Family values.

I was reading Diane di Prima's Recollections Of My Life As A Woman recently. Writing of her grandparents, she cited how her grandmother would abandon saying the rosary when her grandfather entered the room, but how the two of them loved one another despite their differences.

At that moment, I was suddenly struck with the realization that never in my life had I seen my parents together as a loving partnership. Never had I seen them as two adults who shared the same bed in their shared home as they traversed a shared life together. Photographs of their togetherness existed, worn 3x3 black&whites with oversized borders taken in Karlsruhe and Berlin, all locked up in a grey plastic suitcase stored with the artificial Christmas tree and the stamp collection.

Instead, what I saw were two adults tolerating moments of strained silence when they were in the same room together. There was always a subtle tension that I could feel, though perhaps not fully understand. The awkward silences. The brief moments when my father tried in vain to profess his love for my mother, and the suddenness of her monster-eyed fury as she shushed him up and shamed him with a stage whisper. I would be in the kitchen during those moments, listening but trying to not overhear. I would be angry in my father's defense, though he rarely if ever spoke of it with me.

I'd never seen them laugh together, holds hands, kiss. In the one photograph I possess of them, taken during my Communion, I had to ask them to pose together. There was a lot of quiet during the exceptionally few dinners we shared, usually around a major holiday, provided he wasn't under observation at the time and couldn't come.

He tried to collect me from grade school once, and what I remember most was the panic among the principal, my teacher, my mother. I didn't see the big deal and talked with him. It was a treat for me, though I never intended to leave school with him, of course.

"Look," he said as he bent down to me, shadowing the sun as we stood on 75th and 3rd. "What do you see?" I peered into the distance, the busy street, uncomprehending, shrugging my shoulders. "Life," he said.

It was always my father who tried to share matters of depth with me.