(Host) Commentator Willem Lange reflects on a trip back to his home town for Father’s Day, and the difficulties of an evolving relationship.
(Lange) It’s a long haul from Etna to the glacial hills of New York: over the Green Mountains, down the Hudson, up the Mohawk. Two hundred, sixty miles, through the traffic of Woodstock and Rutland, Whitehall and Lake George, Ballston Spa and Amsterdam, to the quiet boulevard of old US Route 20, with its decaying motels and restaurants and the Silurian limestone and shale bluffs of my childhood. A trip from Frustration to Melancholy — and back.
But it’s Father’s Day weekend.
Dad’s 94 now. He still has his hair, and looks like the fullback he was over 70 years ago. But he doesn’t come at you any more. Instead, he waits for you to come to him. Communicating is tougher for us than for most fathers and sons. He’s been deaf since 1919. Our conversations in sign language are complicated by the lack of nuance inherent in speech — a nuance I could express in signs if that were still my primary language. And now he sees less well than he used to. So if there are hearing people in the room, most of the conversation is oral, and he — like deaf people in any room of hearing people — is left out of it. He closes his mouth and face and drifts away, distressed, but not surprised.
We sit in chairs side by side, trading a few words, and otherwise looking straight ahead, uncomfortably. I should get another chair and sit facing him; but I don’t feel like it. He doesn’t seem to mind not talking, and I can’t think of him as incapable of vigorous, conscious action.
My first memory of him is as in the predawn darkness he left for work at a meatpacking plant. My mother handed him his lunch pail. He kissed her and rumbled down the stairs to catch his trolley. Later, I remember him at his desk late at night, studying for the priesthood
Over the next fifty years, he traveled to 30 churches once a month — first by Greyhound and train, and later in his first car, a ’42 Chevy. He logged 1.3 million miles and wore out 18 cars. Those cars were his magic carpet. In them, he was any man’s equal; in a room full of people, he was odd man out. His sermons were simple, in many cases unforgettable. I didn’t realize till recently how much he was loved and how delighted people were to see him coming.
Closed-caption television, e-mail, and cochlear implants have eroded the deaf community, and he’s in touch only by TTY now. I was sure he was going for 100, but he acts as if he’s lost interest in that. He’s an extrovert, and needs people to stimulate his will to fight off this lethal lethargy. I sit beside him and silently hope he’ll do something about it before it’s too late.
This is Willem Lange up in Etna, New Hampshire, and I gotta take a little trip.