MISSING
Obi was a 19 year-old college boy in 1939 when his father, Robert, died of Hodgkin's disease. He was away at Washington and Lee, the university in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia where I graduated in 1969. He lost his father and his means of continuing college in a single stroke, then returned to Chicago where he began taking an interest in flying, which took him to Florida in the early 40's.

There is only a bare outline of Obi's childhood to go on, because he was willing to share few stories of childhood, good or bad. He played catch with his father, rooted for the White Sox, was nicknamed "Fat" and "Red"--tags that wounded him deeply. We(his children) heard next to nothing about his early years, the impact of losing his father, how he got along with his older and younger brothers. As he got started on his career and married Lil in 1944, it was as if he turned his face away from the pains and shock of childhood, never to re-visit them.

Now, I don't know if he was "running away" from his childhood miseries, or not. I do know from my own experience looking back that the price of redeeming memories is high. By redeeming, I mean that the bounties of our childhood can be received anew if we will pass willingly through the gate of death and loss. Looking back in his teen years, Obi might have found some gems of memory from his parents' marriage or from his school chums; but first, the abyss of death had to be crossed.

As a person with secrets myself, I look back on Obi's life as one damaged by secrets and cover-ups. I'm not sure how, or if, he grieved the loss of his father in 1939. Soon after, his mother and younger brother Tom left Chicago for Boulder, so he lost his homeplace. His family history of alcoholism only aggravated the secretive trait, because in that world you can make your troubles go away--for a while. As you may have heard, drunkenness in that era was considered funny, and smoking was good for your health.

In any case, my point here is that when you're missing something or someone, the length, depth and soreness of that loss must-- sooner or later--be fully felt and explicated. It never goes away, or resolves itself.

FAMILY FIGURES

I am sitting here on a cold Monday morning, the porcelain images of Obi and Lil are a few inches away. Obi regards the headlines of the Times with mild disapproval; Lil, for her part, looks over her teacup at an invisible person plainly in need of sympathy.

Though I cannot hear from them directly any longer, their manner of life characterized by generosity and the enjoyment of life's simple pleasures--these direct my own ways and thought patterns every day. It's that way with our human legacies--things we receive, both good and ill, dark ways and light--handed down willy-nilly to succeeding generations.

Our common human longing is for the past to be unlocked and explained so that we can see our way forward. Children ask again and again for the story of their parents' first romantic meeting, their eyes shining to hear of its glory. In their innocence, they are already looking for a mate!

Now that you have all grown up and left, it's a good time to reflect on where I came from and where Obi and Lil came from. Values and patterns of life are passed down, mostly unconsciously, the unhealthy and the healthy, the constructive with the destructive. I feel stuck in patterns I learned from my parents, and the only way I figure to get unstuck is to open up a conversation with you, a conversation with a past you may know little about but which directs your steps to this day.