in the breeze. They are so beautiful that they make you slow down and appreciate the moment.
As I sit writing, I imagine that the breath of antiquity, and the breath of my great-great great grandmother and grandfather have flowed into the eons comingling with the new oxygen produced by the leafy plants that I have planted. The combined strands of oxygen now fill my lungs. I inhale slowly. As I exhale, I imagine that the air, including the oxygen emitted from the leaves of weeds, lifts into the breezes that raise the colorful Tibetan Prayer flags and spreads the message of compassion to the world. In return I inhale and exhale compassion adding my breath to the flow. This means that I am inhaling the breath that I took with my father and Jean more than four years ago as we sat by the river. In that way, the moment still exists for me.
My father and I and my mother – and then Jean – had been coming to this river walk in Bristol for as long as I could remember. Behind us a large parking lot stretched behind the main street that was a shopping district. A bandstand was off to the left-hand side, past my father. Currently it was empty. On weekend evenings, the bandstand was filled with musicians who played varying types of music, including my father’s favorite, big band music. When he and my mother used to tell me about going, I imagined them dancing under the stars. Now, however, as my father has become old and frail it was enough for him to sit by the river and breath in the breezes.
Also, to the left of us, behind the bandstand at the end of the street, at the end of the commercial district, new condominiums were under construction. Jean was keen about keeping up with the progress of the construction. The industrial plant in which my father worked swing shift for nearly forty years was just down river and around the bend. It was warm for March. An early spring breeze came from the river. The air was cool but balmy. It hinted at warmer days that were coming. The breeze came off the river. It smelled muddy and wet. It smelled like water. I remembered paddling a canoe down this river in this exact spot with my father when I was a child.
As we were talking, a speedboat sped by. The small waves that the speedboat created lapped the cement foundations of the boat dock about thirty feet in front of us. We listened to the suck of the small waves. This was the same river that flows past Philadelphia between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The city of Camden, in New Jersey, is on the opposite side of the river from Philadelphia.
“I remember swimming in this river when I was a boy,” said my father.
I couldn’t see his eyes because he had put his large dark plastic glass over his regular glasses. But the tone in his voice sounded almost wistful. His voice sounded like he would have a faraway look in his eyes or maybe in his one good eye. “The old neighborhood in the City is that way” — he pointed to the right — “about twenty minutes by car on the new highway.”
I nodded. The “new” highway he was referring to was I-95. When I was a child, and we had taken it on vacations, often with my father sleeping in the back of the station wagon after working his final nightshift for a week. The interstate highway stretched from Florida to Maine.
It was the fastest way to get to Center City Philadelphia from Levittown and there was an exit that went to my father’s old neighborhood of Fishtown about ten minutes before the exit to Center City. I took the Pennsylvania Turnpike back and forth from my home in the Northwest section of Philadelphia because the Turnpike was closer to me. Interstate 95 was built when my father was a boy, so it was still new in the mind of this man who at that time was over ninety.
“My friends and I swam way far out. It’s a good thing we were strong swimmers. Fortunately, the currents or the undertows never got any of us. I remember that more than a few guys we didn’t know that well drowned in the river.” My father turned and regarded me for a moment.
Bright sun glinted off his dark glasses. I shivered and pulled up the zipper on my blue and green nylon windbreaker. It wasn’t cold but I found the subtext of his words chilling. If fate had been different, if my father had drowned, everything would have turned out differently. For starters, I wouldn’t be here. As he kept his head turned, the sun glinted off his large dark glasses.
I nodded my head and said, “that is good.”
I still couldn’t imagine the world without him.
“I was with my friend Shorty. You’ve heard me talk about Shorty from the old neighborhood. He was my best man when I married your mother. Even then when we were in our twenties, he was going bald.”
I nodded, remembering the old black and white photograph of Shorty standing close to a head shorter than my father with his broad shoulders. My father looked even taller than he was. His blond curly hair that grew upwards on his head – like mine did when it was short – and made him look taller.
