Good Stuff Read online

  The articles he saved for me included the cautionary (“Wealthy Women Fight Second-Class Treatment of Money Managers,” “6% of Psychiatrists Admit to Having Sex with Their Clients”); the instructive (“Winning Ways for First Days on the Job,” “Honda Captures Its Second Consecutive Best Mileage Ranking,” “Peace Corps Picks Scores of Stanford Students,” “To Entrepreneur, Success Tastes Sweet”—an article on Mrs. Fields’s cookie-selling success). Other clippings are curio pieces: “Celebrity Dirt” (describes vendors’ travails in digging up literal dirt from celebrity gardens), “Daddy’s Little Girl Takes the Wheel and Daddy’s in a Spin,” “Pros and Cons of a Delivery Room Audience,” and the sardonic “Pity the Rapist Who Can’t Get Any Respect Behind Bars.” Still other pieces serve as a reminder of the decades that have elapsed: “Computer Boom Hits Home for Stanford Students” features a photograph of one of the original dinosaur boxes that foreran our now common PCs. An Ann Landers column from 1972 (I was six) advises children on the handling of angry parents: “All that happens when you argue back is that the adult argues back at you and on it goes, generally with the adult winning—and if not winning at least punishing you for talking back, on top of everything else. Adults, especially parents, don’t like being called unfair—and they really don’t like it when they know they are! Which means that you will have to hold back. You’ll have to say the kind thing or be quiet. And when you get a chance, do something loving which may help the adult to get over what is making him angry.” “The Little Helpers Around the House” advises that “you’re much more part of the family when you all work together.… If your family is small, if you are an only child, then you will want to be sure that your parents understand your interest in wanting to help keep the home working.”

  Several of Dad’s clippings give partial answers to questions I never before stopped to ask. Messages from the hereafter. For a long time I’ve vainly wondered if somehow I could’ve kept my father alive. Should I have found a way to save him? “Good-bye Dad, It’s OK for You to Go” gave me a moment of solace. Perhaps he actually appreciated a lack of dramatic protestation surrounding his departure. One article describes a man predisposed to wanting a son who later revels, gratefully delighted by his fate as the father of four girls. “Is It Christian to Cremate” was likely meant to ease my mind with its assertion that “man is not a body, he merely wears one.” One of my favorites, “Stanford, Where Rich Really Means Rich,” tells of college life among the wealthiest from a scholarship student’s point of view. This gives me unique insight into the way Dad viewed wealth. I was born with it. Dad worked his whole life to make and keep his money. “Who wants to look rich?” one self-important student asked the author. “Poor people.” There was more than a touch of irony in the wealthy student’s antimaterialism.

  “In their eyes I was terribly materialistic, worrying about money, taking scrupulous care of my belongings so they’d last. But they could afford to be carefree spendthrifts, and untied to their possessions. They were, in fact, ready to renounce their worldly trappings and demonstrate the strength of their social consciences. You’ve got to have worldly trappings to renounce before you can renounce them. I hated to tell them, but poor people want material comfort and worldly trappings, and would never listen to these voluntarily penniless reformers denouncing the kind of life they were all after.… I worried about the next major expense and how to acquire some desired possession (typewriter, bicycle, etc.) while my friends worried whether to abandon theirs and find a guru. I worried about making a living, while they worried about meaning in their life. Which one is better off? Only a year ago I would never have thought to ask.”

  I didn’t know “poor Dad” but here was his voice, and it explained the rubber band balls, coupons, and school-of-hard-knocks mentality perfectly. Dad gave me the resources—money, formal education, access, name—that he never had. But here’s the rub: Having navigated an entirely different course in his life, how could he advise me to chart my course in this new sea of privilege? Dad couldn’t take my courses, make my friends, establish me in business, and build on the platform with which he provided me. The most he could offer, the most any parent can offer, is the wisdom of sharing one’s perspective, another vantage point. “You’re so lucky to have what I never had” is often guilt-trip material. This article described exactly how I was lucky. It described my potential blind spots. The spots Dad tracked so that I never had to. When I returned home upon completion of my sophomore Political Science 1 class espousing the benefits of communism, Dad likely wanted to spit out his marmalade-covered muffin. Instead, he bought me The Marx-Engels Reader and suggested that after I devoured my new doctrine we discuss it. From recollection, the conversation went something like, “Yes, dear, lovely philosophy, but you see in practice, these people stand in very long lines for toilet paper … so it hasn’t worked out so well.”

