A Child Both Prodigal and Poor Sees His Parents ‘Ambushed by Wealth’ : Family: Once torn from his father by politics, a son finds estrangement now in wealth-- the new generational issue.
Over the telephone, my father tells me: He is saving up for my retirement. I, in turn, buy myself a catastrophic health insurance policy, in order to protect his retirement. We rendezvous, these days, in preparations and precautions.
These are strange times for my father and for me. Although distance, it seems, has always been the way with us. When I last lived at home, more than 20 years ago, the space between us was a world. Today the span is merely half a continent. It is a separation measured mutually; location is the rule for real estate, and for relationships as well.
And so we meet infrequently. A year will pass, then two. Eventually we split the ticket and I fly back to visit in their small Midwestern town. A trip there follows an unchanging ritual: high spirits and jet lag on the evening of arrival, a sobering through the second day. Midweek settles into the familiar rhythms of my parents’ home: the sound of morning birds, myfather reading in his study, dishes after dinner in the kitchen, evening television.
The smaller house they bought a few years ago still holds remnants of memory: the cupboards stuffed with food--Kraft dinners!--that I was raised on; and, down in the basement, the moldering boxes of my old books.
But this place is different. The house where I grew up was plain and purposeful; tools and old couches and piles of books. This new home is filled, instead, with extravagant gizmos; in the evening the curtains sweep closed automatically, activated by a light-sensitive switch; a baroque grandfather clock clangs out the quarter hours. The quiet of my father’s study now whirs with the sound of a word processor. He calls me in to demonstrate the fonts on his latest laser printer. “The problem with all this,” he tells me wryly, “is that it wasn’t invented 50 years ago!”
The letters spool out from inside the printer--perfectly, silently--while he watches with a bemused, proprietary air. In truth, it caught him by surprise, this sudden affluence that stole on him in his late 60s. With the same curious detachment, he watched his savings balloon into six figures.
“Funny money,” he calls it. But it buys some real things. They bought a beige Cadillac and a wooden boat with cabin space for two.
Each spring and fall, through the mail come postcards from their trips around the world: “Fish of the Caribbean,” sunset on a beach in Costa Rica, the cathedrals of Venice and Spain.
But not L.A. After a visit here some years ago, they have not come again. It was September, the city wrapped in smog, the air conditioning broken in the rental car. Worse, the bareness of my small apartment in its graffitied neighborhood made them anxious and uncomfortable.
As happy a surprise as their late wealth is the dreadful sadness--I can see the worry in their faces that their son is poor.
So they remain at home and, on no particular occasion, I fly back East to visit in their little house. This crowded living room makes me homesick for the way things used to be, while he, surrounded by his possessions, seems more than ever drenched in distance. Piles of catalogues are stacked up in the closet. There’s something frenetic about this acquisition, as if my father had found himself ambushed by wealth.
On birthdays and at Christmas, I cannot find a gift he does not own. “Never mind,” my mother says. “He already has more than he could ever want.”
Living in L.A., I often forget: the 1960s, and the 1980s, happened everywhere, including this small town. In the ‘60s it was the Vietnam War that separated us; today it is this strange new culture of haves and have-nots that we cannot bridge.
“You’re looking tired,” my father tells me, as we descend midweek on an expensive restaurant in the countryside. But when I mention his health problems, a vein that’s painful in his leg, he turns on me a sudden, hard, defiant eye. “Don’t worry,” he tells me. “I’ll be around a long time yet.”
I look down at my plate and realize: My God, he thinks I want his money. “More sassafras tea?” says my mother, always the emotional buffer. “It used to be your favorite.”
There are a few more days of dishes, and coffee, and dishes again. Then time for packing, the tick of “60 Minutes” echoing in the stillness of their big car on the highway, goodbys in the parking lot, the soothing anonymity of airports, and then L.A. again.
From the elevator I turn back to see my father: his arrogance, his eminence, standing in the parking lot in his elegant new coat from Spain. I want to say I love him. I want to tell him that it’s not his fault.
We remain silent, in our distance. Through times and cultures we have been bound and separated. The ‘60s and the ‘80s; rock ‘n’ roll and baby boomers, “funny money” and class wars, too
Last fall, I waved up at the sky, imagining them passing overhead at 40,000 feet, en route to Hawaii on a package tour. A stopover in L.A., my father explained, would have bumped their ticket more than a hundred dollars.
A few days later a postcard arrived--a beach scene, at sunset, from Oahu. And on the back my mother’s writing, hasty and heartfelt, always in between: “Love you. Miss you. Wish you were here.”
