THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
                 Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, June 19, 1994                    TAG: 9406170505 
SECTION: COMMENTARY                     PAGE: J2    EDITION: FINAL  
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL PEARSON 
DATELINE: 940619                                 LENGTH: Long 

IN HIS OWN IMAGE: FATHER AND SON

In A Place That's Known, by way of explaining my own need to write, I had described his drinking and anger and depression. His dark moods did not come from some poetic fury but rather, it seemed to me growing up, from some deep dissatisfaction, a rooted sadness or disappointment that he was never able to cut away.

{REST} As with all fathers and sons, our stories were inextricably linked. My father made his life mine. I grew up vowing that I would live differently than he had, that I would spend my time doing what I loved, that I would not, as Annie Dillard feared, wake up on my deathbed and say, ``What was that?'' But despite an attempt to create my life, somewhat like Gatsby, from a Platonic conception of myself, I realized when I began writing A Place That's Known that I did not know how to write about an important part of my life without connecting him to it.

The book is not about my father, but his presence is there, between the lines, behind the words. I told myself that I didn't want him to read the book because I didn't want to cause him pain. Perhaps I didn't want him to see himself through my eyes, and for me to catch my reflection in his. So I told myself he wouldn't read it.

He died March 3, of a stroke. Despite the pain he caused me and the rest of my family, I loved him and I know that he loved me. Recently a reviewer described him as an ``alcoholic,'' a fair description given my depiction of him in A Place That's Known, but for me, too glib, too categorical. He was more than that, more mysterious.

It always seemed to me that he was unhappy in his jobs as an electrician on construction projects in New York City. But he always took pride in the work he did and was contemptuous of those who did things less than perfectly. His drinking blurred his vision of the world, I believe. But when he was not drinking, he had a great sense of humor and a playful wit.

He wasn't the type to remember birthdays or send letters. But the few times he did write to me the notes were laced with a wry perspective. Many times I felt that if he could have only lost sight of his own image and focused his gaze more directly in the world around him he would have been happier. He might have forgotten his own pain. I think that is what Soren Kierkegaard meant when he said, ``If a man cannot forget, he will never amount to much.''

But my father amounted to more than can be accounted for in one noun or adjective. He was an alcoholic, certainly. He was also moody, inconsistent, insecure, self-absorbed. But he was talented, blessed with a fine tenor voice. He loved to play the banjo and the four-string guitar. He was a craftsman, meticulous in his work. He was honest and ethical. The young man who had been slim and handsome, filled with life and laughter and expectation, was worn down, made frail and brittle, perhaps, by an indifferent world. But, in part, he was his dreams, too, for they were part of him.

On my desk at home I have a photograph of my father when he was in the Navy during World War II. He may have been about 30 when the picture was taken, but he looked much younger. His arms were crossed a bit self-consciously, his cap cocked back far enough to show his sandy hair, lacquered back, a slight smile played on the edge of his mouth and flickered in his blue eyes. But his eyes reveal something else. There's a shadow in them, a hint of weariness as if, in looking past the lens of the camera and into the inevitable distances, he saw his own surrender.

In his brief preface to McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Joseph Mitchell wrote, ``The people in a number of the stories are the kind that many writers have recently got in the habit of referring to as `the little people.' I regard this phrase as patronizing and repulsive. There are no little people in this book. They are as big as you are, whoever you are.''

Like the people Mitchell wrote about, my father fit no category. He was human and, therefore, a mystery to be encountered, not a riddle to be solved. If in A Place That's Known I led even one reader to believe he was simply an alcoholic, then I didn't say enough or I said too much.

Fatherhood is a joyously, heartbreakingly difficult task. At one time I thought that being a good father would be as easy as loving my sons, being there for them, setting an example, following a course I believed was different from my own father's. Now I know that no matter what you do, no matter what plans you have, there's always that individual - that son or daughter - whom you love but who isn't you and never will be. Our children will be what they will make of themselves with some help and some hindrance from the world. Our sons, like our fathers, resist any easy explanations or definitions. They are not compliant to our dreams. They drift toward their own. As people, they are inexplicable, tenaciously unknowable in any absolute way.

This essay is for my father and my sons, an acknowledgment that my father's life eludes language, that, as John Hersey said, ``Human life is far too trembling-swift to be reported in whole.'' It is my prayer to him on Father's Day, saying that I know he was deeper, more complex, more stubbornly human than any words I can find could ever explain. by CNB