We have enjoyed bright days in early spring here on the coast of Maine. The sun has punch for the first time in six months. But the wind has its power, too. A few days ago, a cold wind blew fiercely from the northeast. My daffodils bent sideways and whipped back and forth, staggered by a very Euroclydon, the levanter which shipwrecked St. Paul.
I took that day off from writing my book about my poet father and how his lyricism contributed to Channa’s and my conversions, and I drove the three miles to Popham Beach. Popham is a swath of sand, miles long in both directions, rare for rocky-beach Maine. Far out rock ledges cause the seas to blast up white furies. Two-and-a-half miles out from the beach is Sequin Island, topped by Maine’s tallest and second commissioned lighthouse, commissioned by George Washington back in 1795. For beach-goers, at least when it is low tide, there is a rocky islet, called Fox Island, which one can reach by foot, but you had better watch the tide carefully for it comes in fast, and people have been trapped on Fox. Otherwise, the beach is bold to the open sea.
All through this past winter, surfacing only occasionally for deacon and trustee responsibilities at my church and to serve in my retirement, part-time sales job, I have been plunged into my father’s world, swimming strongly, re-living my living with him. But on that day, I needed to be blown free from words. I needed a break from my father.
As I drove, I put into the CD player the original cast disk of The Fantastiks, which my college had done the year before I arrived as a freshman, and which Dad and I had seen there together several nights in a row. I opened my moon roof for the first time since winter, and I cranked up the music very loud. I sang along with Try to Remember—I’m not a skillful singer—and when we got to It Depends on What You Pay, sung by Jerry Orbach as El Gallo, I sang that, too.
At the last note of that clever song, there is a rousing cheer by the two fathers and by El Gallo, who has sold the fathers on the idea of the abduction, which he calls a rape…”It’s short and businesslike.” Stirred, I punched the air and cheered, too. In that instant, suddenly, I was my father. That song had tickled my father’s fancy, and he had punched the air and cheered, too, with exactly the gesture and the intonation I used.
My cheer was so much his, I was him.
When I arrived at the beach, I shut down the music and sat quivering in my car. Far from getting a break from Dad, I was still at least half him. A thought blasted through me. I had just been my father, because of a gesture…and he, long dead.
Then another thought hit me. Perhaps Dad had used that gesture and intonation because he had seen his father use it, too, back in his father’s day. And I wondered: had Dad’s father used that same gesture and intonation because he had seen his father use it, too, in the even farther-back day?
Then there came a leap of a thought-blast.
If a gesture can be so evocative as to take one, in an instant, back a generation, or even back several generations, then might a gesture take one back much farther than that? Might a gesture take one back to one’s deepest known ancestor? Could I trace that same gesture all the way back to Eberhart the Noble in 1281? Might Eberhart the Noble have gestured that same way when he rose from his knees before the Holy Roman Emperor, and stepped backwards out of the throne room door? Might he then have looked at the new ducal seal in his hand, which had just made him the first Duke of Württemberg at the age of fifteen? He might have pumped his fist in the air in the same way as I had generations later, and used that same intonation…Yes!
And we Eberharts have been doing so ever since.
As I sat in the car before walking to the beach, my inhabitation of my father diminished, and so my mind came more into play than my heart. Here’s what I pondered: if a mere gesture can do this, then what about sin? Can sin, too, do a snap-back?
I sin today. I sin in a way that copies my father’s sin. Did he sin in a way that copied his father’s sin…and so on backwards in time? Adam lied to God, and he accused Eve, thereby disrespecting his wife. I disrespect my wife at times, accusing her of faults which—truly—are my own, not hers. When I disrespect my requirement to honor my wife’s need for true, straight-forward, and timely communication, along with direction of our spiritual passage, does this sin snap me back, in an instant, all the way to Adam, and to his hiding in the Garden, and to his lie?
Could I be responsible for the Fall?
No, no.
Some Other Dude Did It.
Not me.
No. Not me.
Copyright 2013 -- Dikkon Eberhart
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