“I remember you talking about Shorty,” I said to him. A balmy breeze caressed my cheek. The breeze smelled like river – like a watery mix of past and present. “You said that a policeman in the old neighborhood told Shorty that he had to give up drinking and driving, so he gave up driving.”
My father smiled in a way that I could tell that he was happy that I remembered his past.
“That’s right. Shorty got into a few car accidents and then he chose not to drive again, but he kept on drinking,” my father said.
“We could look him up when we go back to the old neighborhood,” said Jean.
“With all the drinking that he did, I suspect he died a long time ago,” said my father flatly.
He was silent then and so was Jean.
A moment later he added, “But I do want to go back to the old neighborhood. Maybe you can drive.”
“As long as my kids never find out,” retorted Jean, in her sharp high voice, from the other side of me.
My father’s smile spread to me. Jean was always mentioning the things she could never tell her adult children about – including day trips that she and my father took to their old neighborhoods of Fishtown and the neighborhood where she grew up. Port Richmond is a Philadelphia neighborhood right next to Fishtown. Her adult children would have been concerned that she was taking too long of a trip. Afterall, going to the City was a half hour drive – about twenty-seven minutes longer than if she went to the nearest supermarket. Plus, they would have been horrified if they knew that their mother went to the City. They lived conventional lives – some might go as far as to call their lives provincial – in the suburbs. All they knew about the nearby City was what they saw on the local news – that it was crime ridden.
Today, Port Richmond is a working-class rowhome neighborhood that is being gentrified – like Fishtown but at a slower pace. That is to say that a large part of it has remained a row-home working class community. When Jean was growing up, though, Port Richmond was quite different. Jean told Barbara and me about growing up on a farm and the general store that her mother ran.
Perhaps it is human nature to remember goodness. Still as I write this more than four years after my father’s death, I wonder. Will I ever miss my old neighborhood? Would I make secret trips there – not forbidden to my children since I never had children but forbidden perhaps to myself. Is it possible to want to return to a place that I fled from?
“I would like to go back to the old neighborhood again,” said my father softly as he looked out at the river. “I’d like to visit my parents’ graves again in the Palmer Cemetery in the old neighborhood. The weeds were overgrown when we went there before, but I bet I could find their graves again. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about my parents.”
I was moved when my father said this, but I was surprised also. I never met his parents, since they died before I was born. The fact that he was so attached to them seemed like a wall between us. It was a familial attachment that we didn’t share. But they are my grandparents, my great grandparents, my great-great grandparents, and my great-great-great grandparents. They are important to me in ways that I wouldn’t begin to consider until after my father’s death. They are my blood line, my connection to antiquity.
“I’d like to go to my old haunts in Port Richmond,” added Jean. “Maybe we could have lunch there. I bet they have some of the best Polish food around.”
I smiled and nodded at the thought of Polish food – pierogis, strudel, cabbage rolls, bagels which originated in Poland as a special Polish bread and then spread through Jewish communities. As I sit writing this, more than four years after my father’s death, I reflect that so many ethnic memories and traditions hinge on food. I wonder if some enterprising person has created Polish vegan food. If it hasn’t yet been created, then it soon will be. There are so many vegan alternatives to traditional foods. Soon tradition will be in the future.
Sitting next to my father by the river, a breeze blew from the direction of the water. Another speedboat went by leaving breezes in its frothy wake. The breezes smelled extra watery. They smelled like mud banks, where mysterious creatures grew. They smelled like dried mud fossils if they were soaked in water until they became mud again. The scent made me believe that humans could reverse time.
“Do you remember the two off us canoeing in the river when I was a kid?”
I looked toward the narrow, uninhabited island siting in the middle of the wide river, to the left of us. When I was a child, the island piqued my curiosity. I had wondered who lived there — if anyone. I had wondered if there were castaways like Gilligan’s Island, the popular television sitcom I grew up watching.
“I’m surprised that you remember the two of us canoeing in the river,” replied my father. “You were so young.”
“I wasn’t that young. I was about twelve,” I replied. “I was old enough to remember things. Besides, how could I not remember,” I continued. “Those trips with you were important to me. They shaped the way I see the world.”
