here that I don’t really understand it yet. I mean, I talk a good game, but I’m not what you’d
call a championship player.
I haven’t gone into my important relationships and my marriages in my narrative here,
because I want to honor the privacy of those people whose lives I’ve touched in hurtful ways.
I’ve kept my “story” limited to my own personal wanderings. But I can say in a general sense
that just about everything one can do to hurt a person (except injure someone physically),
I’ve done in my love relationships. Just about every mistake one can make, I’ve made. Just
about every selfish, insensitive, non-caring thing one can do, I’ve done.
I married for the first time when I was twenty-one. Of course, I thought I was a grown man,
understanding all there was to understand about love. I understood nothing. About
selfishness I knew a great deal, but about love I knew nothing.
The woman who was unlucky enough to marry me thought she was getting a self-assured,
sensitive, caring guy. And what she got was a self-centered, egotistical, domineering man
who, like his father, assumed that he was “the boss,” and who inflated himself by making
others look small.
It was just after we were married that we moved to the South for our short stay, then headed
back to Annapolis again. I became deeply involved in the town’s cultural life, with the Colonial
Players, and helping put on the first productions at the Annapolis Summer Garden Theatre. I
was one of the founders of Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts, as well as part of the small
group that conceived and coordinated the first Annapolis Fine Arts Festival there.
Between my full-time job and my other “obligations,” however, I was away from my wife and
children three or four nights a week, and most weekends, throughout the year. In my world,
“love” meant “providing,” and being willing to do what it takes to accomplish that. This
willingness I had, and no one ever had to convince me of my responsibilities. Yet I thought
they began and ended with my pocketbook—because that’s where they seemed to begin and
end for my father.
Only later, as I grew older, was I able to admit and acknowledge that my father was far more
involved in my life than I wanted to give him credit for—making pajamas (he was incredibly
handy
with a sewing machine), baking apple pies (the world’s best), taking me camping (he became
a pack leader when we joined the Cub Scouts), hauling me on fishing trips to Canada and
expeditions to Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, teaching me photography and typing, the
list is endless.
What I did lack from my father was any verbal or physical show of love. He simply never said
“I love you,” and actual bodily contact was unheard of, except on Christmas and birthdays,
when Mom would instruct us, after we received our always-wonderful gifts, to “go hug your
father.” We did it as fast as we could. It was a Cursory Closeness.
To me, Dad was the source of authority in the house. Mom was the source of love.
Dad’s edicts and decisions, his wieldings of power, were often arbitrary and heavy-handed,
and Mom was the voice of compassion and patience and leniency. We went to her with our
pleas that she help us get around Dad’s rules and restrictions, or get him to change his mind.
She often did. Together, they played a very good game of Good Cop/Bad Cop.
I imagine that this was a fairly typical model of parenting in the 1940s and 1950s, and I simply
adopted the model in the sixties, with some modifications. I made it a point to constantly tell
my children that I loved them, and to hug and kiss them a lot, whenever I was around them. I
simply was not around them very much.