  Some things take on an entirely new significance now that I’m a mother. A simple note I’d written Dad, “Thank you for letting me spend the weekend at Lisa’s.” An entire weekend. Given his advanced age and the limited time we had together, letting go of a weekend was a monumental sacrifice. What made the forfeit worthwhile? My happiness, I suppose. I certainly wasn’t aware of what that time really meant to him; I was simply shocked that he’d let me go for a weekend so I thanked him for it.

  Safeguarding and modernizing the archives took time. The first job was to assess the materials. Photographs, slides, and letters I could cope with. Treat them gingerly. Find the right cases and covers to hold them. Easy enough. The cassettes were still in good shape, but too fragile to be played or overused. Who can be entrusted with these? What’s on them? They’re mostly of Dad and me, I know … but these are every day at home or holiday or whatever they are tapes and my Dad’s voice is all over them and what if they end up on some Web site?… Make lists. Next, I found some trustworthy souls to transfer the materials. Quarter-inch audio and cassettes became CDs. Super 8 films are now DVDs. With his meticulous print intact on the originals, I felt at liberty to watch and listen and get into our life together.

  Dig the purse! Place unknown, circa 1969.

  Dad presumably had a purpose in this vast undertaking of his. Home slides show an inordinate amount of orange furniture in our “original” prerenovation home. My current house sings with orange furniture and I’ve just ordered more. Then there are the jeans. In numerous childhood pictures I’m wearing jeans with two little button-down pockets in the front. I’ve worn the same style for the past ten years. My fascination is the link to behavior, the mind, personality.

  Taken during my daily kindergarten bus ride to school. Dad would wait alongside the road for a simple wave hello as we passed his parked car en route. This day the bus driver kindly stopped while Dad’s secretary, Bill, snapped the photo, 1970.

  How many thoughts, sentence structures, feeling states, do I wear, or surround myself with, that have their roots in a prerenovated life. When are my choices automatic? Programmed by my childhood comforts, ingrained likes and dislikes? Which decisions are conscious? How is it possible to discern the difference between patterning one’s life, and simply repeating patterns? Dad had no records of his childhood. He did LSD to remember the past, to unburden himself with long accumulated “stuff.” If I knew the past, perhaps I could reinvent what worked and toss aside what didn’t. A circuitous route to presence … but sometimes the intellect is helpful that way. Until now I truly thought that I was the first in my family to like orange furniture. Guess again.

  Perhaps Dad’s longing for childhood recollections served as a guide. I had forgotten just how much he whistled around the house. How much he sang and danced. How patient and cheerful he was. Sometimes it’s easier to forget all of those things. Did he know how much I’d miss him? Is that why he made all the tapes? It’s as if he said, you want a day back … you want to spend time together … here it is! Live with me again. Hear the laughter, hear the silences, hear me walking down the hall, he
ar yourself bathing alongside your nanny, hear the TV, the phone, hear us preparing Christmas dinner. Here it is. Feast on it. You can have the days back. Pretty cool.