“Humph,” replied my father. He sounded checked out.
If he wasn’t wearing his large dark glasses that he had placed over his clear bifocals with the silver rims, I probably would see what my mother used to call his “fisheye” – meaning that he was checked out or about to check out by ignoring everything around him. He might have been thinking about my political views that he didn’t agree with. He created me. Did that mean he created my political views also?
We were sitting by the river in 2013, the year after the 2012 presidential election when President Obama was elected to a second term over the former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney. My father didn’t say who he voted for. But by that time, he had already swung to the right with the help of the conservative news. The country wasn’t as politically divided then as it was four years later when Trump was elected in 2016, but it was getting there. After the 2012 election, I could tell on the phone by the glum tone in my father’s voice that he was depressed for a few days. But then he went back to being happy at the small things in life such as the Senior Special at the diner. He decided to cope with the election results by not mentioning the election again.
When we were sitting by the river, I decided to try again to get him to remember our trips down the river when I was a child.
“Of course, I remember our trips down the river, Dad. Do you remember trailing our hands next to the canoe and feeling how cool the brown river water was next to the metal canoe? Things were slower in those days. It felt like a scene out of Huckleberry Finn.”
My father smiled and then spoke:
“Things were slower then. There weren’t so many speedboats – maybe there weren’t any yet – but there were freighters. Remember the waves they made? Our canoe would go up and down on them. Sometimes, the waves were so strong that they would turn our canoe around in a different direction.”
“I remember,” I say as I think back to my childhood. But going in the wrong direction was the last thing that I was remembering.
I was remembering the rusty bottom of a ship – or the bottom that I could see — where the rusty red hull cut through the brown river. The ripples would turn into waves, rocking the canoe, tossing it to and fro, turning it into a new direction. Life was like that. A simple event – or wave – could send you in a direction you never expected to go.
I breathed in and out. I was content with the moment. My father and I might be remembering different parts of the same day when I was a child, and we went canoeing on the river in front of us. But we were remembering the same day. In this way, our memories made us whole.
When I was sitting next to the river with my father and Jean, it wouldn’t have even occurred to me to feel out of place, a sense of not belonging, to feel like I did during much of my youth when I was bullied for being different. I had a place after all. I was with my elderly father. I belonged to him, just as I belonged to my ancestors. In accepting the present moment, I also belonged. I belonged to the breezes, to the blue sky, to the muddy river. I belonged to antiquity, and I belonged to eternity.
As I sit writing this, four years and some months after my father’s death, I reflect that memory may get keener as it slips away. The day that we sat by the river, my father’s life and his memories were slipping away. Even though I refused to acknowledge that my father would die, I must have known it in my bones. I didn’t think about it. But I must have known that all life is temporary because I accepted the present moment that day when I was sitting by the river with my father and Jean.
As I sit in my home office and write, it is later in the day. It is hotter – more than ninety degrees Fahrenheit – and I am still a bit sweaty from my forty-five-minute walk earlier. I have closed my window – where I can still see the leafy hickory trees outside. The air conditioner hums from the side window in my office where the window unit hangs two stories above our driveway.
As I sit writing, I reflect on my youth – when I was about twelve – when my father and I spent hours gazing up at the windswept blue sky and at the reflection of our paddles in the brownish water.
I watched my father and learned to paddle away from the wake of the larger boats. My father was not a big talker – especially when we went canoeing. Occasionally, he would point when he wanted me to see something, like a large boat in the distance, or an occasional rare bird such as the time we saw a “Fish Hawk” which is the local name for an osprey that must have flown inland to the river from the sea and landed on a barren tree trunk jutting from the marsh near the riverbanks. I reflect that maybe that was an early Buddhist experience as I sat silently in that canoe with my father. We breathed in and out. I learned to be silent and to let the world come to me.
Following are some links to pieces that lead up to my new memoir:
To learn more about my latest published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:
The Unicorn, The Mystery now available from Adelaide Books — #amreading #FaithfullyLGBT
Janet Mason, author 