(for Father’s Day 2003)
by Jerome du Bois
In the six-plus years since my father died he’s been schooling me in the meanings of the heart and the hand, or “Why are we here?” and “Where are we going?” -- two of Gauguin’s famous three questions.
Oh, those. Look, we’re busy. Why bother asking? Because we’re busy. We get up and do it again, don’t we, every day into the everyday, but why? And I’ve wondered, especially in the last two years, what difference will it ever make, if I keep trying to scratch my tiny arc on the huge black moving wall of history?
My father was Alan du Bois, a name largely unknown among the suits in town and instantly familiar to scores of graduates of the three main Arizona universities. He was an educational philanthropist. In 1967 he and his uncle Ernest turned his uncle’s stock market gains into the E. Blois du Bois Foundation. For almost thirty years he and they gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in renewable grants to thousands of Arizona college students. (They still do.) And my dad personally interviewed many of these young men and women.
You can see his name, and my mother’s (Marjorie), cast in bronze over here, etched in glass over there; and yes, the Student Center at NAU is named after him. But he lived quietly. “I don’t make speeches,” he would say as he was handed another award. “I write checks.” He was one of those about whom people say, “He was devoted to the cause of education.”
“Horse manure,” he whispers in my ear now. (My old man was a WWII Marine Corporal, Sixth Division, Pacific Theater. ) He was motivated -- no, okay, I’ll tell ‘em -- he was deeply moved -- by hearts on fire, by notions tumbling ass-over-elbows out of strong, fevered minds, by nervous electric fingers sketching plans in the air -- but the “cause of education?” That’s a limp hook to hang a life on.
He was here, he got up and did it again, because he served actual human efforts, not abstractions, which are far older than American education, such as the sovereignty of the person, material progress, science, and oh, the books, the books, the books! (Our family was American because our ancestors, two brothers, were persecuted Huguenots -- French Protestants -- who escaped to Rye, New York, in 1650.)
He was here to give a boost to the ones who strain forward, the scrappy, impatient ones with their glasses askew. I think he met them personally to bear witness to the hard-won lines in foreheads too young to bear them. He always put perseverance over GPA. He honored bitten nails and library eyes far above Nordstrom suits and fawning patter. Meeting them, he told me once in a rare bit of poetry, was “like looking at the headlights of the future.”
He asked them, “Why are you here?” and “Where are you going?” And they told him they wanted to make better artificial limbs, hunt down new molecules, rescue Latin from obscurity, restructure child protection, make really teensy technology, become a doctor or a forest ranger, or study the microscopic creatures hiding in the hindguts of termites.
And right here is where the heart meets the hand in my father’s very person, and I see the tiny arc of him, barely visible on the Arizona map, explode. Its shockwave staggers me -- the enormous energy he unleashed, like slow chain lightning, by lifting so many small burdens, so quietly and so often. Multiply the people above by the hundreds, add the ones they influenced, and like so many expanding spheres, or like some huge electric web --
“Alright already,” my father cuts in. “Sheesh. They get the point. But what about your heart, Jerry? Why are you here?”
I tell him, because I know.
“And where do you think you’re going?”
And I tell him because, amazingly, I know.
“And what do you hope to accomplish by this piece you’ve written about us? Which really went overboard, by the way.”
Thanks a lot, Dad.
“So bring it home, Jerome.”
My hope? That you, dear reader, will see that there need be no such thing as an ordinary woman, a mediocre man, an everyday life. The touch of your finger shudders the world.
“Not bad. Well, I have to go, but we’ll be talking, son. Water my tomatoes, okay?”
I don’t have to, Dad; they’re flourishing.
Posted by Jerome at June 15, 2003 08:03 AM