  The fact that Dad saved everything for me speaks volumes about who he was. He didn’t save just parts of it, the parts that might cast him in a favorable light, he saved it all. So many sweet notes from my mother. She sent glamorous letters from movie sets all over the world with intriguing return addresses including: Sloane Gate Mansions, London; Macedonian Palace Hotel, Greece; Tehran Hilton, Iran; and The Peninsula, Hong Kong. I know she was working, but it sounded great to me. Dad saved almost everything of mine that he got his hands on. He wasn’t trying to write the story of my past by framing it through his selective lens. Some old friends of mine recently went through their scrapbooks and eliminated every picture of them with alcohol. “For the children,” they said. “It’s a bad example.” So it’s better to misrepresent yourself as pious teetotalers? Eliminate your past and play God with your children? What an impossibly confusing example to follow. That dictum speaks “Be who I paint myself as, not who I was” or “Do anything you want … only don’t let anyone see it.” My father left me smutty articles denouncing his parenting and chronicling supposed debacles between Mom and Dad, and columns lambasting him as an ex-husband and a man. One such article, written by a “close” friend of the family, cagily ended in praise. Thankfully, in reading the nonsense, my emotions ran second to my intellect. Some of it was true, but the angles! Baby with the bathwater behavior. What struck me was that someone who knew us well actually sold us out. What was he thinking? Was this my example of what not to write? How to steer clear of skewing my mind and my soul against family (thereby really revealing myself)? Yes, some of the facts were correct, but only a profit-seeking filtered adult mind could so grossly misinterpret them. Dad’s audiotapes of me were labeled BUGS. What nefarious scheme do you suppose I was up to at the age of four or five? Dad wanted me to have it all. To freely go through, reminisce, and ultimately derive my own adult conclusions. He knew he could handle the ego-bashing, but could I? All he said in his defense was “I hope you’ll know the truth.” I do.

  Some of my most treasured gifts are Dad’s notes. His words have a way of inspiring me, still. Dad knew the joy of siphoning thought to word. He took time to craft his clever correspondences. Dad delighted in seeing the good in all things and finding ways to speak of it. In the age of e-mail, writing by hand seems a guilty pleasure. The paper itself is a gift. Thank God Dad saved all the notes. Hundreds of correspondences. Were I brought up in the nineties or thereafter we might not have all these letters on paper. We’d have … e-mails? There’s something a bit sad about that part of progress. I have boxes of notes that show the progression of my handwriting styles and stationery. The curlicue phase, the block letter stage, the calligraphy. Do children e-mail their parents now? Dad would certainly print out the e-mails, but we’d miss a huge piece of their texture. I cherish Dad’s handwriting! Its slant, force, and grace is personality in letters. Intonations in the texture of his print.

  Oh, the clever, artful way he documented “stuff.” At quarterly intervals, Dad mandated my relinquishment of clothing and toys for charitable donations. “You have so much, darling, give to those who need and will truly appreciate just one doll while you have ten.” Jeez. What could I say to that? Dad would then photograph my giveaways by laying them about the 9966 house and garden. The ranch house, prior to reconstruction. If one stimulus didn’t cue my recall, perhaps another would. My favorite T-shirt, with “HONEY” written in gooily dripping letters, sits on an old lawn chair. My tiny patent-leather shoes rest on the flagstone steps. I hear the screen porch door to my nanny Willie’s room screech open. I’ve gone to get her and request her heavenly chocolate cake with powdered sugar in the frosting … “Pleeeeeeeeeease?” I just want to lick the spoon. “Maybe after school?” My first home, 9966 when it was a farmhouse. Next I’m in the old kitchen, pouring cereal out of a box, and there are weevils in it! Weevils in the Golden Grahams! My scream likely hastened construction by a year or so. Dad deduced this schematic memory-launching device on his own. And if the pictures of my things in my original home weren’t enough, he’d taped years of events to make sure I had everyone’s voices to fill in the blanks. Everyone’s voices including my own. So odd to hear myself through the years. Sometimes I’m an impertinent brat—where in the world did Dad mine his patience from? Other days I’m a dulcet-toned angel child from heaven. And there’s Dad’s consistent, wind-chime-like whistling and singing around the house.

  Friends have been somewhat awed by Dad’s archives. I once shared an audiotape with a visiting friend. We listened to a small portion of a 1970s Christmas tape. Dad was documenting our opening of the gifts. So nice to hear Dad’s happy laugh, and there I am at age nine, performing a newly learned magic trick for him. My friend smiled in amazement and then said, “That’s your problem! That’s why you haven’t found a man.… How could anyone live up to that?” I tidied a sideways pencil. What to say? “You’re right.” No one can or will ever duplicate that sort of love. No one should. That was my father’s place in my life. One needs only one father.

