Commentary: As my father aged, the words began to flow – Bend Bulletin

When I was a child, the strongest presence I felt in our house in Brooklyn was my fathers absence. It clung to his possessions and places, like the drop-leaf desk at which he worked when he was home, and the cellar where he had built the desk. Only my father used the cellar, with its massive table saw, tools hanging in neat rows and shelves holding baby food jars with nails and screws sorted by size.

To me, my father was as tall as the Empire State Building and knew as much as the encyclopedia. I loved the feel of his huge, callused hand, a big, safe house around my little one. But he was rarely home. Most days, evenings and even many weekends, he was at work or at the Brownsville-East New York Liberal Party headquarters, where he was an officer.

The sense that I couldnt reach my father stayed with me into adulthood. I often dreamed that I saw him across a room or on a train platform but couldnt get to him.

After he retired at 70, my father had more time, but he always ceded conversation to my mother. When I visited, she and I would become engrossed in talk and he would retreat to his desk to pay bills or write letters. If he answered when I called home, hed say as soon as he heard my voice, Ill tell Mother youre on the phone. Hed stay on while she picked up an extension, but before long, Id realize hed stopped speaking.

Wheres Daddy? Id ask.

But there was one situation in which my father would stay on the phone: if I happened to call when my mother was out, and I got him talking about his past. I once asked why. Maybe because its pent-up words, he said. I like to reminisce. I cant reminisce with Mother because she doesnt like it. She complains, You only want to talk about people who are dead.

The dead people my father liked to talk about were from his childhood in Warsaw, where he was born in 1908 and lived for 12 years before coming to the United States. Until he was 7, he lived, together with his mother and sister (his father had died when he was very young), in a household headed by his grandfather, a white-bearded, ultra-Orthodox Hasid who arose each morning at 5 to study a large Talmud.

My father never tired of describing his grandparents: their large, gaslit apartment, the way his grandfather held sugar cubes in his mouth while sipping tea from a glass. He never tired of talking about the Hasidic neighborhood, the crowded streets lined with stores, the beggars who came into the courtyard along with vendors offering to sharpen knives.

And I never tired of listening. I soon decided I could bring back to life World War I Hasidic Warsaw by including it in a book about my fathers life. This gave me license to spend hours talking to him conversations that were not recreation, but research.

My father, in his early 90s, is in the hospital after surgery for an infected gallbladder. I walk with him down the hall, accompanied by an IV pole on wheels. In an alcove with chairs, we sit and continue the conversation weve been having all afternoon. Though it breaks my heart to see him so weak, I treasure the hours the days the hospital gives us to talk.

When we talked about his past, my father was as pleased that I wanted to listen as I was that he wanted to talk. I think most fathers are pleased when their children want to hear what no one else can tell them what the world was like for them when they were growing up. My father died in 2006. In his last years, I knew that the man who looked to me like my father looked to the world like an old man. But when we talked, Id forget he was old. And Id bask in what had seemed impossible when I was young: my fathers undivided, unlimited attention.

Deborah Tannen is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and the author, most recently, of Finding My Father, from which this essay is adapted.

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Commentary: As my father aged, the words began to flow - Bend Bulletin