Other fields

I cannot imagine my father as a child.

Even in the few photos I ever saw of the man as boy, snapshots taken during what might have been called a childhood, he appears much the same: focused, driven, serious. Sitting in portrait for school, waiting for the flash of light and the man to say “next,” so that he might return to more important things. Study. Worship. The small comforts of food and a restless mind.

Working. Always working. Hammering away at the books, preparing for another life.

The world he came from seemed infinitely strange and alien to me, when I was a boy. And how could I have understood it? The difference was more than a matter of context; it was a collision of time and space for which I had no referent. Mine was a life in green — fields and lawns ringed with great lush trees. Yards to run across and fall upon and transform into cathedrals of sport and combat. Long walks to school through quiet streets, reverie broken only by birdsong and the sudden rush and kinetic violence of older children on wheels, digging deep for the extra burst of speed that would propel them around the obstacles and through fragrant air to finish lines real and imagined.

Looking back, I can only think of how alien he must have felt within it. Forever present in suit and tie, locked in the trappings of a professional life – an American life – he had fought for decades to make possible, only to find himself unable to escape. Or, at the least, unable to find himself comfortable.

I wonder if he ever really felt at home.

The world he had known was gray. Concrete. Pavement and sawdust, crumbling plaster and echoing stairwells. The Bronx of those days was a place of collision, of refugees and dreamers from eastern Europe fleeing to a new world. It must have seemed an impossible place, to so many of them — vast and crowded, scaled high and massive in a way that defied imagination.

(I think of my father’s father, a hundred years ago, standing on the boat. His first glimpses of the Statue, and the mammoth canyons of brick and glass that lay on the island beyond. How he must have thought of his own childhood – that far-away, long-ago Romanian village – and realized that even as a child, even when he dreamed of great things, he had never dreamed real a place like this.)

And yet: so much of their world came with them. They brought family, or faith and built family with those who shared it. They brought traditions and molded them to fit this new life. They started anew, built businesses and communities, met and married and gave birth to a new generation. A first generation, to bear their names and carry the infinite burden of culture and memory forward in this place.

I imagine my father as a child, standing astride two worlds. One, the world of his parents: thick with strange tongues and solemn ceremony, dizzy with hope and terrified of change. The other, New York itself — pure sensory overload of cultures colliding and reforming into something new, dynamic, troubled and explosive with possibility. A world of fine arts and subtle flavors, where a man could make himself into anything his talents allowed.

(He had ambition. To grow beyond his roots, and explore a sensual and intellectual world his own family would never understand. I can only imagine how vague and tantalizing that idea must have seemed. I can only envy the restless mind and fierce intellect and unflinching determination that allowed him to pursue it.)

My father, as a boy, studied. It was as if his entire life before he entered college passed with the sole purpose of enabling him to take that next step. But he did. He graduated first in his class. Earned perfect scores on his college boards. Won a full scholarship to a world-class university. And began to leave his gray world behind.

Guilt, they say, is an intrinsic part of the culture. It was something he learned well, as he studied and grew and thrived, first within the university and then at the graduate school where he would learn his trade, and build the foundation for all the years that stretched before him, bright and limitless. Each step forward was matched by an equal and more powerful pull back to the Bronx, to the safety of the known, to the grasping and clutching of a family unwilling to relinquish control.

He pushed harder. Through years of study and practice. Through advanced degrees, and challenging boards, and into a title – an honorific – that to poor immigrants might as well have been another plane of existence. They grew fearful. They pulled back. They criticized his attempts to become something more. Belittled him for the same mind, the same drive, they had once praised.

In time, he pushed away. Moved to a new city. Found a woman who did not share his faith, but whom he loved. And there, found the wedge that forever broke him away from world into which he’d been born — the unforgiveable sin of love and pride one his parents would never forgive.

But the life – his new life - began. He never stopped working. Bought a house. Had children. Pushed himself, every day, to build more, to achieve more, to be more than a poor kid from the Bronx should ever be.

I picture him standing there on the sidelines of a suburban soccer game. His son on the field, his young daughter playing nearby with his wife. Other parents surrounding him, cheering on their own. Excited. Happy. Comfortable in the moment. And he, standing there alongside, in the place he had spent his entire life working towards, striving for, dreaming of. It is the same field where I now play with my own children.

He is standing there in his suit. He attempts to cheer, but does not know what to cheer for, other than for his son.

He hopes it is enough.