  All of the photos, articles, notes, and things he kept for me were all lumped together. Pictures of me with President Ford next to my third-grade photo. My two-year-old doodles alongside a card reading “To Jennifer— With all the luck in this world and out— Neil Armstrong Apollo 11.” The socially valuable commodities next to paper. It looked haphazard, though clearly Dad was nothing of the sort. Most of the stuff he saved was thoroughly mundane: “Good Morning Dad” scrawled on a Western Airlines notepad, “Sleep well” notes decorated with rainbows and horse heads, tiny “I love you” greetings … he saved boxes upon boxes of my notes to him. On the reverse side, in red capital letters, he typed the date, time, and where the notes were left for him. This is the stuff of love. These tiny moments are, ultimately, all.

  How many times have I sat listening to a virtually blank hour-long tape? Voices in the background. Shuffling feet. A door slamming somewhere. “Hello’s” voiced from someone or other we knew in those years. And then in the midst, Dad appears and says he’s going to go sit by the pool and have his sandwich. I think he’s talking to Aunt Mickey. Did Dad review the tapes before saving them? He was so damn organized, he must have. Perhaps Dad was a fan of the extended Pinter pause? If he reviewed the recordings then, the only answer is that he wanted me to have the time back. Normal days. Nothing much goes on. We sit around, play some games, have a bit of chat … This is it. Not every day is a graduation. The middle stuff of life. Value the middle stuff.

  It’s somewhat de rigueur for children to assess parents. (For example, she was a selfless mother or a heartless mother, or he was a beast of a father or a brilliant mentor.) But what of parents’ assessment of children? What tips the scale in that department? My heart’s ultimate question: Did I bring my father happiness? Much more happiness than sadness? Was and is he proud of me? Does every child wonder this deep down? Dad told me time and again how much he loved me, how proud of me he was. But he likely knew that my own judgment remained penultimate. When all’s said and done … was I a good daughter? Well, the boxes of notes certainly cue my recall of the love I daily showered on him. As an adult, I must live with my own mistakes and forgive my personal shortcomings, but when it comes to remembering the way I loved you, thanks for giving me a leg up, Dad.

  When will I stop missing him? Writing this book is challenging for me; however, going through the personal archives is … There he is … so clear. His voice. He’s speaking to me again. Here come the tears. I feel so silly. Twenty-one years later and I’m still crying.

  Our first day together. A moment of pure, perfect connection. Mom was exhausted after a grueling labor (Dad, who took the picture, threw his back out leaning over Mom). Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center, Burbank, 1966.

  1969 · DADDY’S ROOM 9966 BEVERLY GROVE DR

  It�
�s time for Jennifer’s nap but she’s set on playing a game with countless chopsticks scattered atop the bed. Daddy gently coaxes with an impromptu song.…

  CG: Because I love you, I love to take a nap nap. Because I love you, I love to take a nap nap.

  Sounds of chopsticks click-clicking together as they are shuffled about.

  JG: Which number do you want?

  CG: Uh…[he gives in] number fifty-nine.

  (Of course, the chopsticks aren’t numbered, but with the flourish of make-believe, JG instantly hands him a chopstick.)

  CG: Well … you found it so quickly.

  JG: Which number do you want?

  CG: Sixteen and three-eighths.

  JG: Here’s sixteen and three-eighths.

  CG [laughs]: Thank you.

  Jennifer fights sleep with her new game. Daddy can’t help but enjoy himself. This goes on for some time, then …

  CG: You count very well for a girl who’s only three years and a little less than two months old.

  JG: Let’s make the airplane…

  CG: You count very well and you also ride the bicycle and oh—what else … you also won’t take your nap.

  JG: Daddy, which number do you want?

  CG: No thank you.

  JG: Well then, do you want a lemon?

  CG: What, darling? Where’s a lemon?

  Jennifer pretends a chopstick is a lemon.

  CG [into tape recorder]: This is seldom effective, but I pretend to take a nap in the hopes that Jennifer will follow. It’s, uh, not probable…